The Matchbox Man

So what do you do when your cherished childhood toy becomes an obsession? And then a collection. A really large collection. Well, if you're Charlie Mack, you make like the Addams Family. And - voila! (Snap snap!) The house is a museum! A generation-spanning monument to collecting, a life's masterpiece unto itself. In The Matchbox Man, filmmaker Gorman Bechard visits Charlie at his Connecticut home. Charlie bought his first Matchbox car in 1963, when he was 7. Six years later, he joined his first collectors club. And in time, his initial 20 to 30 cars exploded into one of the world's largest Matchbox collections - more than 42,000 cars, monstrous enough for him to turn practically his entire home into a museum. Charlie leads us on a dazzling mini-museum tour, a private peek into his vast treasure. Your eyes will have a hard time focusing and your mind will be boggled by each room you see - Where do I look first? All these colors! These cars are really old! Wow - I've never seen that one before! Stop! I'm not done looking yet! Charlie has one of nearly every model Matchbox car ever made. He goes deep on the details, showing off some of the variations that hardcore collectors desire: sizes, car colors, windshields, decals and wheel types. He also traces the history of the Matchbox line - started in 1947 by three Englishmen who founded a small tool-and-die company, Lesney Products Co., making windshield wipers in an old pub. Six years later, following the success of their Coronation Coach, celebrating the crowning of Queen Elizabeth II, they were in the toy business full time. After making a prototype of their first vehicle, a Road Roller, for his daughter to bring to show-and-tell, diemaker Jack Odell had a thought: these vehicles could fit inside matchboxes. Hence, a marketing strategy that made their cars a worldwide phenomenon. And one Connecticut man's obsession.