匈牙利大众巴士从“火柴盒：电影”到火柴盒玩具车

Filmed in Budapest and Bratislava, Matchbox: The Movie has a fairly tenuous connection to the little die-cast toys. Starring the always charismatic John Cena as a CIA agent racing to deal with a rogue nuclear weapon, the central conceit is that a group of friends who used to play together with Matchbox cars in middle school reunite in adulthood to take down the bad guys.

It’s a movie that plays like a kid narrating a story while pushing die-cast cars around the carpet, which feels like a pretty good fit for the brand association. Compared to Hot Wheels, which are all about speed and pulling off loops on those iconic orange tracks, Matchbox as a brand skews a little more realistic, and often features construction machines and vintage vehicles.

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Speaking of iconic orange, one of the central vehicles onscreen is a 1970s Volkswagen T2, the beloved Microbus. These things are such a huge part of popular culture that one was the main plot point in an episode of Futurama, which saw the crew hopping into a VW Bus and following Beck’s band around. (Best joke: When asked by Professor Farnsworth where the onboard time dilation device is, Fry reaches under the seat and produces a bong.)

In this case, two VW T2s were used in filming, both owned by Budapest-based Dávid Sipos. One of the two needed sufficient modification for stunt driving that it ended up no longer road legal, but the more original of the pair survived the filming schedule unscathed and came back into Sipos’s possession. As a tie-in with the film, Mattel of course produced Matchbox models of the film cars, and Sipos was delighted to find that the blister-pack model of the VW Bus was a faithful match for his car, right down to the aftermarket sunroof and identical Hungarian license plate.

The story gets even better, with the involvement of the original owner who picked up the keys to this orange bus some 50 years ago. If a VW Microbus is a symbol of counterculture in the U.S., that’s not the case overseas. In 1964, reacting to European tariffs on U.S. chicken products, President Lyndon B. Johnson enacted the so-called “chicken tax,” slapping a 25 percent penalty on various products including imported European light trucks.

For Volkswagen, this meant the death knell of U.S.-exported T2 pickups and panel vans, so the Microbus was typically a passenger van stateside. In Europe, working T2s continued chugging along as part of the furniture of a busy city, getting people and goods where they needed to go.

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This particular 1976 T2B was delivered by train to Budapest for the Hungarian Water Works to use as a service vehicle. A young employee with the last name Thaly drove it right off the rail car at the depot, and it entered fleet service for the next eight years.

By 1984, something more modern was needed, so the company offered the VW to Thaly, who promptly snapped it up. He kept working, but the T2 effectively enjoyed a sunny retirement, stored carefully in a garage and used as a summertime camping vehicle driven throughout Europe, first with his children, then with his grandchildren. This went on for three decades.

In more recent times, Sipos was working for an advertising agency that often landed accounts for youth-oriented brands. “Somehow I was always the one suggesting that we should have a VW Bus covered in the brand’s graphics as part of the campaign,” he says.

The company eventually bought a slightly earlier 1972 T2A for permanent use as a rolling billboard. Far from just being a work vehicle, employees started borrowing it outside work and just driving it around, as the experience was so much fun.

“There’s something about traveling in a VW Bus that instantly creates a sense of community,” Sipos says.

The T2 became something of a signature of the agency, with friends and colleagues often flagging likely-looking vehicles up for sale. One day in 2013, Thaly’s beloved orange VW cropped up in a listing, and while the advertising company didn’t need it in the fleet, Sipos bought it as a personal vehicle.

This T2 ended up onscreen when Matchbox's director, Sam Hargrave, spotted a photo of it. Sipos also had a second, very similar T2 at the time, green in color, and it was the latter that was cloned to look like the 1976 T2B and modified for stunt work.

The story of how the actual Hungarian registration ended up on the toy car is a bit of a mystery, as the onscreen cars used different license plates. Mattel’s designers would have had piles of reference photos to comb through, and somehow it was settled that the detail on the plate would be DJN-623, the plate this van has been wearing since 1993.

Sipos made sure to get this unexpectedly accurate model of the Thaly family’s beloved orange Volkswagen to them, and he keeps in close contact with them. How typical of a Volkswagen Bus to still be bringing people together, 50 years after it hit the road.

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