The Rise and Fall of Matchbox's Toy-Car Empire

Those things were pretty popular in East Germany as present from your relatives across the border or bought at the 'Intershop' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intershop).

I still have a shoebox or two full of Matchbox cars in the attic.

Also I remember that during my job education as (industrial) tool maker in East Germany our master used to rave about Matchbox cars (and specifically Matchbox, not other brands) and how surprisingly hard it is to build the precision tools needed for creating such fine detail, and how baffled he was that western companies could afford to build such production lines "just for toys" - in that sense, Matchbox was even an effective Cold War propaganda weapon ;)

Part of me thinks "Oh they're just cast from cheap pot-metal" But if he was talking about the machining needed to make the molds (in a pre-CNC environment), including multi-part molds to allow for parts of the car that curved in (i.e. not a straight lift-out on release), then yes. The tooling needed to make them in volume, at the quality they needed, was pretty impressive for "just a toy"

So add Matchbox cars to Levi's 501s as subversive western imports. :)

As another Ex-GDR citizen here, I think the most subversive were the thick shopping catalogs of the big West-German mail-order companies (Otto, Quelle, Conrad [Electronics]).

I don't remember how or why we got them, but for some reason we did, once in a while. I think they should have been confiscated at the border, but apparently enough West German visitors happened to have one with them on visits, that remained undiscovered, or they were left in some of the many parcels (especially around Christmas time) sent from West to East Germany.

We would look through those thick foto-color glossy paper catalogs, looking at one unobtainable item after another. In every category, from clothes, furniture, tools, toys, to electronics. The difference in quality was several decades, the difference in variety and quantity was at least two orders of magnitude, with many items having no equivalent at all in the East.

The paper and the print quality alone were on another level, and they made that for a throwaway shopping catalog?

Just for comparison, when I turned 14 and was given some money I spent about 1100 East German Marks on a mono cassette recorder (https://ddr-hifi-technik.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/IMG_2...). At the same time a stereo recorder's price in West Germany was something like 99 DM. I could not afford the East German stereo variant, that would have cost 1400 East German marks. A typical salary in East Germany was around 1000 East German Marks.