Quite simply, the scale, that's what.
When you buy Tomica Limited Vintage over the internet vs. in person at a store (and in the USA, the only place to buy them is over the internet), you don't get a sense for the physical size of the car. You don't get that sense until you've paid $5-10 in shipping costs per car and had them shipped all the way from Tokyo or Hong Kong... ...and realize that they are SMALL...
Looking through all of the Tomica Limited Vintages in my collection, in the vast majority of cases, they feel under-scale to me - more like 1:70 scale vs. 1:64.
The pictures illustrate this. The car in question is a 1980's Toyota Town-Ace minivan - the same Toyota mini-van that Toyota sold in the USA in the late '80s to compete with the Dodge Caravan (the one where the engine was accessed from under the driver's seat... ...and that was eventually replaced by the Previa, which was replaced by the Sienna). I've lined up 3 other white minivans to compare it with - minivans that you might recognize from my recent minivan post. In the first 2 photos, the Town-Ace is the 2nd from the right. And you can see that it is NOTICEABLY smaller than the other white minivans - when in fact it should be essentially the same size as the others... I'm here to tell you that this is not an isolated case. I have many other Limited Vintages in my collection which have this same problem...
This is why I hate them... ...you get all excited about how good they look on their own - and then are so disappointed when they end up being small...
P.S. They also frequently feel lightweight to me...
P.P.S. I also hate that Tomica has "vintage" in the name, which makes it very difficult to hunt through EBAY for true vintage Tomicas...
closer to their size
No comments:
Post a Comment