Hey gang, long time no post! If you’ve seen my previous LaLD uploads, you’ll already know I’m an aviation enthusiast as well as a fan of fast things on wheels... So naturally, I’m stoked for the release (now delayed) of the Top Gun Maverick movie...
While I’m counting down the days to that, I’ve been attempting to chase up Matchbox’s tie-in releases from their Skybusters series - and I finally found some, in the form of the Legends: Past & Present 4-pack...
The venerable F-14 Tomcat (now sadly retired) is of course the star of the show, and this MB casting has new decos showing it in the colours from the first Top Gun movie - I love the detail on this, right down to Maverick and Goose’s callsigns painted beneath the canopy.
The Top Gun Maverick Legends: Past & Present 4-pack also comes with a second F-14, and this one is also deco’d with detail from Top Gun, showing insignia and callsigns that identify it as Maverick’s rival Iceman and his backseater Slider. From what I can tell, the 4-pack is currently the only place to get the Iceman F-14, as it hasn’t (yet) been released as a single.
And then coming right up to date, we have Maverick’s current ride, the F/A-18 Super Hornet, with neat blue & black tampos including his callsign and three kill-markers (a nice call-back to the first movie). This is the jet we’ll see Tom Cruise..uh...crusing around in during the sequel.
Maverick also flys the Darkstar, the fourth and final plane in the Legends pack, which appears to be a cool mash-up of the SR-71 Blackbird and the Aurora spyplane. I love the silhouette of this one, but it suffers a bit for being more plastic than metal.
There are eight aircraft currently available as singles in the Top Gun Maverick series, with (apparently) a total of fifteen to be released, but so far there’s no sign of any of them in stores here in the UK, which is vexing to say the least for an AvGeek like me! Matchbox releases of all kind are getting harder to find on my side of the pond - a sad fact considering it’s a such an iconic British toy brand.
But I’m really pleased with this die-cast (or should that be fly-cast?) haul, and I’m hoping to collect the lot to add to my aviation collection.