It’s strange, I recall being into Hot Wheels for a very brief period as a kid. I liked the color changing cars and of course, anything that was superhero related. Even when I was into toy cars, I was mostly imagining storylines where the characters were more important than the cars themselves. No wonder action figures soon became the center of my imagination universe.
Hot Wheels have remained popular though, and are perhaps more collectible than ever. The somewhat infamous “Hot Wheels guys” have sort of become the bane of existence for a lot of other toy collectors. Hot Wheels collectors have a bad reputation for pillaging the toy aisles early in the morning, wrecking the shelves and perhaps worst of all, buying up all the rare action figures to flip to feed their toy car addiction. My run-ins with Hot Wheels collectors hasn’t been very good historically, either. However I do know that some of the guys are probably not as bad as the nutcases I’ve seen around here.
Even if other toy collectors may not get along with the Hot Wheels guys, we probably all enjoyed the race tracks. This Classic Comic Ad from the late 1960′s shows one of the earlier tracks. It’s a pretty elaborate set and certainly looks better than the Hot Wheels tracks I had as a kid. Those things never wanted to plug in and would constantly come apart. Loop-to-loops and such were impossible. Here’s to the simpler time, when we were all just playing with toys and not warring factions of collectors!
