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Move over, baseball cards. Metal lunch pails have made it to the big time. From 1950 until 1985, any kid worth his catcher's mitt grabbed a lunch box with a pop icon on the outside before he took off for school. Now those metal containers that used to haul peanut butter and jelly sandwiches haul in lots of cash.

Ralph Persinger of Burbank has been selling, trading and collecting lunch boxes for six years. An electrical contractor, Persinger now owns more than 700. He operates a small stall packed with lunch boxes in an antiques mall in Pomona.

He once traded 450 "blue chip" lunch boxes . . . for three cars. He received three automobiles, two of them restored -- a 1935 Bel-Air and a 1957 Nomad station wagon -- plus a '56 Chevy sedan, in exchange for some Coca-Cola memorabilia and 450 dinner pails.

"He got some good ones," Persinger said of his trading partner. "A Jetsons, a 1954 Superman and a Lone Ranger."

Twenty-five years ago, Persinger started with tobacco boxes.

"They used to package tobacco in these tin boxes, and then the parents would give them to their children to use as a lunch box," he said. So lunch boxes became the natural extension of his tobacco- tin hobby.

NO MORE METAL

Unlike baseball cards, coins and stamps, no more new metal lunch boxes are being issued. Plastic has taken over.

"Rambo in 1985 was the last metal one," Persinger said.

Experts say the issue is safety.

"The plastic ones are lighter and more durable. If the metal one got a dent, it would rust, children could scrape them on the ground and create a sharp edge and kids would hit each other with them," said Mike Shimmel, marketing director for Aladdin Industries. Aladdin made millions of character-driven metal lunch boxes from 1950 to the '80s, including Spiderman, James Bond and G.I. Joe models.

"Now they crank out hundreds of thousands of those plastic ones," Persinger said. "I don't think they'll ever be worth much."

His rarest lunch box depicted Spiderman. Only four were actually made, Persinger said -- prototypes of a lunch box planned by Aladdin in Nashville, Tenn.

Two are still in the factory, but two made it into the marketplace. A collector in Portland, Ore., has one, and Persinger had the other.

But several months ago, Persinger traded it to Chuck Braden of Fontana, part of the deal for the three cars. The Spiderman lunch box is estimated to be worth at least $5,000.

Braden, who has been collecting for less than a year, keeps Spiderman in a china cabinet in his home, along with Dudley Do Right and Bullwinkle lunch boxes worth $2,000 to $3,000 each.

Braden says the Spiderman lunch box is his personal favorite.

Persinger's favorite is the so- called "granddaddy of all lunch boxes," Aladdin Industries' 1950 Hopalong Cassidy, which gets the credit for starting the lunch-box frenzy.

CURRENT TRENDS

So what's hot now?

Early Popeye lunch boxes are popular as well as space- and Western-theme lunch boxes, Persinger said.

"The Jetsons went for $1000. I sold a `Star Trek' for $500 and a `Lost in Space' lunch box for $400," he added.

With an insulated bottle, lunch boxes can sell in antique stores for $10 to $500.

"If it's different, it will sell," said Persinger. "If it's plain, it won't pull money."

Both Persinger and Braden admit to preferring Western-styled lunch boxes.

"Bonanza," "Gunsmoke" and "Have Gun Will Travel" boxes feature simulated cowhide, tooled leather, gun holsters and bullets on their sides and bottom.

One thing that might deter collectors is that lunch boxes are not storage friendly.

A few hundred lunch boxes take up much more space than an equal number of baseball cards or stamps.

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