Please Help ID This item used as a prop in Jim Henson's The Christmas Toy

[scarecroe]

Hi! RPF member KOMakesThings referred me here as a great community to help identify items and props used in movies. With your help, she's been able to track down exact print editions of some of the books used as props in Jim Henson's Labyrinth (and she makes some amazing prop replicas from that movie).

I'm hoping someone can help identify something used in another Jim Henson title, The Christmas Toy. It was a TV special that aired on ABC in 1986 and has since been released on DVD and streaming (it's currently on Prime, Kanopy, and Pluto).

I'm attaching a screenshot of the item in question. It appears at approximately the 2:28 mark in the special and appears to be the box packaging for a model airplane of some kind. From the graphics on the side, I thought at first that maybe it was a GI Joe toy, but the stripes for their branding appear to have mostly been red, white, and blue. The yellow and orange stripes look familiar to me, but I can't place them.

I tried a Google Images search and browsed countless pages of eBay listings with no luck. I also ran it through a reverse image search and even asked Gemini, but no luck there either.

Is anyone able to place what toy this might have been based on the date the special was broadcast and the visuals available?

 

[KevinD]

I think it's the Matchbox model kit of the Halifax aircraft.

 

[OzReturner]

KevinD is correct. You are looking at the left side of the box and the front in that screenshot. Everything matches.

 

[ZeroSum]

Top spotting there, KevinD! They even taped over the Matchbox logo and you still got it!

 

[scarecroe]

Wow, you all are amazing!

On Muppet Wiki, we try to catalogue the smallest details that show up in Jim Henson projects. We didn't have an article yet for Matchbox, so I'll put something up for that soon.

Thank you so much!