Hot Wheels Reviewed by H.o.p. who's too young to come to the computer right now!!!


2000 first editions
2000 segment series
2000 virtual collection
2000 cars, other
1999 first editions
1999 segment series
1999 cars, other
1998 first editions
1998 segment series
1998 cars, other
1997 cars
1996 first editions
1996 cars, other
proracing
redlines
other hot wheels



In the beginning, which was a long time ago in 1997, my dad picked up a couple of Hot Wheels because they were there at the grocery store and my mom was pregnant and stuck in bed with a split pelvis and he thought they might entertain her already cheerful self which was so happy with me. They did. She liked Hot Wheels and Matchbox when she was a kid but her parents never got her any because she was a girl. So my mom would borrow her brothers' cars and would play with them in the bathtub. She liked to have them roll along the side of the tub and then crash into the water. These were very involved games with cars coming to rescue other cars and oops look that one crashed into the water too, and ambulances and police cars zipping to the rescue and those would crash too. It was extra fun in the bubble bath the way they'd plunge through the suds and disappear.

When my parents had around ten Hot Wheels they thought they had a lot. Mom began to wonder if they weren't going overboard.

Around 1999 is when they began what you might loosely term collecting, which is when they had enough cars that they made space on two shelves of a living room bookcase and moved them there off my mom's dresser where she'd kept them neatly lined up. Now the cars were in public view, and every so often someone would come in the apartment and say, "Oh, you collect Hot Wheels!" My parents heard all kinds of stories about people collecting Hot Wheels. One person who was doing carpentry for the landlord was a collector and he was mad about someone who got a job at a Wal-Mart and would scoop out all the good finds from all the new cases, but his mother worked at Wal-Mart and he was having her do the same.

"There are people who get jobs at Wal-Mart just so they can score desireable Hot Wheels?" my parents wondered aloud, amazed.

My parents heard about Hot Wheel hunters lurking the Wal-Mart aisles in the wee hours of the night when they knew a new shipment was due, and how someone else was at a Wal-Mart when two hoarders or collectors got into a nasty brawl over a particular car that had just been put out on the pegs. That kind of fervor didn't interest my parents; they prefered to remain mellow about it all and so they exercised restraint in deliberately not picking up the collecting bug. They wanted to keep it fun.

But deep inside her bonafide night owl heart, my mom kind of wished she was at a Wal-mart when the 3 AM Hot Wheel grail arrived so she could at least witness firsthand what the uproar was about.

Blame Jeff Calder, who mentioned "Hot Wheels" and the "internet" in the same conversation, not even the same sentence, not even related as subjects. It took three months for the auto-suggestion to move her, but my mom started looking up Hot Wheels stuff on the internet, and even though there were tons of collectors and lots of cars issued, which likely meant today's Hot Wheels would become the worthless "collectible" Avon bottles of yesteryear (my mom once worked in an antiques shop and lots of people would come in trying to sell their Avon bottles and get upset when you didn't fall on your knees to worship them) she got a little more bit by the bug she had been so deliberately, and rather effortlessly, avoiding.

My dad said, "No, no, no. If we think about what we're buying that will take all the fun out of it!"

Two days later he walked in with a lion's share pride of Hot Wheels and spread them out on the table.

"Come and take a look at what I found!!"

My parents claim they're doing this collecting thing for me--and they are, because they sincerely expect that in a few years I'm going to be interested in trading Hot Wheels with friends and so they think of it as building a foundation for me. At the same time, if I ended up instead turning up my nose at the cars they wouldn't be disappointed because they find them fun themselves. The delectable little 99 cent Hot Wheels kind of fill up the affordable collectible hobby hole that was left when my parents stopped collecting comic books back when Marvel started getting more like DC, and after they had all the issues of several Japanese manga series they'd been following--even getting Japanese versions from Japan (where else).

My parents aren't feverishly hunting Hot Wheels because I am the BIG interest of theirs and keep them nicely entertained. And they don't have too much time or money to spend on the cars. But they have now asked relatives, when in doubt about what to give me, if you can't buy me a Van Gogh then give me a Hot Wheel!!

Even though a lot of collectors say to go ahead and take the cars out of the blister packs and have fun with them on display, as the rest of our shelves are full of hundreds of books so we have no place to display them, and because I'm just two and merrily, eventually turn all my toys into "Velveteen Rabbits", my parents are reserving a bunch of cars in the blister for me for when I'm older. That's just fine because I've got so many loose ones with which to play! Except today they brought home their first "Hot Wheels Collectibles" car in a box and when I said, "Open!" they put it up on the fireplace mantle! Mommy said it wasn't a car to play with. I said, "OK, all right," and went and got some Fisher Price people and some Hot Wheels and a cup of water and had great fun playing with putting them in the water like it was raining and they were stomping in puddles.