Corgi Model Club: Kingfisher Blue

If you had a Corgi Toy in 'kingfisher blue' in the 1960s you were very lucky. It was most likely to have been a Jaguar Mk X but it could also have been a Chrysler Imperial. The last time I had one of these on my desk was over 10 years ago, when I found this really nice example when I was slowly working through the American section of Corgi's issues to review and document for my then very new Catalogue. I wish I had not let it go all those years ago - I have not seen another since, not even one I cannot afford! So it is a delight to see the latest Corgi Model Club issue, even if they have simply repainted the red one from May/June 2024. It just looks and feels right, and there is something about that wonderful colour . . .

Now, let's take a closer look at this and what the Club say about it.

First of all, it comes wrapped in tissue-like paper with a couple of L-shaped pieces of foam to help protect the screen. The certificate specifies this as the kingfisher blue edition. They get that bit right.

They seem, however, to be unaware of the origins of this model, 

If thy had looked in the 1969 Corgi Catalogue they would have seen it on page 13.

This was planned as model #507, a new Bermuda Taxi to replace the ancient Ford Thunderbird. It would carry the same funny detachable roof as the Fiat Jolly and Thunderbird and a couple of suitcases in the boot, with a suitably well-tanned chap behind the wheel.

That model, however, was never actually 'available later' but a batch of Chryslers had been prepared and these have reached the market. Now, bearing in mind that the 1969 catalogue would not have been produced much earlier than mid-1968 and the #246 model ceased production in 1967, it must have been the case that this batch were put into whatever remaining #246 boxes were around and, as the box talks of a 'surprise in the boot' they popped a golf trolley in there too. It would have been too late for dealers to order but I guess they reached a few somehow.

There is a notable difference between the kingfisher blue and the red editions which tends to confirm this. That is the two holes just behind the passenger compartment where the roof canopy poles would have been placed. These are not present on the re-issue.

There is a further marked difference between the original and the re-issue and that is the colour of the base. The re-issue, understandably, keeps the deep grey of the 2024 re-issue whereas my original had a much lighter grey finish.

For all the mistakes in the description, I have to say that I do like this re-issue and I may get a second so that I can make the two holes, change the base, install a canopy, driver and cases and create my very own #507.

Corgi Model Club: another 300SL and a catalogue of errors

 The Corgi Model Club's second issue of #303S Mercedes-Benz 300SL Roadster has arrived. My first thought on opening the box was that the Club must have used, as a guide to colour, an old example that had been lying around next to an ashtray or having spent its life in a pub, with a colour that I would describe as pale tobacco stain.

I rushed to dig out my original and put them side by side. Whilst the reissue is a bit creamier or browner, I have to admit that it's not as far out as I initially reckoned. Indeed, looking at my car in my hand it looks quite 'white'. Place it on my desk and it's cream! I tried to take some photos to show the difference but they don't really show much at all!

The Club do make quite a big thig about this 'white livery'. though. Putting aside my feeling that 'livery' isn't really the right word here, they make some mistakes in the Certificate in this respect. First of all they write about this being the 1963 model. No, a driver was added to the model in 1963 but there had been an off-white edition with yellow interior since 1961. Admittedly the free-spinning wheels will have been fitted later but they came before the driver. They write that this 'was only produced in white' but, no, there continued to be the blue model (which the Club themselves have produced, and with a driver!) and there are silver / gold mirror finish models still available much later (as you'll find these with wire or cast wheels from 1965/66). They write about this model being issued in white and off-white as if they were separate issues but there really was just the one 'sort of white' just having the usual spread of shades as with most colours in the old days.

The Certificate also rambles on about the 'S' suffix being dropped between 1964 and 1965. It wasn't. That's a mistake in the little red booklet, supplied with the Great Book of Corgi, from where, I suspect, they copied some of the data without checking.

[Note the 'spoked hubs'! I did eventually find the Mercedes-Benz but have never seen the Aston Martin]

The errors don't stop there this month, I'm afraid, because this model was accompanied by a nice little catalogue, setting out the Club's currently available models with illustrations and descriptions reminiscent in many ways of the original old Corgi Toy catalogues from the mid 1960s. Nice as it looks, it is nonetheless filled with mistakes which I'll detail at the end of this article.

Back to the Mercedes-Benz, here are some photos.

It is a very well-finished model, as, of course was the earlier blue one. I do feel it looks considerably more attractive in this colour. I believe the driver was originally the same chap as drove the #215S Ford Thunderbird, later losing his legs and becoming Roger Moore as 'The Saint' in a Volvo in 1965. 

This is a nice reproduction and perfectly adequate as a space-filler until you find a nice original. White examples are not particularly scarce (unlike the sister #304S in white) but still command quite high prices. Cheaper ones will invariably have a cracked or broken windscreen, a missing driver and/or damaged transfer. The suspension, rock-hard on these as they featured Corgi's first concept, involving a second piece of tin which was pretty much indestructible, is never a problem. Indeed, many sellers do not realise they have a #303S and advertise their model as a 303!

Corgi Model Club: MGC GT (cheaper than the sum of its parts)

 The Model Club's latest issue has finally arrived, delayed through no fault of the Club, and, having read many stories about it, I am pleased to have had the opportunity to see it up close for myself.

Firstly, it arrives in what must be the most deprived packaging so far in the series. This time it has the merest slip of bubble-wrap floating around and the box free to cavort around the interior of the usual brown corrugated card affair. Luckily the car is unlikely to move much inside its box, being wrapped in some tissue. No chunks of foam with this issue (which I hear may lead to damaged suspension where the foam is inserted such that it wedges too firmly the car beneath in other instances).

One's immediate impression has to be good, an instantly recognisable colour and great chrome. I like wire wheels on Corgis a lot but I don't remember any of my originals ever having such shiny axle ends. These spoil the appearance a bit but perhaps mine became dull quickly and I never noticed at the time.

You will then have the now familiar disappointment with the 'jewelled' headlamps which aren't. How much extra would it really cost to fit little glass items? I am sure Steve Flowers would give the Club as super discount for quantity should they have trouble sourcing them in China.

As I am sure you will have read elsewhere by now, the funs starts at the back end. The transfer reads MGB GT! I guess that in China the team producing this are unfamiliar with British cars and reckoned that the model which looks pretty much the same as the MGB GT they had produced a while ago might well have the same few letters on the tailgate.  A bit like nearly all Fords have the same Ford badge. Quite how that escaped the attention of some sort of quality control over in the East I don't know, then a later sample gets through the Club's approval process and the old MGB transfer gets applied to every model and shipped here when, finally, someone at the Club realises.

Personally, I find these mistakes quite fun. Yes, I know they make whoever missed this at the Club look a bit stupid but I can imagine that they may have been working with a poor original which had either no transfer or a damaged one. We have read before how they don't always seem to get hold of good examples of whatever they're planning to recreate and I'm not convinced that whoever does check most models is as well-versed in Corgis from this era as one might have expected.

Anyway, once this batch has been sold the transfer will be corrected and some of us will just have to buy the second issue. I think they have about 10-15,000 in each batch so it may be a while before the second comes and I suspect they will eventually be equally distributed and so, whilst this first one will have some value in future, it is unlikely to be significant with so many around.

The black case is a delightful copy and opens and closes just like the original. That little item itself is almost enough to warrant buying the model, with originals regularly selling for £10-£15 + post on Ebay.

The Club need to have a word with whoever packs the cars in the boxes as they are just stuffing the bag with the numbers into the box and that is resulting in many people reporting creased stickers which may not look great either loose or applied. Just adding a small piece of card in a slightly smaller bag would solve the problem.

As I said at the start, this is generally an excellent reproduction in many respects and the colour very close. I detect just a touch more lime in my original but that's all.

The tyres on an original would have been the 'branded' type with clear tread running around the tyre. This would surely be something quite easy for the Chinese to create but they have just left us with slicks!

The box has the usual annoying font error in the small text and numerals and has that shine which I wish they would try and avoid as the card itself is pretty much exact. I would also stop adding those little slits in the tabs which must account for no end of slightly damaged boxes and frustrated collectors, who knew they should have been more careful but took a chance and just tugged.

Looking back at my comment regarding the cost of cases, I have now looked up the cost of all the parts if you were to purchase reproduction items from Model-Supplies:

2 doors                     £2.00

2 seat backs                £2.90

tailgate                    £1.00

tailgate window             £1.75

window unit                 £3.00

chrome chassis / bumpers    £7.00

chrome grille               £1.75

2 jewels                    £0.80

tailgate transfer           £1.55

suitcase                    £1.20

4 Racing numbers            £1.55

postage UK                  £5.50

Total                      £30.00

Remember that the body items would be bare metal too, requiring paint. So the £28.98 that I think I paid wasn't such bad value! Now, does anyone need any spares!!

Corgi Chevrolet Impalas

 

You will, of course, be familiar with this recent issue of the wonderful #248 Chevrolet Impala, the second edition of the saloon model, this time in a butterscotch and cream flavour, as opposed to pale blue or salmon. What you will not be familiar with, however, is the finish on this delightful example, which really should be described as Impala à la Pearson, having being expertly polished so that what the Club sent us by way of a strange satin-finished model (and attempted to assert that this was how it was intended to be issued to boot!) now looks much more like it should.

My 'satin finish' Club edition placed next to Chris Pearson's shows the difference clearly.

Mr Pearson also likes to replace the rivets with something that better matches the originals.

Mr Pearson tells me that his Aunt Iris worked at the Corgi factory from 1958 to 1983 and he would sometimes accompany her as a child and he recalls seeing a number of 'prototypes', not that he would have known they would have been prototypes at the time. One was the #481 Chevrolet Police Patrol Car with a white lower section. The other was the #482 Chevrolet Fire Chief Car but with a black lower section.

As luck would have it, the two issued models can simply be taken apart and the sections swapped and there we have very nice copies of the 'prototypes'! It has since occurred to me that what he saw at the factory may just have been some 'mistakes' or someone having fun with the two halves with #481 and #482 probably rolling down the production line at similar times in 1965/66. I feel this is more likely, certainly for the Fire Chief model.

My research indicates that the Fire Chief car is unlikely to have existed in the 1959-style. In 1959, General Motors completely broke the mould with a wildly low, wide, and aggressive space-age design. The massive protruding rear "batwings" and sprawling trunk lines made it a styling masterpiece, but highly impractical for utilitarian city fleets. Because of the extreme rear fins, municipal fire and police departments overwhelmingly rejected the 1959 Impala sedan for official duty.

 Instead, the rare 1959 Chevrolets that did make it into fire service were almost exclusively 1959 Chevrolet Brookwood or Kingswood Station Wagons (which flattened out the wild fins to carry ladders and equipment), or stripped-down, lower-trim Biscayne sedans. Corgi took considerable artistic license by reusing their existing, highly popular 1959 Impala civilian saloon diecast mould (originally released in late 1959 as Corgi #223) to create the Fire Chief edition.

I have been able to find just one example of the 1959 style Impala in genuine use as a police car, this image, courtesy of the Ypsilanti, Michigan Community archives at https://www.reddit.com/r/ypsi

Nevertheless, the two variants that Mr Pearson very kindly sent me are very well constructed and fun to add to my own collection. I have always been a fan of the Impalas (although not the final throes of vehicles for kennel services or poodle display).

Here they are for your admiration.

Lastly, I am not at all sure now that there was ever such a thing as the 1959 Impala as a taxi in either all yellow or the later yellow and red, other than, perhaps, much more recently, in Cuba! It was the Police car that came first, in December 1959, and I can see that there will have been some evidence of a vehicle they could reproduce. After that, I do believe it was a matter of making the most from an excellent casting.

One might say that the Corgi Model Club are doing the same, and I am not referring necessarily to the Impalas here. Take a look at their forthcoming issues:

R345 MGC GT

R303S Mercedes-Benz 300SL Open Top Roadster (cream edition)

R246 Chrysler Imperial (Kingfisher blue edition)

R275 Rover 2000TC (white edition)

R302 MGA (teal edition)

R318 Lotus Elan S2 (copper edition)

There is also a store-only issue of an MGA in off-white in October by way of celebration of Corgi's 70th anniversary. I quite like the idea of a variation of one of the early models for this purpose but with the teal edition already in the pipeline at about the same time I feel they would have been better advised to choose one of the actual 1956 releases, not this one, which was May 1957, nearly a year later. There is, of course, a fair case to be made of economy of scale, using resources in several different ways but the frequency we see now does make me wonder whether all is well back at the Corgi ranch. I know that just about everybody who reads this has enjoyed collecting diecast models but I am not so sure there is such a certainty of a continuing robust market for people collecting new diecast models.

It will be quite nice to see fresh-looking examples of the Chrysler, Rover and MGA, the Chrysler and MGA being extremely hard to find in any condition. The Rover is not that common either. So I can see that the Club provide a way for people to fill missing spaces. I am also quite content with the production of models that were not actually issued, such as the Lotus Elan in copper and the MGA in off white. These are interesting and could be collectible as a group on their own although, having said that, it could be argued that every Club issue would fall into this category as none are ever quite right!