Your Favorite Hot Wheel (Or match Box) Ever?

I had a Match Box that was a Ford Pickup with a camper, AND it had a Bird Hunter, and a couple of pointers.

Also was the TNT Bird (which I customized)

And...The Jackrabbit Special. There were others...Ford J-Cars, BP Fuel Trucks, Deora with Surfboard...

What about you?

Anybody ever launch them from a wrist rocket? I had good luck with a Volkswagen Hotwheel...it had a tiny sunroof and a blown v8 and could find mysister's friends in the dark like no other.

The surf crate - wild open wheeled custom rod with 34 Ford styling cues, but is was a woody and came with 2 boards hangin out the back window

My very first memory is playing with one of my older brother's hot wheels cars on the floor of the kitchen of the apartment my parents rented while our new house was being built back in 1972. I was two years old. The memory is like a snapshot in my mind. Not sure what car it was, I do remember clearly that it was brown and that it looked something like a 1970-71 Heavy Chevy. I wish we still had it.

I still have all my redlines and i had the green version of this one too....my all time fav as a kid.

The Matchbox "Mini Ha Ha."

Somehow my older brother got roped into watching me one afternoon and I still clearly remember riding to the shopping center in his 1940 Plymouth, which was his daily driver, and selecting this car off the Toy Barn rack. It was the first Matchbox/Hot Wheel I ever owned and is still my favorite.

Man ... we only get to pick one...will it be the Grasshopper, the Ice T, the Backwoods Bomb...nope it has to be El Baron Rojo as my all time fave. I still have this thing burried in a box in the attic somewheres but it doesn't look nearly as sweet as this one:

Boss Hoss, yes I have launches them from a wrist rocket

I think my favorite Hot Wheels car was my Tom "The Mongoose" McEwen funny car. My buddy down the street had the Don "The Snake" Prudhomme version. Funny cars were still kind of novel at that time. I also had a very cool school bus funny car.

My favorite Hot Wheel of all was one of the HW motorcycles. Remember them? They were a bit out of scale, being too large to sit side by side with the cars. But they had little rubber dudes who rode them. My fave was a three wheeler that was designed to look like a pterodactyl. Of course, as kids, we gave all the riders superpowers. Damn that was a cool little trike!

Man too many to choose from, at last count when I was 16 in 1988, I think I had around 300 or so. Then My brother came along, and he probably got about another 100 or more.

some favs. off the top of my head
the Red Baron
The Paddy wagon( police)
57 Chevy
63 Corvette split window
Forget the name, but the one that looked like the Speed racer car

Jeff(bigtikidude)

P.s. No Offense to anyoone, but I hated Matchbox, thought they were crappy,
construction, and looking.

Jeff(bigtikidude)

On 2006-03-24 19:27, bigtikidude wrote:
P.s. No Offense to anyoone, but I hated Matchbox, thought they were crappy,
construction, and looking.

Jeff(bigtikidude)

I'll tell you the real reason the Matchbox was perceived as an inferior product... Matchbox cars were always a tad bit larger than Hot Wheels and thus didn't work well with Mattel's flexible plastic tracks, you know the ones that always ended up being used as weapons when squabbles broke out. You could really slap the hell out of someone with a Hot Wheel track!

I was firmly in the Matchbox school of die-cast automobiles and I think that's what most likely started my lifelong quest to conflict with the mainstream. Now don't get me wrong, it wasn't that I didn't own and love a ton of Hot Wheels but I just felt it was necessary to proclaim my Matchbox preference to the other guys in the neighborhood... just to throw a wrench into their "group mentality." :)

I guess I'm too old to catch onto the Hot Wheel/Matchbox thing. I was into model cars and slot cars. My fave slot was the Ford GT40 (which had just kicked ass at Le Mans). I had ALL the Ed Roth cars, Don Garlitts' Sligshot dragster, Mickey Thompson's salt flat car (the Challenger) and I took my AMT classic model cars and modified them to suit my own personal ideas of what I would like my custom car to be (I still have X-acto knife scars on my hands from chopping tops, hollowing out wheel wells, etc.). My earliest memory of anything similar to a Matchbox car was a 1956 Ford Crown Vic Sunliner that came free in a cereal box when I was 6 years old.

My favorites in the Matchbox and Cigarbox cars were the cool European sports cars. Man, when I was a kid I was going to have a corvette or lotus or something like that when I grew up. The closest I ever really got was my Rx-7.

The Red Barron kicks ass! Some of those names bring back memories, I like the straight 8 engine.

I have an uncle who had and raced odd sports cars. Simca's (which were shyte) and later Porsche's. He had toys called "Corgi's" of all the cars he had.

I sort of grew up thinking after childhood, one graduated from Matchboxes to those.

Did any of you ever mosey to a pals house with a your collection in one of those tire shaped briefcases like some child hot-wheel exec?

Those were silly, the badges however were pretty cool, and would make a nice tie clasp.

I was big on matchbox cars. Our house had an old cement porch base, and I would take a brick fragment, draw the outline of an oval racetrack, and then have races with my various cars - simply nudging them forwards one at a time, until finally a 3 to 5 lap race would be run. Through normal wear and tear, they became scratched and beatup - and I then painted several of them with my enamel model car paint. I remember painting some of them with a swirling mixture of various colors, so they ended up looking like Janis Joplin's psychedelic Rolls Royce.

But did I have a favorite? I guess it was always the newest one that I purchased - the start of my consumer addiction, where i only needed to buy 'just one more car' to make my life more complete. I guess the Lotus racecars (60's Indy style cars)will always be a fond memory for me, because they were the most exotic looking of the cars when I started, and partly because you could drive two of them into the bigger Race Transporter vehicle.

I did buy a few hot wheel cars, and bought the used yellow track of a neighbor, but by then I was getting a bit older and into other things. The Hot Wheel cars did roll longer and faster - but once the wheels got bent and out of alighnment - forget it! The Hot Wheel cars eventually started getting more elaborate and fake cartoony looking, and by the time they got into day-glow colors, I had moved past that scene.

I did catch the tailend of the HO slot-car scene, mostly because my Dad built this great mountain loop layout for my oldest brothers, and then I played with it when they went off to college. The cool things about slotcars was that you could easily switch body tops, and suddenly give your fastest car a new look. One thing HO provides that HO and Hot Wheel cars can't is the memories of the burning oil used to lubricate those small engines, or the feeling of placing those two curved magnets into the underlying car mount.

The car-toy that really brings back fond memories is the SSP Smash-Up Derby cars - the ones with the big gyro wheel in the middle, that would be powered via the black notched, pull T-strip. I think I was fortunate to be a young teenager in the era when Evel Kneival was King, and the best event to appear on ABC Wide World of Sports was the Joey Chitwood stunt drivers.

Vern

ikitnrev, I had that same matchbox you show, but mine had the straight pipes out the back (One broke off tho) like the one on the box.

I was also thinking of those smashup derby cars, what a funny thing to attract kids too (maybe better than candy cigaretts tho)

In this same era there were also Johnny Lightings cars, and some wierd track for hotwheels where they went thru an gas station, and were thrust out by what amounts to a tiny pitching machine.

Later there was another system called "Sizzlers" that were like battery powered and rechargable hotwheels. They were actually pretty cool, and stayed on the track well, but the re-chargability would diminish with age.

I always thought that the matchbox axles were more flimsy and bendable than the Hotwheels ones.
They just had a show on VH1 about the top 100 toys of all time.
they were talking about the Matchbox/Hotwheels debate.

Then they showed the car suitcases, and said if you were really cool. You had the Tire and MagWheel shapped case.

And then talked about how your mom would use it to whip your ass, if you had left them out.

too funny!

Jeff(bigtikidude)

My favorites for a long time were my complete set of RRRUMBLERS that I painstakingly bought one a week at the local Toys R Us until I had them all.

My favorite was the Centurion :down:

Followed by the Boneshaker, Preying Menace, and Bold Eagle :down:

(I wish now that I hadn't given them away when I outgrew them)

My best friend at the time was an anal-retentive collector fiend who had a huge display case full of Matchbox cars that he never played with, each one displayed next to its original box. I remember he had the trailers and boats and campers that went along with the cars. I hope he kept them.

I remember going to a VW dealership in the 1967 with my parents when they were shopping for a bug. The salesman gave me a diecast (possibly Matchbox) VW bug and bus to keep, just for visiting. I was four years old and that made my life at the time. I wish car dealers would still do that today.

Sabu

[ Edited by: Sabu The Coconut Boy 2006-03-27 18:25 ]

My favorite Matchbox is the first one I got in 1967. It was this white Mustang. I still have it. My parents bought it for me at the gift shop at the top of Pikes Peak in Colorado when we were on vacation.

Favorite Hot Wheel is from the first year of original Red Lines 1968. The orange Custom Camaro.

My mother had a real '68 Camaro that was olive green. I still have my Hot Wheels too. Much played with and loved! Did you have a big brother who beat the hell out of you with the orange plastic track??? I still have marks I think.

Where's SugarCaddyDaddy? I want to hear his choices!

Sabu

I used to play with an old British Double Decker Bus.

If I remember correctly, you could see little people inside, like a sticker of the driver or something.

I love those double decker busses! (especially one with a "Swinging London" add on the side. Very "Spy-who-shagged-me"

It's funny that I know a number of people who own those and use them for business. The best meat pies I've ever had are vended by a bloke from one of them made into a Mobile Kitchen.

A toy like that is definatly cool...could chip a tooth or worse if projected just rite.

Oh man - gotta be these two:

Poison Pinto
http://www.hotwheelscollectors.com/showroom/checklist/product.aspx?upi=2127

Inferno
http://www.hotwheelscollectors.com/showroom/checklist/product.aspx?upi=2106

I still remember getting that one at Sears in the Orange Mall... and watching the front wheels bend more and more over the years as I played with it...

Paddy Wagon

Gremlin Grinder

and Ice 'T' were cool too...

Hell Yeah Poison Pinto and The Paddy Wagon, sweet!!
great pics, thanks,
Jeff(bigtikidude)