I had some Matchbox cars at first, but when Hot Wheels came on the scene I think that became the go-to for relatives who were buying birthday presents. Hot Wheels were shiny and unrealistic, and many were kind of dumb looking, but they were ubiquitous in the stores.
Matchbox’s main problem in the USA was that they used 1950s era British marketing strategies to sell them. “I say, put them in a red box on the shelf in the toy store and children will covet them.” Mattel’s marketing division came along and pushed them into the dirt on the playground, took their lunch money, and made them cry.
Mattel doubled down on the “toy” factor by selling them not only in individual clear blister packs, but by packaging them in kits. They came out with a car packaged with a few pieces of flex track, which got kids wanting more track. Then along came kits containing more track, and then sold buildings that would zip the car by pushing them between spinning foam wheels and speeding them around plastic banked racetrack corners. Later they came out with little electric cars that had tiny motors and NiCd cells, charged with a gas-pump shaped box of D cells and a tiny plug called a Supercharger (no doubt the name inspired Tesla.) And every new product release was accompanied by a barrage of loud, fast, exciting TV commercials played during Saturday morning cartoons.
As a kid I kind of wondered why I stopped getting Matchbox cars; as an adult with hindsight it’s painfully obvious.
