Playing with your Dinky cars
Dinky is a brand of toy car from olden times, it’s like Corgi or Matchbox but with an even stronger whiff of Werther’s Originals about it.
STEEPLE – A Scary Go Round Comic
by John Allison
Dinky is a brand of toy car from olden times, it’s like Corgi or Matchbox but with an even stronger whiff of Werther’s Originals about it.
Perhaps it say something about me that my first reaction to this was to try to estimate just how many toy cars reverend Penrose must own based on how good an approximation the toy cars are to the actual cars. The middle car is pretty close. The van is at least a van, but not red/pink and not a VW bus. The other car is not even close. Based on this, I’m going to estimate that the reverend has around ten of these toy cars, give or take a few.
Thank you for doing that important work.
Maybe someday this will be the final ultra-obscure stumper question in a bar trivia contest. You never know.
If only we lived in such a world…..
There’s a definite ‘Christine’ feel to it now
I’m surprised the Rev doesn’t have a combi van Dinky toy, that Transit is no substitute…
And on an unrelated topic, I really wish I’d looked after my old Dinky and Matchbox cars instead of painting them and otherwise causing them more damage than actual cars I’ve owned
On a semi-related topic to your unrelated topic, when I was a lad, from about 7 years of age until my mid-teens (the ’60’s and ’70’s), I collected baseball cards. I bought lots of them – enough to fill up nearly every team in both leagues. And every winter, my mother would throw them out.
I still love my mother.
I had a Nolan Ryan rookie card and a 1974 Willie McCovey “Washington National League” card, among man others, that were discarded.
I have a Cito Gaston “Washington National League” card from back before he was known as Cito, when he was “Clarence”
I’ve still got all my baseball cards, as well as those my dad collected late in his life when his previous collections of coins and stamps became too expensive to continue.
My older brother, thanks in part to military moving allowances, had the quintessential childhood story of having a Mickey Mantle rookie card disposed of before a family move. The demonstration of which was learned quickly enough by my parents that my entire collection was safe from such depredations.
She was teaching you non-attachment, good for her!
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that the Rev. has such boring cars in his toy box. Based on my (more well off) childhood friends, a more realistic setup would be a Lady Penelope FAB 1, a James Bond Aston Martin and either a Batmobile or a Green Hornet Black Beauty.
I only had a Matchbox James Bond car (much smaller) [sigh] so the ejector seat passengers were much easier to lose. I did have Mac McClaine’s flying car from Joe 90 but I sense that it would be out of place in this mystic vehicle recreation…
Is it just me (Firefox) or is the comments interface evolving almost daily?
I had a lot of Micro Machines(for those unfamiliar, I guess they’re slightly bigger than N scale? Which I’m just learning because I wanted to check around for a frame of reference on size) as a kid, and a few Matchbox and Hot Wheels around, along with generic brands cars. But I don’t really remember what real cars I had.
My memories of my childhood are spotty at best.
Dinky was the greatest for me because they had vehicles from all the Gerry Anderson series from Thunderbirds on, but the range of products was really amazing. They even offered a blue police box decades before anyone conceived of that as a mode of transport. As an American I probably learned more about British everyday life from the pictures in Dinky catalogs than I gathered from any other source.
Inexplicably, the toy shop nearby to us in non-city California had Dinky vehicles. And so I have a UFO interceptor, an Enterprise, and many others. Would love to find the missile from the interceptor…
Also, foreshadowing headlights of DOOM.
I should have known that such parts are obtainable on eBay. Nifty!
I remember Dinky. And Corgi. And Matchbox. Thanks for the nostalgia.
Panel 1, Reverend Penrose’s first word balloon- “On a road wide enough for for maybe two cars”. That’s a double “for”, which I believe equals “ate”.
Thank you, I have scraped one of the fors off the page with a craft knife.
I find myself hoping that the desk surface is dry erase. 🙁
Reverend Penrose knows what he’s doing. https://steeple.church/comic/it-cant-be-anything-complicated/
Oh my gosh I had forgotten all about this collaboration! Charlotte and Penrose, what a team.
I’m still hoping we see Lottie in Tredregyn again. We know that as of “Clotted Crime”, she was keeping in touch with Billie, at least.
Imagine if Lottie visited again! What a thing that would be.
Haunted? Spiritually Guided perhaps. I too well remember the Dinky, Corgi, Matchbox trinity and thinking that I learned everything about British life from Alistair Cooke.
I learned all about American History from Alistaire Cooke!
“They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist—”
“Well, at least nothing else can go wrong.”
“We can cover more ground if we split up.”
“Maybe the car’s just haunted! Ha ha!”
“At least things can’t get any wor-“
Worse things happen at sea.
“Don’t worry, it’s not: loaded / venomous / armed / as unstable as it looks / able to open doors / able to see us if we don’t move”
As always Mrs Clovis is able to understand what is really happening, without actually understand it… She’s amazing.
I’m telling ya: she’s just the right age to have been a Go-goccult Adventuress in Swinging London.
Maybe the car is Christine’s British cousin, Prudence?
A friend of the family owned Christine’s British Cousin. For reasons I don’t fully understand, the film was advertised in the UK not with footage or stills from the actual film, but with a local lookalike, and my mother’s best friend owned that car.
Alas, Christine UK looked more like Christine US than the Rev’s new wheels.
Somehow of all the things that Mrs. Clovis has born witness to in Tredregyn, a haunted car sounds the most outlandish to her.
The Rev hit the brakes, spun out behind the Kombi and was parallel to the oncoming car as it passed, continued to spin and ended up across the road.
A 180 anticlockwise – oncomer passes – continues for another 270, or more likely 180 anticlockwise, backwards skid as oncomer passes, 90 clockwise.
Not saying it’s at all likely. Just that it’s sort of possible.
I think both other vehicles passed him at the same time, though.
Does anyone else catch an ever-so-slight ironic tone to Mrs. Clovis’s divine intervention suggestion?
Well, given the name of ths story, I’d bet against the divine intervention theory.
This would be a good time to go and thank the car.
Nonstandard (for JA) top of the page location for scene setting! But I’m having trouble finding a spot it could’ve been written in-panel. Curled into the Rev’s burly forearm hairs?