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Dylan-Marie Antoine used to brown-bag it to work every day -- until she had "an accident" involving her paper lunch sack and a mushy carton of yogurt.

"That was it," she said." I started looking for a lunch pail."

For $4.99, Antoine purchased a colorful metal children's lunch box with Superman embossed on the outside.

That was in 1979. Today, the same box is worth about $100.

Call it going from bags to riches. Antoine since has collected 62 metal lunch boxes with an estimated total value of about $2,500.

Antoine's 1969 "The Wild, Wild West" box is worth about $100. Another featuring "The Walton’s" -- "in mint condition, right down to the matching thermos," she said -- is worth $250.

"It started out as just a cute little thing, collecting them," said Antoine, a free-lance graphic designer who lives in Toluca Lake." But the prices have just been jumping so high."

Attention, schoolyard veterans of the 1950s, '60s and '70s: Dig up, dust off and spit-shine that old metal lunch box, that elementary school identification card you carried with you every day. That little box could be worth big bucks.

Metal lunch boxes, unmistakable pieces of playground pop culture, have emerged as legitimate -- and lucrative -- collectors' items. Not manufactured in the United States since 1987 (plastic boxes are deemed safer for children), metal lunch boxes, particularly those featuring popular television programs and pop heroes of yesteryear, can garner $500 -- or more.

Perhaps the most famous lunch-box success story occurred in April at a collectors show in Atlantic City, N.J., where an immaculate box and matching thermos featuring the 1960s futuristic cartoon sitcom "The Jetsons," -- a Hope Diamond among lunch-box buffs -- sold for $3,000.

"Some of them are really up there," said Kathy Ervin, owner of Penny Pinchers, a collectors' mall in Simi Valley." Some of the ones we used to sell for a dollar or two are up in the hundreds. It's really gone wild."

Lunch boxes of various shapes and designs date to the turn of the century. More than 120 million were sold in the United States between 1950 and 1970.

But the collectors' market was virtually untapped until 1985, according to Scott Bruce, author of "Lunch Box: The Fifties and Sixties" (Chronicle Books; $14.95) and "The Official Price Guide to Lunch Box Collectibles" (Random House; $9.95).

Since then, collectors' coffers have swelled from $40,000 annually to between $10 million and $15 million annually from lunch-box sales, according to Bruce.

"Somewhere between the baby bottle and the brown bag, the lunch box reflected your net worth in the blackboard jungle," Bruce said from his home in Cambridge, Mass." It was a status symbol, a social indicator among kids. You didn't want to get caught without one."

Bruce said that he sold his collection of "thousands" of boxes for $165,000 over the past two years (he has switched to collecting cereal boxes). He claims to have created the market in an attempt to start an inexpensive collectible craze that "reflected the electronic landscape of the baby-boom generation."

Bruce motored from Massachusetts to Utah, collecting boxes "until I couldn't see out of the back of my car" and shipping them home. He said he eventually sold the prize of his collection, a 1966 "super-mint" Soupy Sales box, for $3,500.

Like any collectible, the value of a lunch box depends on its age, rarity, physical condition, popularity and various intangibles.

Rarity is perhaps the most significant variable, since most boxes were damaged or destroyed with everyday use by careless kids. Manufacturers began phasing out metal boxes after a much-publicized 1972 Florida court case in which a child allegedly suffered brain damage after being struck by another child's metal lunch box.

Cared-for and cleaned-up metal boxes, consequently, have skyrocketed in value.

Chris Scharfman, a Hollywood collectibles-shop owner, said she sold a mint-condition box featuring the 1960s adventure program "Lost in Space" for $110 last December.

"The guy sold it in February to a friend for $350," Scharfman said." And he sold it to another friend in March for $1,100.

"My husband saw a "Jetsons' (box) at a collectibles show back east on the table for $1,800. And the owner would not come down in price. It's very rare."

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