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Comic Book Brain by Erik Weems. Business site is here.
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THINGS TO CLICK
ONLINE COMICS
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Matchbox Car Lesney Products 1971 . Click to enlarge. There's a lot of miles on those plastic wheels. Lesney Products began in 1947 as a die-cast company by Leslie Smith (March 6, 1918 - May 26, 2005) and Rodney Smith (not related) servicing industrial clients. The company started operations in an unused pub in northern London (called "The Rifleman"), but with success the company eventually moved into it's own factory in Hackney. Because of an order for parts for a toy gun, the Lesney company began making die cast toys as a time-filler when industrial orders were slow. In 1953 the company created a small-scale replicas of the "Royal State Coach" which to correspond to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The smallest sized version die-cast toy sold over a million pieces, and the profits in the endeavor were used to expand the company further into toy production. The beginning of the "Matchbox" toys was the result of public school rules which only allowed toys brought by children to be items small enough to fit inside a matchbox. The original effort at this was a three piece line: a red road roller, a cement mixer and a dump truck. The company's success with die-cast toys increased, with the company becoming the leading die-cast toy maker in the 1960s. The early toys were marketed through a second company named "Moko," but eventually Lesney had grown so far that it bought out Moko and incorporated it into the parent Lesney company. In the early 1980s, the economy in Britain, long suffering from recession, drove the Lesney company into bankruptcy, along with competitors Corgi and Dinky. "Matchbox" (the name used by Lesney to market itself around the world) was bought up by Universal Toys, and eventually became controlled by the Mattel "Hot Wheels" company, though the toy cars are still sold as "Matchbox." Related: Also see these images of the Lesney Dodge Dragster
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Friday, January 9, 2009 
