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.