MOONBASE CENTRAL

Saturday, 7 February 2026

Der de

Slaymobil!

Arto and Jaws! A Royal treatment for a budding movie Buff!

Finnish VHS cover for Jaws

(courtesy of FIx Gallery)

A provincial town somewhere in Finland, late 1975.

Three boys in their early teens admiring a towering, monstrous presence that had appeared in a display window of a local cinema. In a large poster, a tiny female swimmer was blissfully unaware of the toothed iceberg of a shark approaching from beneath. Since that jaw-dropping, awesome sight, "JAWS" became an object of feverish anticipation for the prepubescent trio that was us.

In those days you had to wait weeks after the national premiere before the film made its way into provinces, so the poster stood there for quite a while for us to admire. When the local premiere was finally announced, we decided not to take any chances with the big event.

Seasoned in childhood sleuthing, we looked up the address of the cinema owner in a telephone book and hopped on our chopper bikes. Arriving at the house, we knocked on the door and politely asked the surprised cinema owner if we could reserve three tickets for the premiere.

Visibly amused, the owner played along and asked us to meet him right away at the Kino. We hopped again on our bikes to make the short trip to the cinema where the owner was already waiting for us. Not only did the he sell us the tickets but allowed us also to enter the dormant movie theatre and pick and choose the best numbered seats in the hall.

Jaws the movie lived up to all our expectations and more, and the royal treatment we were given added an extra dimension to the experience. For me, that particular screening was the crucial moment of a lifelong love affair with movies – a love affair which later in life turned into a profession as well.

Arto

Helsinki Base

It's a Twenty Footer!

Actually, it's around five inches

🦈

You're Going to Need a Bigger Bus!

Hi,

By the 1990s, Matchbox were aiming many of their models at adult collectors, and several lines were grouped together as Matchbox Collectibles. Including various film and television tie-in models.

This large, modern bus started out as CY-47, in the Convoy series, most of which were heavy tractor/trailer rigs. The name of the model was MCI Coach, a tour bus built in the USA by Motor Coach Industries.

In addition to the normal Matchbox-sized Star Car Collection, a number of tie-in liveries were applied to this model under the name Star Car Bus Collection. These were not intended to depict vehicles seen on screen, they simply carried a version of the film poster, or an image from TV opening credits.

The Jaws model is painted blue and white, with the poster image of a very large shark heading straight up, towards a swimmer, on each side. The movie title JAWS appears in red, with 'See it...Before you go swimming !' in white.

The base is black plastic, and has the MCI Coach name, a copyright date of 1999, the Matchbox and Mattel names, and its country of manufacture - China. The lights are picked out in yellow, red, and white.

The model came packed in a large window box, sitting on top of a long cardboard box that could also house the coach. This secondary box carries further images of the shark.

Six photographs from Worthpoint.

Paul Adams from New Zealand

Peter Benchley ate my Bookcase!

Jaws was my first bite.

Yep.

I used to love collecting hardback modern movie tie-ins.

My only rule was that they needed to have the dustjacket.

There is something essentially satisfying about a hardback novel with its colour jacket in place.

Although I haven't read them all here are some of my fave finds.

Peter Benchley's Jaws.

His great shark tale set on Amity Island sparked my interest in TV and film hard-backs. Book critics said it was poorly written, clichéd, but I adored it.

Published in February 1974, the rest as they say, is just chum.

The first edition looked like this, which I don't have.