Originally published at: How Hot Wheels left Matchbox in the dust: A toy car tragedy - Boing Boing
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Matchbox kid here! I hated Hot Wheels, thought a lot of them looked unrealistic and dumb.
Thinking… where I grew up there wasn’t much of a car (mod) scene so I didn’t have the eye for it. A lot of those early designs look like LA customs.
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Me too. I had those sort of suitcases with plastic trays in where you could store the cars. I don’t know what became of them. Perhaps still in my parents’ attic.
These days I indulge my Matchbox nostalgia intermittently by buying Tomica models in Japan. It’s a similar range of realistic vehicles including some outliers such as the tug and trailer for airport catering deliveries.
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The wheel design was objectively better, wasn’t it? I seem to recall the Matchbox cars as barely rolling at all - no chance they’d go whizzing down the fancy plastic tracks like Hot Wheels.
I remember Micro Machines as being pretty nifty while being likewise “realistic”. Not sure if they’d have had the same appeal to my pliable young mind without their ad campaign, but that probably holds for a lot of toys.
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I had some Matchbox cars at first, but when Hot Wheels came on the scene I think that became the go-to for relatives who were buying birthday presents. Hot Wheels were shiny and unrealistic, and many were kind of dumb looking, but they were ubiquitous in the stores.
Matchbox’s main problem in the USA was that they used 1950s era British marketing strategies to sell them. “I say, put them in a red box on the shelf in the toy store and children will covet them.” Mattel’s marketing division came along and pushed them into the dirt on the playground, took their lunch money, and made them cry.
Mattel doubled down on the “toy” factor by selling them not only in individual clear blister packs, but by packaging them in kits. They came out with a car packaged with a few pieces of flex track, which got kids wanting more track. Then along came kits containing more track, and then sold buildings that would zip the car by pushing them between spinning foam wheels and speeding them around plastic banked racetrack corners. Later they came out with little electric cars that had tiny motors and NiCd cells, charged with a gas-pump shaped box of D cells and a tiny plug called a Supercharger (no doubt the name inspired Tesla.) And every new product release was accompanied by a barrage of loud, fast, exciting TV commercials played during Saturday morning cartoons.
As a kid I kind of wondered why I stopped getting Matchbox cars; as an adult with hindsight it’s painfully obvious.
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Matchbox did introduce “Superfast” wheels in around 1970, which were similar to the Hot Wheels wheels of the time.
Yes, that’s mentioned in the article. But by the time I was playing with them in the 80s, I’d expect they were already all “Superfast”, and yet still inferior. Or perhaps my memory is playing tricks on me. (I wouldn’t have thought it was a matter of just “wider wheels on a thinner axle”.)
Me too. Matchbox all the way. The hotwheels were usually made of plastic and didn’t last as long through my rough handling of them.
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