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The purchase was in keeping with his personal desire never to be an adult. As Marc Engel gazed at the image on the computer screen, he knew this one item would help.

It was a lunchbox. Not just any lunchbox, mind you.

"It's a Fireball XL5," Engel said. "It's a reproduction of a lunchbox that probably never existed."

But the Fireball XL5 lunchbox did exist, and if Engel's had been an original, it would have cost him in the neighborhood of $250 - 10 times what he paid. (For those wondering what a Fireball XL5 might be, it refers to a 1964 TV show featuring the interplanetary adventures of marionette spacemen from the year 2063 who flew about in their rocket ship, Fireball XL5.)

Why would anyone spend that kind of money on what many people might consider junk?

It's about protecting your "fountain of youth," said Engel, the former director of the Embassy Centre.

"Anything reminds me of times when I didn't have to be responsible for things is a good thing."

Welcome to the wonderful world of lunchbox collecting, a growing field that retailers are trying to exploit with a wave of reproduction lunchboxes echoing everything from The Beatles to Scooby Doo.

Trading metal for cash

"Merchandisers are no dummies," says Carole Bess White, author of the "Collector's Guide to Lunchboxes," (CollectorBooks, 2001).

"We all collect our childhoods," she wrote. Today's merchandisers have come up with "miniature metal lunchboxes both with and without candy or snack food, souvenir 'collector' boxes, lunchboxes containing sports cards ... these boxes are meant for just about anything but lunch for small children."

Example? The World Wrestling Federation lunchboxes being sold at Clem's Collectibles at Glenbrook Square. Manager Mike Snodgrass said card collectors buy the WWF boxes that come with unopened packs of trading cards. Also popular at his store are lunchboxes featuring the original hard rock band KISS. The lunchboxes sell from $9.99 to $27.

"All kinds of people (buy them)," Snodgrass said. "Kids buy them for school, and older people who put them with their original (KISS) lunchboxes."

In recent years, lunchboxes have transformed from metal to plastic to space-age insulated bags, capable of keeping ice cubes frozen or soups hot for hours. Plastic lunchboxes featuring today's popular cartoon characters cost between $7 and $10. Lunch bags can cost between $8 and $20.

But lunch "boxes" have been around since time immemorial, in the form of leaves, gourds, animal skins - anything that could hold food for travel, White noted. By the Victorian Age, in the early to mid 1800s, food containers began to take on the modern lunchbox form.

The first patented portable food containers were tin cans, which when empty were perfect for carrying laborers' food. By 1903, when the Thermos bottle was invented, the lunchbox was complete, according to White.

The first logos printed on boxes advertised tobacco products, such as the Union Leader Plug Tobacco tin lunchbox, which featured a black bird perched over the slogan "Smoke and Chew."

The first known licensed character to appear on a lunchbox was none other than Mickey Mouse, who appeared in 1935, on a lunch pail produced by Geuder, Paeschke & Frey Co., according to White.

Walt Disney's most famous creation was immortalized just seven years after his first appearance. Today, that pail would fetch at least $1,500.

But lunch pails featuring popular culture symbols didn't take off until the baby boom exploded - along with the fledgling TV industry.

The first TV character lunch kit debuted in 1950, featuring Hopalong Cassidy. The red or blue enameled box sported a small scalloped cartoon of the TV cowboy, and included a steel and glass Thermos with a picture of Hopalong and his trusty horse Topper (now valued at $345).

A handful of companies, including Ohio Art in Bryan, Ohio, dominated the lunchbox market throughout the 1950s to the '70s - producing thousands of metal and vinyl "lunch kits" for schoolchildren across the country. Aladdin Industries and King Seely Thermos joined Ohio Art in mass producing millions of lunchboxes for American schoolchildren, White writes.

Jim Gilcher has been with Ohio Art for 32 years. Now the company's senior buyer, Gilcher gets about 10 inquiries a week on Ohio Art products, including lunchboxes.

"We started out making oval (lunchboxes) in the 1930s with the sports figures on them," Gilcher said. "The most popular one we made was a knockoff of a James Bond that we called Bond X. We'd make 20,000 in a run."

But as wages and manufacturing costs rose, prices for the lunchboxes didn't, Gilcher said.

"Why, they just couldn't afford to make them anymore," he said. Ohio Art stopped making lunchboxes in the late 1980s.

Despite lunchboxes' ubiquitousness, there were only about 450 different designs created for them. Most featured pop icons from TV and - later - music. In fact, lunchboxes featuring TV and movies provided an instant source of additional revenue from licensing fees.

However, lunchboxes' popularity as food containers began to be overshadowed by their popularity as weapons for playground fisticuffs.

In 1972, a group of mothers in Florida convinced the state legislature to ban metal lunchboxes, and by 1987, the ban was nationwide. Ironically, the last metal lunchbox produced featured Sylvester Stallone's gun-toting, serial-killing character Rambo, according to White.

These days, plastic lunch "kits" containing everything from fruit cups to coupons are on retailers' shelves, competing for kids' affection. But they're being muscled aside by space-age food totes, which feature special linings to keep drinks cold and food hot - at the same time - for hours.

Plastic lunchboxes still feature pop icons of the day - including Barbie and Scooby Doo, both of whom have been featured on lunchboxes since their respective creations. The newer ones cost just a fraction of originals. A 2001 Barbie lunchbox costs just $7.99 at Target, while a 1962 vinyl Barbie lunchbox can cost upward of $450. An original 1973 Scooby Doo runs about $75, plus $35 for the matching Thermos.

In the past several years, "retro" lunchboxes have appeared at local retailers, including Suncoast Motion Picture Co. and Spencer Gifts, both at Glenbrook Square. White calls retro lunchboxes "a fantasy box ... that never was issued in the 'old days' but looks like it could have or should have been."

Betty Boop, Felix the Cat and other early cartoon characters are popular subjects for retro lunchboxes. The hottest sellers at Suncoast these days are Spider-Man, Superman and Batman boxes, sales associate Adrian Walker said. The boxes cost between $10 and $20.

"There's a lot of kids and adults who get them," Walker said. "Everybody wants to be a superhero."

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