Eleven thousand, eight hundred and sixty-five dollars. That’s the hammer price a battered tin lunchbox pulled at Weiss Auctions, and the box in question wasn’t gold-plated or one-of-a-kind.

It was a 1954 ADCO Liberty Superman lunchbox, the kind a kid could have bought at a five-and-dime for a couple of dollars and dragged through a school year of dropped trays and scuffed lockers.

The design is the whole reason collectors lose their minds over it: Superman locked in combat with a giant robot, rendered in the kind of saturated, comic-panel color that mid-century lithography did better than almost anything since.

It was one of the first lunchboxes built around a single licensed superhero image rather than a generic scene, and according to The Takeout, a pristine example has fetched nearly $12,000 at auction — with unrestored, well-loved specimens more typically landing between $500 and $1,800 depending on paint loss and rust.

Condition is everything here. Most surviving Superman boxes spent a decade banging around a cafeteria, so a lid without dents, a hinge that still closes, and color that hasn’t sun-faded into pastel are what separate a $500 box from a five-figure one. That gap is also why the category exists as a serious collecting field at all — the same reason a mint Mickey Mantle rookie card dwarfs a creased one, dented tin is common and unmolested tin is not.

Superman himself wasn’t even the format’s real breakthrough. Character lunchboxes existed in small numbers through the 1930s and 40s, but they stayed niche until Aladdin Industries put Hopalong Cassidy on a box in 1950 and, according to NPR, sold roughly 600,000 units in a single year — proof to every toy licenser in the country that kids would lobby their parents for a specific lunchbox the way they’d lobby for a specific cereal. Superman rode that wave in 1954, and the format exploded from there into the decades of Star Wars, He-Man, and Muppets tins that made lunchboxes a genuine collectible category rather than a school supply.

What almost nobody realizes, including plenty of people who own one, is that Superman wasn’t first. The lunchbox industry’s actual origin point is a 1935 oval tin kit made by the Wisconsin firm Geuder, Paeschke & Frey, licensed from Walt Disney Enterprises and stamped with Mickey Mouse and a lineup of Silly Symphonies characters. It was, as History.com puts it, the first time a licensed cartoon character appeared on a lunch container — the moment a mundane object became merchandise, twenty years before Superman ever threw a punch at a robot on the front of one.

The box arrived at the worst possible moment to sell well. It retailed for roughly 15 to 20 cents in the depths of the Depression, an amount plenty of families genuinely couldn’t spare, and it stayed in production for only about two years before Geuder, Paeschke & Frey moved on. That short window is exactly why so few survived intact. Vail Daily reports that only a handful of the tins are known to still exist, and puts current value as high as $7,000 for one in decent shape — well above the $1,800 to $2,000 range appraisers have assigned to lesser examples, including one Antiques Roadshow valued at $1,800 to $2,000 back in 2006, purchased at a flea market for $125.

Run the numbers and the Mickey Mouse box, on paper, still trails Superman’s auction record. But collectors who track the category point out that record was set on a mass-produced item with a known population in the thousands, while the Mickey Mouse tin is a two-year run with, by most counts, single digits of surviving examples in any condition. Scarcity that extreme rarely gets tested at public auction because so few people who own one are willing to sell — which means the box’s real ceiling has never actually been discovered. The next one to surface with an intact lid could very plausibly outbid Superman on rarity alone.

That’s the quiet joke sitting at the bottom of a lot of parents’ basements and grandparents’ garages: the object everyone assumes is disposable is sometimes the one thing in the room actually appreciating. A dented Superman box worth four figures is a nice story. A forgotten Mickey Mouse tin that predates the entire billion-dollar lunchbox industry, sitting in a box marked “donate,” is the better one — and it’s the one nobody’s checking for.

If you’re actually digging through a garage for one, the tells are simple. Flip the box over: an oval shape with a pull-out tray and no thermos slot points toward the earlier Geuder era, while a rectangular steel box with a matching vacuum bottle points toward the 1950s onward, when Aladdin and its rival American Thermos standardized the format most people picture when they hear “lunchbox.” Rust along the seams and a faded, chalky finish knock the price down fast regardless of era, while sharp lithography and an intact handle are what get a specialist auction house interested in the first place.