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.
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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”.)
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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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I was more Corgi than Matchbox, it took longer to save the pocket money to buy one but the anticipation was part of the process.
And Corgi is still around
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Yup! Thinking more about the suitcase I remember how matchbox held more respect for me. Those were the cars I drove around the towns I constructed, I pretended to care for them like taking them to the carwash, and that case gave it the collector vibe. It was an automobile experience for a child.
Hotwheels were the cars in the pool and in the yard. More of a stunt toy.
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For me it was matchbox all the way, I wanted real cars not ugly fluorescent things with crappy axels. The matchbox and corgi cars are the toys that have lasted long enough for my kids to play with them.
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Siku for life!
We still called them “Matchboxautos”, because that is genericised, apparently.
Hot Wheels never appealed to me as a kid. They weren’t realistic, after all. I wanted to playact the real world.
I say, clearly the British approach resonated more with me.
ETA:
Is there anything more German than these two images being the first on their website?
Ja, ja, jetzt wird wieder in die Hände gespuckt. Wir steigern das Bruttosozialprodukt!
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While we’re at it:
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I never saw any Siku until I moved to Germany, they didn’t exist in 90’s Scotland but my kids like them. I wasn’t a fan of majorette as a kid, they always felt a bit flimsy to me, perhaps they’ve improved I’ll need to have a rake through the toy box and find out. I did like the burago 1/24 kits that were available in the late 90s they were awesome.
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I’m too old to have had to think about Hot Wheels.
Dinky, Corgi and Matchbox were the life-blood of any kid’s play in the old days.
For fifty years, Britain made the best toy cars in the world, expertly shrinking every kind of reallife vehicle and producing them in their countless, die-cast millions. Dinky Toys were the 1930s pioneers, then in the 1950s came the pocket-money Matchbox series, followed by Corgi Toys bristling with ingenious features and movie stardust.
But who were the driving forces behind this phenomenon? And how did they keep putting the latest, most exciting cars into the palm of your hand year after year?
In this illustrated and expanded edition of Britain’s Toy Car Wars, Giles Chapman reveals the extraordinary battle to dominate Britain’s toy car industry, and the dramas and disasters that finally saw the tiny wheels come off
Did Dinky and Corgi make it over to the US? I suspect not.
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I seem to remember a Corgi car in my toybox, but I also had an uncle in the Army who was stationed in Europe, so it’s possible it came from him.
When my son was young, I remember visiting a few boutique toy stores that carried the brand, but I don’t think they ever occupied the shelves of the major department or discount stores.
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In Vancouver I had Dinky in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Corgi too but Dinky was better in our minds. Some of them were really old. I still have some. They need new tires. Or should I say tyres.
Then Hotwheels came and were all flash. In my day they were metal on metal with spring steel axles like pins with wide wide hard plastic tires. The neighbourhood went all Hotwheel and it became the standard. We made really long tracks with pooled pieces.
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Growing up in Alberta in the 80s we always referred to our cars (a mixture of matchbox, hot wheels and other anonymous brands) as Dinky cars, but I’m fairly certain I never saw Dinky brand cars for sale.
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I had Matchbox, Corgi, and Hot Wheels. They ended up outside in the dirt with my Tonkas. Good times. Hell, I gave all those to my nephew and he has them for his sons.
I remember getting the electric Sizzlers for Xmas in '70/1. Some much more fun than those slot racers.
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Yeah, I got those electric Sizzlers in the early 70s. Loved them all.
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