With this it kind of brings back the memory of the Matchboxes having more involvement with the imagination, like where the child would visualize being in the car and driving it to destinations like they were adults, and sometimes all getting together in parking lots around Lego buildings. Of course all Lego had at the time was buildings.

You know what I mean where most of the time is spent with your hand on the hardtop of the toy car guiding it all around with proper motor noises in accompaniment :)

You feel like you're driving a brand new 1960 Jaguar over to the brand new McDonald's when you grow up. Which just appeared not far from the old Burger King, where they already had Whoppers. McDonald's were small burgers only, for many years before the Quarter Pounder came out but at least they were only 12c each so you could have more than one.

The king sitting on top of the sign was a jolly fat guy, but the gleaming tiled golden arches seemed like the kind of thing you would see at Disneyland.

By the time the 1964 Mustang came out it was so popular there was soon a Matchbox replica.

Walt Disney himself was probably not yet dreaming about building an attraction in Florida, although maybe his secret buying of swampland was already underway.

We felt so sorry for the "poor" kids in the relatively small city of Orlando, the only true "city" without a beach, how could their parents move them there? Well, one reason was to work at NASA where there was a Moon shot going on. But the small resort town of Cocoa Beach near Cape Canaveral was not an attractive enough destination for recruiting the most advanced engineers for a multi-year project of a lifetime, when they would mostly appreciate a more metropolitan lifestyle. So Orlando it was and they soon built the Beeline Expressway straight from the suburbs to Cocoa. It was high-toll low traffic at the beginning but everybody went 100+mph so they could commute to NASA and the cops didn't give tickets for the first few years when it was basically like a private highway for NASA people to get to the Moon sooner. The Sunoco stations where you could choose your own octane well above 100 R+M/2 allowed anybody to be filled up with base stock live blended using different levels of tetraethyl lead to their satisfaction, which really made a difference with big American V8 gasoline engines as well as high performance sports cars. Some of those Sunocos even made it into the self-serve era.

One more thing is, the Matchboxes would often go "off-road" into carpeted areas by hand, up and down furniture, etc and it was not that much different than the pavement when your imagination is doing most of the effort.

With Hotwheels, the car itself performed so well you didn't need that much imagination any more, it was not zero but you were also not imagining the same type things.

And there was no similarity at all between the carpeted areas and the places where Hotwheels would really roll.

But you didn't even have to grow up that much to realize there weren't going to be any brand new Ford Mustangs like they had in 1964, especially not as affordable, by the time you were old enough to get your license.

Too late for Boomers born in the second half of the '50's, at that "early" point in the the trailing edge, the huge cohort that was only a few years ahead was abundant enough that most everything phenomenal had already been spoken for as you go along, so kids and adults only a few years older are the ones that set the stereotype of the well-off Boomers as a whole born into a more prosperous America. There's still only so much to go around, those born in 1958 or later are so far out of the spectrum that it's a whole different generation, but it's been disappearing the whole time since its peak. Actually for those who are about 66 years old now, there was not but a small a fraction of the opportunity left as there was for those born about 1953 or so. With an even more dramatic difference in their ability to come out on the other side when the Nixon Recession came along, in the way it was orchestrated.

One generation doesn't really have any advantage over another due to any vague sinister events, even when crooked dishonest "leaders" like Nixon get elected and do maximum damage. It's really just the occasional or gradual currency devaluation, whether blatant or implied.

You really don't need anything more sinister than that to get us where we are now.

I still wish I had my old Matchbox collection which is probably worth about $500 a case now, even if only due to inflation :\