Not one or two Matchbox cars, mind you, but the whole brand, before Mattel kills it. There's a limit to how many neon green/yellow/pink unlicensed tractor-trailer-loaders a brand can make before its parent company goes "oh, we're very sorry to announce Matchbox will be ceasing its activities due to low sales" and I fear they're very close to that limit. Like, one or two tractor-trailer-loaders removed from that limit! Someone needs to take them back to their glory days, and that might as well be us! Ok, not really, because that would be crazy expensive, but I figured it would be fun to at least pool our ideas together to see if we could come up with some sort of Oppo/Jalop Diecast Brand. Here's a some of what I'd do if I actually owned Matchbox:
The Lineup: The basic 1-75 lineup would go back to having 75 numbered models, but all of them would be licensed cars of some sort, including SUVs, caravans and pickup trucks. No big rigs, planes, boats or construction equipment here. These 75 cars would be sequentially numbered, just like the original lineup, but everytime a new model was introduced, it would get a new number, instead of taking the number of an existing casting, like in the old system. Obviously, not all cars would be released every year, instead, a mix of 75 would be selected from the available castings, and older cars would eventually be re-released in their original numbers, but in new colorways or with new tooling options.
A subseries, reviving the King Size name, would feature trucks, semis, trailers and construction equipment, similar to the Real Working Rigs of today. These models would be larger to keep within the scale of the regular series, hence the name. There would be far fewer models here, as they would be a bit more expensive than the regular series, for obvious reasons, and would feature their own numbering with the letter K added.
Planes and helicopters would get their subseries back, the old Sky Busters. In the same vein as the King Sizes, these would be larger and fewer, and numbering would have the letter S added.
The Models: Model selection would be as varied as possible on all series, and all vehicles would scale down to 1:64, even the really big ones, so some of them would be less like Matchbox and more like Firewoodwagon, but whatever. Vehicle construction would be all metal, with plastic interior parts. For the wheels, personally, I prefer detailed plastic wheels on free axles over rubber tires. They roll better, they give the model a toy car feel, which is great, and they can look pretty good, so that's what I'd go with. Also, every line would have some sort of moving part to it. 1-75 cars would have opening hoods, King Size vehicles would feature moving arms, buckets, tippers or articulated hinges for trailers, Sky Busters would have opening canopies or doors, or articulated propellers, and really big vehicles could be sold in the place of playsets, and would feature opening interiors, like an airliner that you can take apart and look inside. Design-wise, I really like what Matchbox's been doing with the few licensed vehicles they've released lately, like the Firebird above. I wouldn't change any of that, except maybe, swapping out chrome parts for silver tinted ones. Higher end brands like Auto World and Greenlight are doing that, and the silver paint not only looks much cleaner but also doesn't come off as easily as the chrome.
The Packaging: Obviously, I'd go back to boxes of various sizes for the different vehicles, but I'd want to include something along with the car, like a small, collectable spec sheet, maybe something talking a bit about the model, that could be later collected in an album. Other than that, I'd keep the design similar to latest Lesney and 60th anniversary editions, which are both clean and good looking. Bigger models would probably be sold in other types of boxes though...
And the pricing... Well, I figure a line of all metal 1/64 diecast cars with relatively simplistic design could be sold for around the same price as Auto World's basic lineup. I
don't know how much that is in dollars, because I don't live in the US, but it's just slight above Hot Wheels' mainline. King Size models could be sold for about the same as Real Working Rigs, and sky busters... Those would be a problem, because you have lots of different planes at lots of different sizes... But I guess that's that for now. Feel free to chime in with anything I may have missed, or anything you'd do different. Maybe we could get a series about a Jalop diecast brand up.