This is the second edition of my Throwback Thursday series. This time I’ll focus on one brand that dominated my toy box as a child: Majorette!
While Matchbox and Hot Wheels likely owned controlling stock in the $1 car market in the late 1980s, Majorette was the brand that I was actually much more familiar with. The main reason was due to them being carried at our local CVS pharmacies. With my mom having to go quite often due to a number of prescriptions (she’s had multiple sclerosis since before I was born), she’d often buy me a car or two whenever we went. Seriously, the brand probably outnumbered HW and MBX 3:1 in our house. What I’m going to show here are the ones that survived better than others. Some met their fate with the business end of a hammer…
To me, Majorette was actually the better of the three brands at the time. Most were metal/metal, and almost all had spring suspension and some sort of moving part.
I really liked how with the trucks they often tooled three bases to keep using the bodies. Castings like the Toyota pickup and the Jeep Cherokee would have a “normal” height base, a 4×4 base and eventually the Super Rockers monster trucks.
The Super Rockers are, IMO, the best of all the monster trucks that the brands were doing at the time, like Matchbox and Road Champs. They were quite robust where the ones I had from the brands easily broke on me. Plus like many of the normal vehicles, these had the spring suspension, making them that much more interactive.
The cars were all over the place for me, though my favorites were always the ones with the wide/fat wheels, I believe called “turbo wheels”. They were always on the sports cars. Ferrari 288 GTO, Mustang SVO, Pontiac Fiero racer, Lamborghini Countach, Corvette C4, Firebird Trans Am, Porsche Turbo. Not sure why they were just my favorite things at the time, despite seemingly frowned upon nowadays by collectors.
So, another deep glimpse into how I became a collector today. A number of years ago I came across a random thrift store and stopped on a whim. Guy had a box of old diecast cars, mostly mint and had a BUNCH of Majorette from this era in it. Asked how much he wanted, was only like $15. Told him I’d be right back and bought the box almost strictly for the Majorette cars that were in there. I think there were 15 or so of just that brand that I kept, so it was WELL worth the price. Finding that box really kicked the nostalgia for me, and I’ve been looking for a lot of these older cars ever since. Not constantly, but once in a while. Sometimes I find a few gems, some I’ll eventually feature. Hope you enjoyed some nice play-worn cars, maybe kicking some nostalgia for some of you too!