Lesney Products

steal? Probably not, but can you read the clue again, please?

Name this popular die-cast toy brand, which was introduced by Lesney Products in 1953 and is now owned by Mattel.

I'm pretty sure there's more than 20 of them.

Is it Lesney? Can you spell that?

And to set the stage for all this, we need to go back to Britain, just after the Second World War.

In 1947, Lesney Products was founded in London.

Created by Leslie and Rodney Smith, Lesney the company made die-cast products, like miniature replicas of the Queen's Coronation Coach from 1953.

This company also had an engineer on the team named Jack Odell.

But yeah, as we hear in the movie, sort of the context for what Matchbox Cars are, we hear in a monologue, which is integrated very naturally into the dialogue and in no way feels tacked on.

Matchbox Cars were first created in 1953 by Jack O'Dell, who was a co-owner of the British die casting company Lesney Products.

And Odell's daughter's school only let kids bring toys if they were small enough to fit inside of a Matchbox.

So the company was already making larger toy cars, so Odell figured out a way to make them smaller so that they would fit in the Matchbox, thus the name Matchbox Cars.

It runs a little over two hours, and it promises plenty of vehicles, action, comedy, and international adventure.

And just for a bit of history, because I think this is genuinely charming, the Matchbox name goes all the way back to 1953 and a British company called Lesney Products.

These little cars have been around for generations.

and the brand has been part of Mattel since 1997.