The Story of Hot Wheels: Casting a Legend

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: When Hot Wheels first launched in 1968 there had been nothing like it in the world of model cars. Unlike rival marks which had controlled the market since before the Second World War, Hot Wheels were designed to be raced, and they achieved this thanks to the car's incredible rolling resistance and the small but durable and infinitely adjustable orange plastic track which vanished from toy shops all over the United States, just as fast as the cars themselves went around said track. And after more than half a century of development and evolution that has elevated the company to ever loftier heights, the brand continues to perform strongly to this day, which is why it's so unfortunate that no one has actually told the story of this scale automotive giant in full. Though I greatly admire the work of Andy Haslam, his channel Big Car and sister channel Little Car, his video on the brand was... I don't really know how to put this nicely, but a bit of a disappointment as I discovered it was basically a narrated retelling of the Hot Wheels Wikipedia article, which anyone can do, and didn't really cover anything that wasn't already mentioned in it. Unlike other videos that talk about the history of this brand of toy cars, this isn't going to simply tell you what you already know, nor is it going to hit you over the head with a sensory overload of loud noises, memes, and other bizarre nonsense. This is going to be a completely straight-laced documentary that just talks about how this company rose from a very rich man's passion project into a global juggernaut. From its founding in 1945 in San Diego, California by Harold Mattson and Elliot Handler, eventually incorporating the latter's wife, Ruth, Mattel had become a giant within the toy industry, cornering every single market it approached within a matter of years. Though it had experimented with releasing its own line of toy cars in the 1950s, the company never really took the idea seriously until the following decade. This was because the one toy which company founder Elliot Handler noticed that his son, Kenneth, would play with them most over any other were die-cast cars manufactured by Matchbox, which had been imported to the US from the UK since 1954. Handler wondered why his company couldn't make their own cars, and as this thought lingered in his head for years, he eventually decided to enlist the help of car designer Harry Bradley, who had worked at General Motors since 1962, so knew a thing or two about cars. During his four-year tenure at the company, Bradley had moonlit for several hot rod and custom magazines under the pen name of Mark Fadner, and had collaborated with the Alexander Brothers on several custom vehicles, making Bradley the ideal fit for what Handler had envisioned. At that particular time, Mattel had sort of teased their entry into the die-cast car market, as in 1966 they would release the company's very first carrying case designed for miniature cars, particularly those from Matchbox. But it was in the winter of that year where Bradley would be tasked with designing what would eventually become the very first Hot Wheels car, the custom Fleet Side. To design it, he simply drew an artist's rendering of his own personalised 1964 Chevy El Camino, but made some hot rod-influenced adjustments which gave the car a more striking look, such as a lowered profile, minimal bumpers, obscured headlights, and side-mounted exhausts. Handler was wowed by Bradley's work and demanded him to design more cars in this style. To aid in the construction of physical tooling, it is believed a 1/32 scale model kit of an El Camino was used, and it was then downsized and altered accordingly. From there, company apprentices such as Johnson Qualls would carve out wooden templates for the resultant castings, which would in turn become scale models fabricated out of resin from which the eventual tooling would then be produced, and the final cars manufactured at the two plant locations Mattel had designated for the building of Hot Wheels cars, one in the US and one at Hong Kong Industrial, a factory which it had bought out specifically for this purpose, and formerly produced dinky toys prior to its acquisition. To give these cars the ability to move, Handler would task former rocket engineer Jack Ryan with developing a die-cast car wheel that could go at far faster speeds than anything else then on the market. Taking inspiration from American Racing's famed torque thrust five-spoke wheel design introduced in 1963, the Hot Wheels redline would be just as fast as its appearance would suggest. Unlike other die-cast wheels of the era, the redline wheel had a smooth, slick tread and was fabricated entirely out of one piece of plastic, with the outer wall tapered ever so slightly towards the inside like that of a train. Helping these wheels in their quest for speed would be the decision to appropriate axles out of a failed Mattel prototype for a guitar that never needed tuning, and although these would be gone by the time the cars hit mass production in favour of more commercially available piano wire, they were just the thing the concepts needed and helped to serve as a basis for how they'd be designed. From patents filed in January 1968, it was decided to crimp these strings in a way that they formed a basic suspension, along with Delrin bushings which further helped to reduce friction, and was a technology appropriated from full-sized cars. Once the first few design prototypes had been made, it was time to see just how good these cars actually were. To that end, the body from a Ford Mustang originally made by Matchbox was lifted from its original chassis and placed onto one designed by Mattel, along with two pairs of wheels. Much to Mattel's expectations and subsequent delight, the Mustang rolled freely unlike any other scale model of a car before it. Although they are commonplace nowadays, at the time of their development, cars that rolled this much simply didn't exist yet. Throughout 1967, many different prototypes were built and experimented with, especially those of the custom Camaro, a vehicle which early employees took a particular liking to. The earliest known prototype, known only as Number 2 Camaro, is likely to also be the oldest surviving Hot Wheels car that was fully designed in-house. Several batches of test cars were also manufactured in an enamel white finish which helped the designers check for imperfections, with a few mistakenly packaged for customers and becoming highly sought after as a result. Along with the usual fare of current-era muscle cars that the company would become known for, Hot Wheels had a particular image it wanted to imprint from the get-go. Whereas the likes of Matchbox and Dinky had looked at regular road cars, primarily those found in Europe, with the aim of replicating miniature scenes of daily life, Hot Wheels would instead focus on the California custom scene, which was an amalgamation of the previous 30 years of hot-rodding, combined with the quickly rising muscle car trend. At this point in time, the aforementioned torque-thrust wheels with red-lined tyres, souped-up engines and powerful superchargers that burst through the original hoods, along with intense Candy Apple paint, were among the most popular aspects of car customisation, and each design of what would be known as the Sweet 16 incorporated these facets accordingly. Spectra Flame would be created with the intent of replicating the deep, intense, shiny metallic effects that Candy Apple paint had on real-life cars, and to their credit, they were able to authentically reproduce this effect at a smaller scale. Also in 1967, Harry Bradley would help to design the Dodge Deora concept car, which mated the rear end of a Ford Fairlane wagon to the front of a Dodge A100 van, transforming it into a pickup. The seldom known design language would later be replicated in the Deora's successor, the Deora 2, which adapted the rear end of the Fairlane's late 1990s equivalent, the Ford Taurus, and was then totally ignored in the 2019 Deora 3, which honestly needs to be forgotten about in its entirety. As he was still working for General Motors during this time period, Bradley had access to cars which were not yet publicly known, officially the upcoming third-generation Chevrolet Corvette, which was not supposed to be unveiled until June of the following year, although in a twist of irony, the C3 itself was supposed to have launched in 1967. Bradley decided to adapt this car in spite of the fact it was not yet in production, and when GM caught wind of this, they decided to let it slide, believing that sales of the die-cast version would drum up interest for the upcoming full-scale version. Being turned into a toy probably ranks very highly in the list of unique ways cars were spoiled prior to their launches, and certainly beats the shaky, questionably exposed phone photos that are all too commonplace nowadays. Along with the enamel-white Camaros and a handful of other prototypes, a few other batches of pre-production cars were manufactured for promotional purposes. To make the Spectra Flame finish more apparent on paper and on TV, where the ink and film might have made them look dull or washed out, these cars received nickel-chrome plating underneath the paint to make them shine like Christmas ornaments. Though the majority of these cars were retained by Mattel employees, a fair few of them have made their way into the hands of private collectors, including a child who was turned down a factory tour just to be given a pair of them as consolation. Marketing was a key part of the company's early success, as Mattel needed a brand that was eye-catching and immediately stood out from the crowd, and had many of the resources to do so thanks to the success of its other brands such as Barbie. Though we don't know for sure given that there are many different variations of this tale, the company name was set in stone the minute Elliot Handler laid his eyes on Harry Bradley's El Camino, stating that those were some hot wheels. Whoever it was who definitively said the immortal phrase and the context in which it was said have been somewhat lost to time, but the name immediately stuck. But even with eye-catching designs and an extremely catchy name, Mattel needed an extra edge to establish itself and flourish in a market which was thoroughly saturated at this point. As a relatively new hobby which had only really started with the advent of the 1956 Matchbox series marking the brand's transition from agricultural vehicles to consumer ones, model cars were not able to hold the mass appeal that more mainstream toys had enjoyed, mainly due to a lackluster play experience limited to opening and closing the doors, and occasionally wheeling them on floors and tables. Other than slot car racing, which was more expensive and required far more room, there was no way to readily race toy cars, and Mattel sought to rectify this. In 1964, American inventor Jerome Lemelson had filed a patent for flexible connecting plastic track pieces which could be used for die-cast cars. Though litigation would see Lemelson win and then subsequently lose a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Mattel in the 1980s, it appears that he was the first person to come up with such an idea. This idea was a very good one in theory for a multitude of reasons. As toys such as Lego had already proven at this point, the concept of connecting plastic pieces to make larger structures was already very successful. Being made out of plastic also allowed manufacturing costs to remain low, and its flexibility meant it could be more easily coiled into packaging and allow for easy changes in elevation, something that many children over the decades would take advantage of as they built tracks inside their houses which often went up and down their staircases. And as it turned out, this track system would be Hot Wheels' secret weapon, as they offered something no other competitor had at the time: the ability to actually race its cars in a very cheap, easy-to-construct manner. The toy's success would not immediately be clear, with Mattel optimistically predicting sales of five million. The company would tour the country's supermarkets and retail stores demonstrating the Hot Wheels toy line in front of potential vendors. It was at a Kmart where a prospective buyer observed a demonstration on Hot Wheels' track between their car and a rival from Matchbox. According to legend, the Matchbox car trundled slowly and fell off the track, whilst the Hot Wheels' car stayed and maintained its speed. This heavily impressed the vendor, who placed an order for 50 million units on the spot, ten times Mattel's original prediction. Last but not least, the company needed some eye-catching packaging to entice buyers to buy into the newest, hottest name on the street, and would commission graphic designer Otto Cuny to bring Hot Wheels to life. Cuny was known for his unlimited creativity and ability to make anything he was presented look like the most exciting thing on Earth, and what he eventually came up with certainly stuck out like a sore thumb engulfed in flames. As the original Hot Wheels box art would be based around a fire motif, with a bright orange box, red and yellow flame logo, and artwork that was exceptionally dynamic in nature, with the earliest track sets in particular allowing Cuny's imagination to run wild. With everything in place, May 18th 1968 would see Hot Wheels' official launch, issuing 16 designs that would become known as the Sweet 16, and each were sold at the initial price of 59 cents per car. Almost all of these were based on modified or Hot versions of contemporary muscle and pony cars, with exception to the Ford J car, based on the then-current version of the Ford GT40 race car, and the custom Volkswagen, which was a Beetle with an inverted, more powerful drivetrain. There was also a fair share of concept cars, such as Ed Roth's Beatnik Bandit and the Python, based on Bill Cushenberry's Cheetah concept, with the earliest instances having this latter name on the baseplate before trademark issues forced it to be renamed. At this stage of the company's life, there were many idiosyncrasies which wouldn't last into the successive decade, chiefly due to the lack of communication between the two main factories, one in America and the other in Hong Kong. Though 12 colours were initially advertised, over 30 visually distinct shades would be seen on cars due to manufacturing discrepancies and different quality standards than what are seen nowadays. The community has ascribed various unofficial names to many of these colours, which have become quite desirable depending on the vividity of the shade in question, the condition in which the car is in, and its rarity. Cars produced in colours such as Root Beer Brown and Watermelon, for instance, are among the rarest colours ever produced, and command very high prices regardless of condition. However, a more significant difference between what went on at the two original factories was that the designs for certain castings were completely different, with those produced in Hong Kong typically possessing far greater detail and a more realistic appearance than those designed in the US. The Beatnik Bandit, and custom Volkswagen in particular, are perhaps the most interesting, as despite the cars made in the US and Hong Kong looking superficially similar at first glance, as well as being officially considered the same casting. They are actually two completely different castings, with not a single part between the two factory efforts compatible with one another. Eventually, this practice would be done away with, but it was fun while it lasted. What I find even more bizarre is the fact that the company did not initially sell these cars under a unified Hot Wheels banner everywhere. In German-speaking territories, they were first called Heissachade, a literal translation of the name. In Italy, they were called Bruccia Pista, which translates to track burners, and were produced alongside larger-scale cars that were made due to Mattel's acquisition of Mebe toys very early on in the company's life. In Japan, they would often be sold in a matchbox-style collectible box, a design choice which it had adopted from earlier innovators like the Taiseya Cherica Phoenix series, and would go on to be used by other diecast manufacturers such as Tomica and Taiseya's successor, Deerpet. Back in America, the Hot Wheels toy range was a massive success on an unprecedented scale, shifting tens of millions of units within a matter of months, and easily eclipsing Mattel's initial predictions. All of the handler's careful planning had resulted in more or less the perfect toy car. Its zamak, the zinc, aluminum, magnesium, and copper alloy construction meant the cars were insanely durable. Although the paint would chip off upon impacts with floors and walls alike, it took an inordinate amount of force to actually damage the bodies of these cars, with many having survived horror stories of abuse such as being buried and slowly compacted by the Earth, only to then resurface decades later in a largely recognizable state, whereas a tin plate would be hopelessly crushed and rotted beyond all possibility of restoration. It was also virtually rust-proof, and although the bodies would partially oxidize over time owing to unavoidable impurities in the formula as well as just general aging, they would never lose their initial integrity, meaning that they would essentially be able to last forever if stored properly and not abused too hard. This gave Hot Wheels a major advantage over pre-existing rivals like Matchbox and Dinky, who primarily employed rubber tires in their cars' construction, which would eventually crack, perish, and disintegrate, the same not being said for Hot Wheels' all-plastic designs. And all across the world, the story was much the same. Thanks to the purchase of the Hong Kong factory as well as a bunch of other strategic acquisitions, the cars and track easily displaced products from the country's own domestic offerings, largely because Hot Wheels had far more of an appeal to a child's playful imagination than its rivals did. Mattel had seemingly achieved the impossible to make cars into an actual plaything, rather than a mere static bauble for a kid to periodically gaze at in a mildly interested manner before putting it down, or slowly trundling it across the floor. At the end of his original contract, Harry Bradley would choose to leave Hot Wheels, not convinced that the toys would be a long-lasting success, and instead would recommend fellow GM designer Ira Guilford, who took over Bradley's role for 1969. For 1969, Guilford would design 24 cars, with the majority of Guilford's designs playing things safe through a variety of real-world road and race cars. At this point, the general Hot Wheels design aesthetic was an uncertain one, and Guilford decided to experiment a little. With America and the world as a whole captivated by the late 1960s space race, he would design four cars with pointed, featureless noses and ultra-low, swooping bodywork that evoked the shape of rockets, and encapsulated the era to a T, naturally mating them with large, powerful, exposed engines. Of these four toys, two would have the biggest impact. Alongside the much lesser-known Torero and Turbo Fire, Guilford would design the Splitting Image and the Twin Mill, the latter inarguably the most well-known in-house design to be produced during the company's infancy, to the point it has more or less become Hot Wheels' de facto mascot many years later. Much like his predecessor, Ira Guilford would also step down from his role as Hot Wheels designer after just one year, with fellow designer Howard Rees recommending his own good friend Larry Wood to become his replacement. Though he too was only intending to stay at the company for a year, beginning his job in September 1969 to work on the following year's releases, Wood would prove to be the winning combination in the end, and would spend over 40 years at the company designing hundreds of castings. His first design would be the very Guilford-inspired Try Baby, which drew upon his past experiences within the jet turbine industry, and Wood would make many cars over the years which incorporated such an engine at some point in the design phase, including 1971's Jet Threat, 1985's Jet Sweep X5, and 2015's Turbine Time. If Mattel's publicly disclosed records are accurate, more cars were produced during 1969 than most years of the successive decade, with an estimated total production run of just under 36 million units. This is because Mattel would commemorate various manufacturing milestones such as their 25 millionth car, a Custom Continental, their 30 millionth car, a Ford Mark IV, and their 40 millionth car, a splitting image, throughout the second half of 1969. Personally, I'd take these numbers with a grain of salt, given what the company had a tendency to do around this time period, which I'll talk about in a short while from now. On the whole, Hot Wheels otherwise continued to surmount a successful attack on the contemporary cultural zeitgeist by commissioning their own cartoon animated by Fred Crippen and Ken Snyder's pantomime pictures group. Each episode would deal with the exploits of protagonist Jack Rabbit Wheeler and his car, the Jack Rabbit Special. And yes, before you ask, this is the very same Jack Wheeler that would appear prominently in the much later World Race, Accelerators, and other associated series and media as the father of main protagonist Vert Wheeler. Though the cartoon was initially successful at first, rival diecast manufacturer Topper Toys, along with other interested parties, would cry foul, and eventually managed to successfully lobby the FCC into making channels register certain airings of the show as advertisement time. And this effectively ended the show in September of 1971 as it negated the cartoon's entire purpose. However, the cartoon did see Hot Wheels win its very first fast food-related contract with the primarily West Coast-based Jack in the Box franchise, who distributed a version of Wheeler's Jack Rabbit Special with their own special stickers. Along with the cartoon, 1970 would see a companion comic book produced by DC Comics, which ran for a total of six issues between the cover dates of April 1970 and February 1971. 1970 would also see the introduction of Sizzlers, battery-powered cars which were fuelled by what was known as a juice machine. They were introduced after a custom T-Bird modified to be gasoline-powered never made it past the prototype stage, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out why a child playing with petroleum is a bad idea. To design the Sizzlers, Mattel would take on board George Sulakis, who would design many cars that wouldn't be seen in the Hot Wheels mainline until much later. These Sizzlers were a marketing success, and once again Mattel's rivals scrambled to gain a foothold. Corgi would design the Electro Rockets, which were a limp failure given how only two castings were ever issued in this series, whilst Matchbox would launch its much more moderately successful Scorpions. One thing was abundantly clear in spite of Mattel's incoming shortfalls: Hot Wheels had caught the entire die-cast industry with its pants down, and its only countering move at this point was to fruitlessly imitate. Naturally, with this great deal of success Mattel had enjoyed, competition came thick and fast. Topper Toys were the first to respond with their Johnny Lightning range, which although picking up its own reputation later on after various revivals, started out in life as a shameless carbon copy of Hot Wheels, all the way down to extremely similar redline wheels and paint shades reminiscent of Spectra Flame. Main rivals Matchbox would launch their Superfast line and Corgi their Rockets line both in 1969, whereas Tomica in Japan would launch their own 164 toys in 1970. In just two years, Hot Wheels had turned the entire die-cast automotive industry on its head. Companies were scrambling to gain a foothold which many of them had firmly held a commanding market share just a handful of years earlier. But luckily for them, it turned out Mattel's greatest enemy was itself. A catastrophic fire at Mattel's Tijuana plant destroyed a whole third of Christmas inventory along with a lot of raw material required to make cars. Production was halted for a full month and returned at a reduced capacity, putting the company on the back foot at the beginning of the following year, and crucially at the most important time one could sell toys, in the run-up to Christmas. And despite Hot Wheels seemingly remaining a success throughout 1970, Mattel as a whole harboured a dark secret that would embroil the company in scandal and define its fate for the entire decade. Mattel's chief financial officer at the time, Seymour Rosenberg, decided to make things look nice for the company's investors by reporting orders which were tentative or even cancelled as successful sales, only for this to backfire after two years of falsified financial reports which failed to match the company's actual performance. Mattel finally coming clean in 1973, where the company reported a sudden and unprecedented $32 million loss just three weeks after stockholders were given a report which suggested the company was in safe hands. Mattel's stock sunk like a stone in the immediate phase of this news, and the SEC was called in to get to the bottom of it. On the surface, 1970 would otherwise record Mattel's highest profits of all time at $17.4 million dollars, adding to a total revenue that was reportedly over $200 million dollars at that point, with roughly a quarter of sales being Hot Wheels and Sizzlers cars, but at least 20 million cars were produced during Hot Wheels' second full year. But the effects of the company lying in their own financial reports was beginning to backfire on them. They started to exercise some form of damage control from behind the scenes with the intent of making it through as unscathed as possible. In their first effort to cut costs, Mattel began using an impurer form of zamak for certain castings where the metal's slag did not mix together correctly, and resulted in a brittle, unstable compound that would eventually crumble to powder given enough time and stress. These are known in the Hot Wheels collectors' community as crumblers, and are essentially worthless. The issue was quickly fixed for the following year, but these damaged the reputation of Hot Wheels as a manufacturer of quality toy cars, and the company would struggle throughout the majority of the decade as a result. The Delrin bearings and thin piano wire axles, which had helped contribute to the sheer performance of the earliest Hot Wheels releases, were abolished as these were too expensive to continue to manufacture, and would be replaced with thicker straight axles, which slowed the cars down. Matters were made worse in the face of recession, and in late 1971 a dock worker strike again brought woes to potential Christmas sales. There would be many weird releases around this time frame, as Hot Wheels hurried to diversify its market share in a bid to vastly increase profit. Possibly the most infamous of these were the small shots, which used the zamak base and redline wheel moulds of Hot Wheels, and were designed to run on the same track. What crucially separated them from Hot Wheels, however, is the plastic doll mounted on top, as the toys were aimed at a younger audience who were not interested in die-cast cars. In a possible early attempt at corporate licensing, there were Peabody and Bullwinkle figures also produced and potentially prototyped, but no photos of these have ever seemed to have surfaced. In January of 1972, Mattel would give the Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company 5.6 million unsold cars, valued at $1.2 million from the previous year to paint and sell at a later date. Initially, this deal was for 16 million units, but would end up reduced due to Mattel's financial problems. These cars would eventually resurface as part of a 1973 Shell promotion, and along with the smaller scale "wackier Zowieys", which were known as fun buggies in the United Kingdom, marked the start of Mattel's relationship with third-party organisations to sell their own versions of their cars. But even with these extra sales, Mattel's sales on the whole would drop by 30% that year, most of which was due to Hot Wheels' rapidly waning popularity after a disastrous 1971. Cutting costs further, in 1973 most cars changed from Mattel's in-house spectra-flame colours to less shiny solid enamel colours, due to the original paint formula having a lead base, which was now outlawed, and the limited paint technology of the era coupled with the company's greater money woes prevented Mattel from researching and developing a lead-free substitute. From 1974 to 1979, with the exception of superchromes and unpainted or bare metal vehicles, all cars sold by Hot Wheels had enamel paint jobs. It would take until 1983 before metallic and metal flake options became widely available. With all this seeming self-sabotage ruining what had been such a brilliant start for the company, it was clear something had to give in order for Hot Wheels to survive, and in 1974, Elliot Handler, his wife Ruth Handler, and Seymour Rosenberg were all ousted from Mattel due to their role in falsifying financial reports dating back to 1970, with the company ordered to restructure its board in favour of non-affiliated individuals. This may seem unusually cruel given how it was them who built the company up, but it was a necessary move as a result of their grift. In the wake of this, the company needed a small-scale reinvention, or else its once-bright future would have otherwise been consigned to the history books. Noting that its existing offerings were dull without the trademark Spectra Flame paint, Hot Wheels would introduce the Flying Colours series in 1974 as the company experimented with new methods of painting their cars. Due to the loss of Spectra Flame, and the fact that stickers perish too easily, the Flying Colours were characterised by a form of painting known as Printed Tampos, where a silicon pad is used to apply ink from an etched printing plate onto a surface, such as a die-cast body, using a three-dimensional grid to help position the various decals. This innovation helped secure enough sales to the point Hot Wheels' future was no longer in jeopardy, at least in its native United States, as the Flying Colours were a big hit upon their launch. With the gas crisis and the ensuing fallout now in full swing, corporate meddling would dictate that the company had to move on from the muscle cars and hot rods that had made the company so successful in the first place, in order to focus on economy cars. Now, some of these castings were played rather straight, such as the Chevy Monza 2+2 which debuted in 1975 and the Packing Pacer which debuted in 1978, whereas others such as the Vegabomb, Poisoned Pinto and Greased Gremlin got around this issue by featuring the original car in question but in the most technical manner possible, as these cars would then be extensively modified, thus retaining the Hot Wheels' flair that many of these cars were missing in real life and ensuring there were at least mild sales successes if not the cars that Hot Wheels wanted to make. Over in Europe, Mattel continued to exert its influence over Mebe Toys, an Italian company which it had acquired a few years earlier, and began manufacturing its flying colours there in an enterprise which would eventually result in non-US castings also being produced in Italy. In an effort to increase sales, the company would begin introducing castings based on cars that would be more familiar to a European audience, such as the Fiat Ritmo, Peugeot 505, Ford Escort XR3 and Double Decker Bus. Mattel also manufactured their cars in France, Canada and Mexico. In regards to the latter, a company named Sipsa would produce officially licensed Hot Wheels on their own accord along with many other toys, a fact to which many collectors simply didn't know before the internet due to its obscurity. There was also the Argentinian toy company Mookie, who somehow got their hands on old Mattel moulds and began using them to produce their own die-cast vehicles. Though very early on it seems their corporate espionage even went as far to include authentic redline wheels, it appears either the tooling or the mould broke fairly early on, causing cars to leave the factory with exposed capped wheels. A temporary workaround was created before the majority of Mookie's hit Argentine shelves with a cheaper five-spoke wheel design. After a period of Hot Wheels' lowest ever sales, 1976 would see production demands increased to 600,000 cars per week, or approximately 30 million cars per year, the company largely resurging to production figures it had set during 1969 after a malaise period of low sales. These increasing sales would be bolstered by the introduction of several iconic castings which remain beloved to this day: the Corvette Stingray, a very nicely detailed update of the company's original C3 casting, the Neat Streeter, which was a retooled version of the '36 Ford Coupe from 1969, the '57 Chevy, which is quite possibly the company's most released casting of all time and remains a popular choice in spite of its many inaccuracies, the Letter Getter, Hot Wheels' first majorly successful casting of a regular commercial vehicle, and the Hot Bird, which was most recently retooled in 2021 and replicates the Pontiac Firebird from which it derived its name from. In 1977, after a few years of it being used interchangeably with its successor, the original Redline wheel would be phased out for good. Though it had made increasingly sporadic appearances in the years leading up to this decision, 1977 was the final year they were an option, with a majority of castings already using the updated blackwall design. The most likely reasons as to why they were removed is not due to changing trends within the car industry as Wikipedia and other sources would suggest, but rather due to their outdated capped design, which prevented an axle from passing all the way through, and the prohibitive cost of sustained manufacturing, which etched an extra line into the tyre wall which could be saved from the overall production cost if removed. Not long after, the Sizzlers would also be phased out after eight years in production, Hot Wheels deciding to replace it with the Scorcher range. As the 70s drew to a close, Mattel eased itself into a more comfortable financial position, particularly with the launch of its Mattel Electronics division in 1977 and its highly successful football handheld console, which led to the division's expansion and the launch of several other successful products. The company would also sweep up multiple intellectual property licenses, such as the highly coveted Battlestar Galactica franchise. Mattel began a rapid expansion under Arthur Spears' leadership, acquiring Western Publishing in a nine-figure deal, along with two live ice shows. This success would be reflected across the board, with Hot Wheels introducing several new product lines. These would include the Scorchers in 1979, a successor to the popular Sizzlers line which was phased out the previous year, as the technology it employed was no longer in vogue. These cars were described by Mattel as being spring-powered, although in modern terminology they'd be considered pullback toys. In 1979 these were a very novel idea. At the beginning of the 1970s, West German toy company Dada would pioneer pullback motors, although its choice of car was very provincially limited until the addition of American cars in the 1980s, and were slightly larger than Hot Wheels clocking in at a scale of 160, with distorted proportions to accommodate a much larger motor and drivetrain. Dada toys are still produced to this day, but it was Hot Wheels who would be the first to popularise the toy in the US, as well as downscaling the technology to work in a relatively normal 164 toy car. The Scorchers would be an immediate hit at the 1979 toy fairs, and the Puntastic Scorcher Chamber specifically designed for these releases were a favourite among children, and actually remained in production for at least a good 20 years after the Scorcher line had long since been discontinued. The Scorchers would last for a little over two years, being discontinued in 1981, likely due to a loss of unique market share due to rivals introducing their own pullback offerings. They would be succeeded by the somewhat similar Shift Kicker range, which lifted the cars up onto larger wheels and made them even more closely resemble the Dada models from which the Scorchers surely drew their original inspiration from. The High Raker range would follow the Scorchers into 1980, which came with their own adjustable suspension along with the development of a new wheel type which would be faster than anything Hot Wheels had previously engineered. Dubbed the Hot One, this wheel type boasted improved performance over its predecessors, thanks to its thinner axles. These wheels would also prove to be an immediate success, rejuvenating the product line and successfully marketing the wheel's improved performance over its contemporary rivals, who had spent the previous decade playing a game of catch-up as Hot Wheels struggled to move on from its early 70s woes. 1980 would also mark the debut of what many argue to this day is one of Hot Wheels' greatest ever castings, the '63 Split Window. With this wheel and this casting, Hot Wheels entered what I like to call the Silver Age, a company which had successfully shed its malaise period and could begin to enjoy something of a renaissance. In addition to wheels, Hot Wheels also sought to bring back some of the flare they had lost following the withdrawal of Spectra Flame. The Space Eraser casting would become the first car to feature metal flake paint, a feature exclusive to that particular model until 1983, as the company experimented with ways to bring back that unmistakable metallic sheen that had helped to shift the company's earliest offerings. 1981 would be a rather conservative year in the overall history of Hot Wheels, as the company readied its plans to open up a large scale manufacturing plant in Malaysia. They would double down on the Hot Ones product range and introduce quite a few vintage influence designs to the line-up, such as the '37 Bugatti, Old No. 5 and '35 Classic Caddy, based on the earlier success of their Auburn 852 casting with the hope of enticing and encouraging the growth of an adult collector base. They would also release the steering rig series, where a series of tractor trailers had a small turnable wheel on the back which allowed them to steer. According to the 1982 Hot Wheels Collectors book by Mattel, 350 million cars had been manufactured by the beginning of that year. However, it's very likely this statistic was outdated at publication by as much as half a decade, given how the 700 millionth car would be commemorated just three years later, and the one billionth car five years after that. In 1983, Hot Wheels would finally open their Malaysia plant, which helped to usher in a new era for the company, as production rates could significantly increase, and 40 years down the line, Malaysia remains the factory in which the bulk majority of Hot Wheels cars are produced, and even now, someone living in Malaysia gets access to the newest Hot Wheels two to three months before the rest of the world does. Crucially, the Malaysia plant allowed Hot Wheels to manufacture rubber tyres, which it previously couldn't really do as they lacked the facilities for wide-scale production. That year, designer Bob Rosas would help to engineer a new style of wheel called Real Riders, which made use of treaded rubber tyres, a novelty at the time. Despite the fact they were very popular, Real Riders only lasted until 1987 before they were pulled from production due to high manufacturing costs. But for the time being, with a bit more money in the bank to play with, Mattel experimented a little bit with its Hot Wheels brand launching Hot Wheels Railroad, which was surprisingly the company's second attempt to get into the toy train market following 1970s Sizzler-based hotline, and surprisingly still wouldn't be Mattel's last experiment with trains. It also started to re-incorporate moving parts in its castings, which many from the second half of the 70s onwards had lacked. Of particular note is the Nissan 300ZX Z31 casting, which featured opening doors, a rarity for Hot Wheels, and carried over into the Z32 casting released in 1990, in addition to the '67 Camaro, which Larry Wood would retool from the original 1968 Sweet 16 line-up, making the custom Camaro the sole survivor of Hot Wheels' original Sweet 16. A year after the introduction of Real Riders, Ultra Hot Wheels would be manufactured for the first time, boasting further performance improvements over HO wheels. This product line would also see the celebrated, albeit brief return of Spectra Flame paint in its second guise, now free of the lead which had plagued the original version. But once again, Spectra Flame wouldn't last, and by the mid-1980s it would be gone for a second time. And unfortunately, as was the established pattern at this point, this string of successes would be cut short by Mattel declaring a $394 million loss, as a result of its uncontrolled early '80s expansion, which would negatively affect Hot Wheels for the rest of the decade, and put the company back on the same path it had spent much of the previous decade straying from. To help cushion this blow, Mattel would strike a deal with international fast food giant McDonald's, who would begin offering Hot Wheels die-cast toys as part of their children's Happy Meal range in 1983, and these became enough of a success that they would be incorporated into the meal outright starting from 1991, with the toys being designed independently from the main company. Hot Wheels would also briefly land itself in hot water with General Motors, and they would threaten to pull their license from Mattel, which would have been disastrous for Hot Wheels. Thankfully, GM never followed through on their threats and came to their senses, otherwise the company may have been forced to discontinue or permanently alter a large bulk of its pre-existing catalogue. The same could oddly not be said for the DeLorean Motor Company, who after initially approving a Hot Wheels rendition of its flagship DMC-12 sports car in 1979, would renege on the deal and force the company to very crudely alter its tooling before releasing the car in 1981 as the Turismo. After these debacles, Hot Wheels began opening up its range a little more, with the flip-outs and crack-ups launching in 1985 and 1986. The flip-outs featured a small plastic pin on the base plate, and once the car hit an object or wall, such as another flip-out, the vibrations would cause the pin to pop out and the car to flip into the air. The crack-ups, on the other hand, were a series of cars that featured switchable body panels to give off the illusion of a wrecked car, and were designed to be crashed into each other in order to achieve this. As a result, it is actually quite difficult to find unboxed versions of these cars which haven't been beaten to hell and back, but that's what they were designed for. Expanding the company further, 1985 would mark two firsts in the history of Hot Wheels, the first tie-in breakfast cereal promotion where cars would appear in boxes of Kellogg's branded cereal, such as Rice Krispies and Frosted Flakes, and its first officially licensed video game, developed by Epix. This game wasn't particularly that good as it was essentially a car simulator where you would go to the dealership and test out a variety of Hot Wheels designs at relatively leisurely paces, but it was a start. Also in 1985, a Highway Hauler casting would be officially designated as Hot Wheels' 700 millionth car since production began in 1968. Quite why this specific number was celebrated is unknown, since it's an extremely arbitrary figure to pick, but it is the first officially verifiable production number since the last one was disclosed in late 1969, and once again demonstrates how far the company had come in such a short amount of time. Only six new mainline castings would come out in 1986, all of them part of the Speed Demon series involving anthropomorphised vehicles based around deadly animals or mythical beings. No regular castings would be issued that year aside from the aforementioned ranges, from which the Camaro Wind and Ford Aerostar would be retooled into normal mainline castings in the 1990s. Other cars, like the S12 Nissan Silvia and Chrysler 5th Avenue police car, would never see a mainline release. To make storing cars an easier and flashier task for young owners of Hot Wheels whose collections were rapidly growing, 1986 also saw the introduction of the Car Transporter, the first of many larger-scale trucks created by Hot Wheels for the intent of being able to take one's cars without resorting to bags or cases. That same year, Hot Wheels would enter the lucrative Indian market for the very first time. Due to the Foreign Exchange Regulations Act in operation at the time, which required companies to have a 40% Indian-owned stake, the decision was made to partner with Bloplast Inc, forming Leo Mattel Toys. Through to 1999, the company would produce unique and rare castings and designs never seen anywhere else, including, rather bizarrely, an attempt at selling a Renault 5 casting as a Suzuki Alto-based Maruti 800, which as I'm sure you'll note, looks nothing like a Renault 5. Certain toolings, such as those for the Mach 5-inspired Second Wind, would be produced exclusively in India for the international market. However, the build quality of the India-produced cars would ultimately be deemed not up to Mattel standards, as certain cars would be affected by the crumbling issue last seen in the early 1970s, and Leo would lose the license for good at the turn of the millennium in favour of the company operating its own franchise itself, as the conditions within the Exchange Act were no longer relevant nor particularly profitable. In 1987, Hot Wheels would sell $50 million worth of cars, but deep down the company was hurting for cash, as an aftershock of Mattel Electronics' total collapse from five years earlier. Its Masters of the Universe toy line would be axed following the cancellation of its cartoon two years prior, and this would have a knock-on effect, causing Mattel to lose a further $115 million and effectively negating the profit which Hot Wheels had brought more than twice over. In October of that year, the company would be forced to shut down its Paramount plant, which was its final domestically based factory initially purchased in 1969, and was largely responsible for the manufacture of Masters of the Universe Fiend toys. In January 1988, just three months later, Mattel would also withdraw from the Philippines, following a bitter strike at its Manila-based facilities. What was possibly the biggest casualty of Mattel's continuing losses in regards to Hot Wheels was the forced discontinuation of Real Riders' wheels, as the company could not afford to continue producing them. Aside from some brief, exclusive production runs for the California Custom Series in 1990 and 1991, alongside 15,000 Volkswagen bug castings primarily for the 1993 Cima Auto Show with the rest being sold at a Colorado-based Volkswagen specialty shop the following year, Real Riders would be mothballed and forgotten about for almost a decade. However, in amongst all this doom and gloom, there was some good news. Now nearly 20 years old, Hot Wheels had attracted its first generation of adult collectors, many of whom were children when that toy line originally launched. To accommodate this demand, the very first Hot Wheels convention was held in Toledo, Ohio, which came with its own convention-exclusive '40s Fordcasting, a custom which has since become obligatory for both officially sanctioned conventions and for those organised outside the company. This followed the establishment of the Hot Wheels newsletter by Mike Strauss the previous year, which is still distributed to this day in online form and paved the way for the likes of the modern-day Redline Club. As 1988 was Hot Wheels' 20th anniversary, a series of Special Collectors Edition car sets were released, with each car having the Hot Wheels logo embossed on the roof or hood. 1988 was also the first year since 1982 when Mattel recorded a profit of $36 million, following a restructuring of the company under John Ammerman, who took over from the ageing art spear in late 1986. Once again, Hot Wheels had managed to bounce back in a big way, and this time Mattel would not be holding it back, with Ammerman taking a more relaxed approach towards Mattel's expansion, successfully negotiating a merchandising deal with Disney that practically ensured the company a stable, bountiful future, and along with Ammerman's successor, Jill Barad, pledged to primarily focus on expanding the company's existing portfolio rather than creating or acquiring new ones. Under Ammerman's lead, the company would almost entirely reinvent itself for 1989, where it saw the introduction of the Collectors series, which was essentially a reboot of the Hot Wheels brand in an attempt to incentivise collecting. Cars were numbered number 1 through to number 76, mounted on a blue card which remains to this day and would be continued throughout the following years. One of the company's most popular gimmicks from around this time period was the Park & Plates series, which featured a decently sized plastic license plate of the car inside the box, in addition to a plastic display case with which to keep the car in once the blister pack had been disposed of. There was also the revealers, launched in 1993, where each car was a mystery and had to have its wrapper dissolved in water to reveal the car underneath. Then there were the tattoo machines, which were sold with temporary tattoos, the California Customs, a series of Gaudi sports cars based on the real-life California customs scene of the era, the Super California Customs, which allowed parts to be taken off and added to further customise them, and the Auto Magic and Color FX cars, which changed colour depending on the temperature, or if water was applied to the body of these cars. Microscale cars would also be launched for the first time this year, in direct competition with Galoob's Micromachines. These would be produced until the end of 1990, with several castings that never appeared in full-scale Hot Wheels, such as the Nissan R90 CK Le Mans Racer and 1988 Ferrari Formula One car. Though these were the first in a series of unsuccessful miniature car ranges, their wheels would see later usage in the Hot Wheels mainline as the MGW wheel, debuting in 1993, which allowed the company to produce their very diminutive go-kart casting, among others that used the wheel type. 1990 added to 1989's pre-existing catalogue, boosting the number of castings from '76 up to '91. Casting number 85, billed simply as a new release on the back of blister packs issued for 1990, would never be used on a collector's series car. Several castings were also removed from the series for unknown reasons, and by the end of the series' run in late 1999, Mattel had dropped any pretense of cohesion and began issuing unique collector numbers on every single paint colour they issued a casting in. Hot Wheels would manufacture their one billionth car in 1990, and a series of four Chevrolet Corvette castings would be sold as part of a series celebrating its achievement. Another thing Hot Wheels would achieve in 1990 was something of a major coup for Mattel. They would be among the first companies worldwide to produce merchandise for the then-new American animated series, The Simpsons. Coming in specially designed boxes, there would be two cars released, although the famous family sedan and Homer prototype would unfortunately have to wait another 20 years. Alongside a blue Baja breaker where Bart and Lisa gazed out of tamper-graft side windows, there was also the nuclear waste van, which had a clear plastic lens at the back. When gazed through, there would be one of a handful of lenticular animation stills showing the havoc going on inside that particular van. As the early 90s progressed, perhaps one of the most crucial things Mattel did as a company was relocate its aging headquarters in Hawthorne to the more thriving business community in El Segundo, a move it had originally announced in 1989. Though it was something of a melancholic experience for long-time employees, with the business having operated out of the same building visible from the San Diego freeway since its founding in the 1940s, the move was strategically necessary as there were more business opportunities for the company there. Around the same time as the move to El Segundo, Hot Wheels would experiment with broadening its brand and the products which it manufactured and sold. In a bid to increase sales, Mattel would launch the Hot Wheels Speed Points program, where children could send opened Hot Wheels packages back to Mattel and in return receive tickets which represented points, which they could then use to purchase Hot Wheels branded gifts such as a racing jacket, a small television and a stopwatch, among many other things. The Speed Points program lasted until at least March 1992, when it was discontinued. Rolston Cereals would launch a Hot Wheels branded breakfast cereal which were packaged with their own unique cars, to drum up further sales for the brand. Deviating a bit further from simply selling die-cast cars, in 1991 Mattel would secure the rights to dub a localised version of the French-produced Michel Veiland cartoon, based on Jean Gatton's long-running graphic novel series of the same name, and would retitle it to "Heroes on Hot Wheels". As you'd expect from this bizarre method of dubbing something that was originally something else, the show wasn't that warmly received, with only a 6.5 out of 10 rating on IMDb. That said, it did help to shift a ton of unique designs made specifically to accommodate the tapes that were sold with them, and was something of a success in that respect in the sense it sold toys all the while skirting the FCC's rules that had been imposed on the company 20 years earlier. 1992 would turn out to be the final year where every design in the Hot Wheels mainline was designed by Larry Wood. It seemed apparent that Wood was getting ready to wind his career down, although with over 30 years worth of hindsight he hadn't even reached the midpoint of his career yet. Wood's pen would continue to crank out timeless designs at lightning speeds such as the Purple Passion, Mini Truck, Limousine, Street Beast, and '56 Flash Cider to name a handful. The five-dot wheel, one of the key wheel designs of the 1990s would be introduced this year on the prison bus casting, and was the first of many designs intended to supplant the long ubiquitous blackwall design, which could trace its history all the way back to the original redline. Also in 1992, Hot Wheels would launch the Pro Circuit series, which featured licensed race cars from Kart, NASCAR, and IROC, although the series had to be dialed back for unknown reasons, with many cars never leaving the prototype phase. The company would also strike a deal with Bob Chandler for its Bigfoot Champions series, which marked the first time Hot Wheels would produce a monster truck. Outside of Hot Wheels, the year 1992 would be massive for Mattel, largely due to the eminent Gilberard's work on modernizing and expanding the Barbie range. The company would also purchase International Games, who were the then-current IP holders for the wildly popular card game UNO. Hot Wheels would end up celebrating its 25th anniversary in 1993 in a big way by launching the Vintage series, where 16 designs from the 1968 to 1970 lineups were re-tooled and reintroduced for the first time in over 20 years, including the fabled Twin Mill. Now of course, these reproductions weren't 100% faithful to the originals, not only due to the majority of the original tooling not having seen use in 20 years. The collector's pins, for instance, were no longer made of metal, but were instead larger rubber tyres. With the original redline wheel moulds lost, Mattel resorted to using temper-graphed black wool wheels which weren't the same as the old ones, but on the whole, it was something Hot Wheels had never really done before. Other than the neat streeter and 67 Camaro, none of the castings from the first three years were in active production, and even the Twin Mill was last seen in 1977. To bring back all of these cars required a great deal of work. Perhaps more crucially, Hot Wheels needed more personnel if it wanted to keep up with the competition and celebrate its history in a far greater capacity. The same year as the company's 25th anniversary, Hot Wheels would partner with Warner Brothers Pictures to sell a series of promotional toys to accommodate the release of their 1993 action movie, Demolition Man. With their unique packaging incorporating plastic cryocubes similar to those which had been seen in the earlier Park & Plates series, the Demolition Man series was a hit and crucially opened up the company to future movie and TV licensing deals. The three-year stretch from 1993 to 1996 would mark a period of transition for the company as a whole, as Larry Wood was creatively spent after 22 consecutive years as Hot Wheels' lead designer. He would begin to take a lesser role in car design starting from '93, and the company would appoint four new designers to take up the slack: Bruce Bauer, Mark Jones, Michael Collins, and Phil Reelman. Over the course of the following decade, these four would help introduce more than 200 new castings to the line-up, dragging the brand kicking and screaming into the new millennium. Dave Wise would soon join Hot Wheels the following year, his first casting debuted in 1995 as the Radio Flyer Wagon. Greg Paginton, who joined the company in 1992, would also make his debut in '95 with the Big Chill casting. What's important to note here is that largely due to how successful the year 1992 was for Mattel as a whole, with the company's Barbie range accounting for over a billion dollars in revenue alone, 1993 would see the company poised to take over Fisher-Price, which it would promptly do so, and by the end of the year, year-end net sales greatly surpassed the $3 billion mark, which encouraged further growth. 1995 saw the debut of first editions and other segmented series, thus setting the stage for the modern era. Sales for these series models soared, causing stores across the nation to have shortages. Between 1995 and 1996, sales for Hot Wheels would increase by 20%. 1995 also saw the introduction of the Treasure Hunt series, where 12 cars would be chosen as part of a premium range where they would receive more intricate, eye-catching paint jobs, and real-rider tyres, which made their return to the company for the first time since 1987, Mattel finally able to subsidise their manufacture. The first run of Treasure Hunts were limited to just 10,000 units per car. The hysteria only increased once it was realised that the '67 Camaro sold at JCPenney department stores was different from others, and had chrome rear wheels. For the year after, Treasure Hunts increased to 25,000 units per car, but they otherwise remained just as desirable as the previous years. For the next three years, production would increase even further to an unknown limited run, but in doing so resulted in the cars losing the real-rider tyres until they finally reappeared in 2000. This was a loss Hot Wheels could afford, as the initial hysteria had paid dividends and made them amongst the most profitable of the range for several years. By this point, Hot Wheels as a company had never been stronger, and this allowed them to make more creative decisions, some more successful than others. During this year, Phil Realman began working on a car that would define his career. Even after a quarter of a century, it remains his definitive design, and one of the company's greatest. And perhaps more remarkably, not only was this Realman's first fully-fledged design, but it wasn't even supposed to go down that way. You see, in a bid to increase sales and brand familiarity, Mattel wanted a promotional vehicle which they could sell to companies to put their name on. As a result, the vehicle needed to be big and blocky so as to clearly display a brand's image, meaning it had to be a van, truck, or bus of some sort. Realman wound up producing two concepts, the first of which was a hot-rod delivery van based on a 1930s Ford Coupe. Not only as the coke truck, this casting would not see the light of day until 2010 as the blown delivery, as Realman grew disillusioned with the design and started over from scratch. The resultant second concept harkened back to the original redlines, as it was a Volkswagen bus which heavily resembled the rear-loading beach bomb of the 1960s. A prototype of the vehicle was made out of resin to show what the van would look like, with Mattel executives interested in the design, but general sentiment felt that it needed more of a Hot Wheels twist to make it pop. Realman would take his Volkswagen concept and fundamentally redesign it into a dragster, lowering the bodywork, adding a massive bolt-on spoiler and removing most of the windows so as to offer a clean, undisturbed, flat section of bodywork with which to display sponsors. As the company did not yet produce wheels that were large enough to fit the rear of the vehicle, Mattel would trawl through their decommissioned parts bin until they found the 1989 gift-pack dragster, from which they would take the rear wheels. The body would also be made partially detachable, thus exposing the cockpit. Despite the company originally having zero intentions of mass production due to its weight, production cost and intended exclusivity, the final drag bus caused a stir and was fast-tracked to the mainline as 1996 First Edition No. 6. Despite having a reduced production run, rumoured to be one-eighth that of a normal casting, the vehicle would sell out, much to the surprise of Mattel, who did not expect this level of success. The drag bus, much like any other all-star Hot Wheels casting, has spawned its own lineage of similar vehicles, though none of which were majorly successful until Tony Martino's Cool Combi launched in 2013, inspired by the shortened Tillamook Volkswagen buses, which has gone on to develop a cult following all of its own. Following Mattel's purchase of Mettoy in 1989 and taking over production of the Corgi Juniors line of toys, castings from the rival British Mark would begin to appear internationally in 1994. The earliest of these collaborative castings would be otherwise unmodified Corgi castings with Hot Wheels crudely added to the base plate. However, by the late 90s these cars received new wheels and graphics, and some were even included in special collections such as FAO Schwartz's Gold Series and other department stores across the US. One of these ex-Corgi castings, the Porsche 911 Carrera, remained in production until 2003 and was featured in that year's Final Run series. Hot Wheels would also eventually launch another series of micro vehicles which were, as their namesake suggested, smaller versions of existing Hot Wheels castings. Unlike the earlier micro ranges from 1989 to 1990, every car was based on a common base plate design, likely to keep design costs down. Though they came with their own scaled-down track, these were also designed to run on regular full-size track as well. The company would also toy with the idea of bringing motorcycles back into the range, and along with the over-ambitious Attack Pack, launched in 1993 as a clear attempt to make an inroads into the transformable vehicle market dominated by Hasbro's Transformers, the company was again starting to put its hands in all sorts of jars, losing focus somewhat. There was also the mechanics, where larger 155 scale cars could be taken apart and assembled with a variety of custom parts, which later expanded to incorporate its own low-budget video game title, as well as the short-lived Road Wars series. A bit later still, the computer car series would launch, where each blister pack was sold with a large floppy disk containing a digitized representation of the car in question. In 1996, the Malaysia plant would produce its 100 millionth car since it was established in the early 1980s. Sales figures on the whole rose to $150 million worldwide, and the company could no longer be stopped at this point, as every year, Hot Wheels continued to take chunks out of its immediate rivals, to the point that in November of that year, Hot Wheels would do the unthinkable and purchase Tyco Toys, who at the time manufactured Hot Wheels' number one rival on the market, Matchbox. This acquisition meant that Mattel had almost complete control over the 164 diecast market. Also in 1996, Hot Wheels would launch its 100% line, which aimed to target the 164 model collector market. Of these cars, some were absolute works of art, such as 2000's Rocket Oil, designed by Phil Reelman, and is in my opinion one of the most beautiful Hot Wheels cars ever released, with its hinged body revealing its full zamak construction, as a sort of VW drag bus on steroids, whereas others would later be orphaned into the regular mainline once the range was discontinued. In January 1997, John Ammerman would step down as CEO of Mattel after 11 years in order to step aside for his replacement, Jill Barad, who would keep the company going stronger by cutting off unprofitable assets. And under her leadership, Mattel's profits surged tenfold from annual sales of $200 million per year to over $2 billion per year, although a spate of disappointing acquisitions would eventually force her to step down in favour of ex-Craft CEO Robert Eckert, though Barad would leave the company with a $40 million severance package. Hot Wheels would officially partner with NASCAR in order to create its pro racing series, capitalising on the sport's rapidly increasing success. This couldn't have come at a better time, as NASCAR fever would grip the nation in time for the sport's 50th anniversary. 1997 would also see Plymouth's return to Hot Wheels for the first time since the 1970s, but not after some slight hiccups first. Originally touted as 1997's first edition number 8 in promotional material, Dave Wise's 1970 Plymouth Barracuda wouldn't be released until much later in the year, and was manufactured at the former Corgi plant in China as casting number 523. Though a reason was never given, it has been speculated that the company was either delayed because of license negotiation, since the base of early cars read King Cuda instead of the car's real name, the integration and phasing out of ex-Corgi designs from the Chinese plant, or the fact that the Barracuda had already been released in limited numbers as part of a Hills department store promotion, meaning it could not legally be referred to as a first edition since it had already been released. We don't know for sure. One of Hot Wheels' oddest releases in 1997, a retooled Chevy Stocker with a unique body design, would also release, its origins shrouded in mystery, often referred to by fans as the Huffman Stocker, in order to differentiate it from a pre-existing casting of the same name. The Chevy Stocker featured a heavy die-cast body and base, although some of these had plastic bases, and proved to be very good at competitive racing, albeit with some stability issues which were exacerbated with the metal base. Some have speculated the design to be a Corgi casting, however Corgi never produced a Chevrolet Monte Carlo stock car. It is also rumoured that this casting was intended to form part of an unreleased NASCAR themed line of products, which can be corroborated through to the 2004 release of the Pontiac Grand Prix casting, which was originally designed in 1998, a similar timeframe to the Monte Carlo. Again, much like the Barracuda, we don't know for sure. But what is probably the most important release from 1997 was Greg Paginton's Scorching Scooter, which launched the MC3 wheel type as well as marking the first time Hot Wheels had made motorcycles since 1975's Motocross 1 casting. From 1997 until 1999, Hot Wheels released the Planet Micro line of toys, which were the company's third attempt at producing a competitor to the market otherwise controlled by micromachines. Unlike the earlier microcars from 1989 to 1990, however, these were not designed to complement the larger scale regular Hot Wheels, and were again mildly successful. And so, we come to 1998, the company's 30th anniversary, which would prove to be a significant year for Hot Wheels, as in addition to this illustrious celebration, Hot Wheels would also manufacture their 2 billionth car since production began in 1968. To commemorate the former, a limited run of 30 cars in period-accurate blister packs were issued. A full-sized twin mill was also commissioned by Mattel, intended to celebrate this occasion, and was in the process of being built by Boyd Coddington's firm, although it would file for bankruptcy before the car was finished. In a twist of fate, however, when Coddington's assets were seized, the twin mill was nowhere to be found, Mattel having snuck the car away as a precaution. The project would restart in 2001 under the auspices of Carson Lev, and would debut at the 2001 Las Vegas Cima show to widespread acclaim. Across each of its ranges, Hot Wheels would produce over 80 new castings in 1998, including 40 in its basic mainline. Gary Saffer, who had previously been responsible for designing the 1991 Super California Customs series, would return to the company in 1998 and release several memorable designs, through to his retirement from Mattel three years later, including the 32 Ford, Tail Dragger, and Midnight Otto. Another casting of note that was introduced this year was Phil Reelman's Dairy Delivery, a casting designed around a Divco milk truck which struck a chord with older collectors who remembered them from their childhood, and for many years thereafter the casting these collectors would look forward to the most would be the Dairy Delivery. The casting was successful enough that it would spawn several offshoots in much the same vein as the Volkswagen, but did not have the lasting commercial appeal as its predecessor, and as its original collector base slowly died off, so too did its appeal, to the point that its most recent appearance was in 2019, which attracted minimal fanfare. Speaking outside the mainline, the Pro Racing series also expanded, incorporating Kart for the first and unfortunately only time, a license the company had previously held in 1992 prior to its split with IndyCar. NASCAR's received tall boxes and larger scale, albeit true 164 haulers. The 100% series would introduce the McLaren MP4-13 into the range, as Mattel had also secured a deal with Formula One. This would result in the Pro Racing line expanding further in 1999, as the company would begin producing a series of licensed Formula One cars from the five most successful constructors of that season. To try and target other markets, Hot Wheels would also launch the Action Pack series, where various castings were boxed with small, army man-sized figurines. This included vehicles from the 1998 action movie Armageddon, as well as the full-sized action figures of the main characters. Hot Wheels also sought interest from basketball fans by first launching the Radical Ride series in 1998, with larger scale toys complete with a caricature of an NBA team's star player, before launching the NBA Pro Show series in 1999. Clearly inspired and spurred on by the success of the VW Drag Bus casting, the NBA Pro Show Bus was a caricaturist, drag-like coach decorated in the colours of a particular basketball team. Though 29 teams were planned, only 11 would be made, and the entire thing was a massive flop for the company, unexpectedly for Hot Wheels. With this large influx of new castings, older, less used ones quickly began to flood factory floors, and Mattel needed a way to dispose of them all, all the while throwing collectors a bone by giving them one final chance to own them. This led to the introduction of the Final Run series in 1999, where the cars in question would be produced one final time before the tooling would be scrapped for good. From 1999 through to 2005, 49 castings would be removed in this manner. Fully occupied with his role in the 100% Hot Wheels line, 1999 would also be the first year since 1969 where a first-edition mainline casting would not be designed by Larry Wood. It would mark the final year that the collector's series would be used, ending at 11:21, the Chevy 1500 from the 1999 mainline, as by this point it was more or less a redundant relic from the past which didn't quite work out the way Mattel had originally intended. Though there's some other Hot Wheels-related minutiae one could talk about as the company approached the end of its first century, what perhaps signified the beginning of Hot Wheels' transition to digital content and the next year of the company's history as a whole was its 1999 video game release Hot Wheels Turbo Racing, developed by Stormfront Studios. Despite blowing half the game's budget on licensing the Metallica track Fuel from the 1997 album Reload, the game was a much more earnest attempt at making an engrossing, addictive video game, and it was critically acclaimed by many journalism outfits of the era, thus proving the company still had a lot of life left in it despite the ever encroaching threat of virtual entertainment against the toy market. With a new millennium, Hot Wheels sought to reinvent itself in much the same way it had done from 1989 to 1990, as the range had grown relatively comfortable with its position in the market, particularly after Mattel's acquisition of Matchbox in 1996. Whereas much of the 90s had been about tradition and conservatively styled realistic designs, the 2000s would flip that philosophy on its head. One needs to look no further than Larry Wood's take on the same type of lead sled between the two decades to see this in motion. Whereas 1990's Purple Passion played things relatively straight and was realistically proportioned, 2001's Evil Twin would exaggerate its lines even further, twisting its flat nose into a demented grin, stuffing twin engines on top of the hood in a similar vein to the twin mill, chopping the roof further, and lowering the car onto its chassis. The end result was another highly collectible casting which would define the company's image throughout the decade. In 2000, Hot Wheels would begin to fully shift its focus from traditional muscle cars and exotics to Japanese tuna car culture, which would soon rise through media such as the Fast and the Furious and Need for Speed. The first of these designs would be Eric Churn's Showstopper, later renamed the Seared Tuner, which would become the car used on the company's blister packs until the end of 2003. Churn would then collaborate with second generation designer Alec Tam, the son of Paul Tam, and Dave Martis to produce the Honda Civic SI for 2001. Designs such as Churn's MST Suzuka, Tam's Nissan Skyline, and Dave Wise's 24/7 would characterize much of the 2000s. The Deora 2, designed by Nathan Prosh, was released this year and remains one of only four Hot Wheels concept cars officially made into full-size functional ones. Though circumstantial given their relative obscurity, 2000 would see Mattel begin a five-year-long relationship between itself and fellow Japanese toy company Bandai. This collaboration would see the launch of toy lines such as Robo Wheels and Kara Wheels, the latter which saw the introduction of many beloved international TV and movie cars to the company's 164 lineup, which otherwise wouldn't appear worldwide in the Hot Wheels mainline for many years, such as Kit from Knight Rider, the DeLorean from Back to the Future, and certainly not least, an Ultraman-themed rendition of the Mazda Cosmo. Starting from 2001, Mattel began to acknowledge its adult male collector base by opening HotWheelsCollectors.com. The Redline Club would open for membership a year later and begin its first series of exclusive castings, many of which were reproductions of cars from the Redline era, but with the intent of being manufactured to a higher standard than usual. Of course, a service isn't without its detractors, and along with a general failure to supply toys in a timely manner, a problem which continues to persist 20 years on from the service's launch, it has picked up something of a notorious reputation, and that's without mentioning the fact it's basically a free money tree for opportunistic scalpers. That same year, a company named Bright Vision would be founded to capitalise on the success of the internet and the renewed interest in the ultimate unobtainium crown jewel of any Hot Wheels collector's collection, the Rear Loading Beach Bomb, or RLBB for short. When Hot Wheels originally designed their take on a Volkswagen bus for the 1969 line-up, it was a relatively close reproduction of the real van. However, it was discovered that these buses would not work with the all-important supercharger, and also had stability issues. A Telex communique was promptly sent to Mattel's Hong Kong factory, and production would cease after just one shift, with 41 Rear Loading Beach Bombs known to have been manufactured, and a further five prototypes employing an intermediate hybrid design. Now, of course, with production figures that low, the price on one of these has consistently remained higher than an actual restored or near-factory condition Volkswagen T2, with Bruce Pascal's pink example in particular estimated to be worth over one million dollars, owing to its condition and infamy it has within the Hot Wheels community as a whole. Though there had been conversion kits and handmade attempts at building a cut-price RLBB for the common collector, Bright Visions was the first to be a comprehensive scratch-built die-cast design. Painstaking effort had been taken to replicate the real casting in order to sell it to paying customers for a small fraction of the price of a real RLBB. Every detail was authentically replicated, from the body to the chassis to the individual suspension parts, and even a brand new Redline wheel mould was created. Several hundred of these RLBBs would be sold before Mattel ordered the company to cease and desist its operations. However, Bright Visions' efforts were not wasted. One year later, Mattel would produce its own in-house Beach Bomb 2, but those attentive to the ordeal at the time noticed a glaring number of similarities and resemblances between Mattel's version and the Bright Visions version which had been forced out of production. In fact, so influential was Bright Visions' work that the first series of HWC and RLC releases in 2002 practically owe the company its existence. 2002 was otherwise a relatively quiet year in the greater history of Hot Wheels, as all eyes would be set on the following year's upcoming 35th anniversary celebrations. A series of three books would be produced, going over the company's various designs from over the years. Only three final run castings were issued out of an originally intended twelve, the rest being forwarded to the following year, and in October the video game Hot Wheels Velocity X would be produced, which served as a preview in the story-driven direction Mattel wanted its IP to go in. 2002 also marked the debut of Atomics, the Hot Wheels' third attempt at micro-scale Hot Wheels. Atomics would last until 2005 as a mild but unsustainable success. Hot Wheels celebrated its 35th anniversary in 2003 with a full-length computer-animated Hot Wheels movie titled Hot Wheels: Highway 35 World Race. The movie tied into the Highway 35 line of cars that featured 30 classic Hot Wheels cars in addition to five new models created specifically for the line. These Highway 35 cars were grouped into five teams, with special graphics and co-moulded wheels never seen before. The Track Aces, and later Track Stars series, would launch this year, aimed at fans and collectors who preferred to race their cars, as these were castings that worked really well on the track, and were specifically designed to go as fast as possible with a lightweight plastic chassis and a lowered centre of gravity. 2003 would also see the debut of tuned designs, cars which were specifically designed to look like smaller, exaggerated versions of the cars they imitated. This series also hinted at the direction which Hot Wheels wished to go, as various toy series such as Muscle Machines, Simple Wishes Fat Boys, and Radio Shack's Zip Zap series of remote-controlled cars had proven that there was a welcoming market for licensed car designs, with deliberately altered proportions, and Hot Wheels wanted to dominate this market as it had done everywhere else. Speed Demons would also be introduced in 2003 for Hot Wheels to try and capitalise on the sudden international success of Takara's Coral Q series in the early 2000s, better known internationally as Penny Races, but were very short-lived as the craze subsided and Mattel failed to gain any traction in the market. After a single series of regular castings, plus pro-racing castings featuring Formula One and NASCAR race cars, the series would switch to exclusively producing monster trucks from 2004 onwards, where it would last until 2011 before being phased out for good. Though they would not become a staple of Hot Wheels' line-up until many years thereafter, a Rare Movie Tyne playset was produced and released for the movie Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, featuring a unique Ford Anglia casting designed by Alton Takayasu. The Anglia would be recasted only a small handful of times thereafter, but the playset itself remains a highly sought-after collector's item due to its novelty and rarity. Unfortunately, 2004 would prove to be a disastrous year for Hot Wheels, with several new product lines failing to resonate with an audience increasingly preoccupied with video games and other toys. Though the Tombed line worked to an extent and remains in production to this day thanks to its on-track ability, the same cannot be said for the Fatbacks and Hardnose lines, in particular other than their very odd look. The Fatbacks were useless outside of their box, as their extremely wide rear tyres meant they could not be used on any track or playset. In addition, the Hardnose cars were just as useless on the track because the fronts were wider than the rear, hence their name. It speaks volumes when the official promotional material advertising these toys actually employed live-action real cars on a stunt track as opposed to their own models. And due to this relative failure to launch, Hot Wheels would lose a lot of profit that year and force them to abandon many of the 100 new castings introduced, as they simply weren't selling. A 101st vehicle, the customised Volkswagen drag truck, would be hurriedly commissioned, designed by Phil Realman, and then subsequently marketed as casting number triple zero via hotwheelscollectors.com to try and entice collectors to get all of the new models, but this would prove less successful than its older, bigger brother. That same year, the Redline Club would introduce its controversial Selection series, where members could vote on four cars that would be sold exclusively to these collectors, with many voting for Real Rider tyres as opposed to the Redlines which the club was named after, creating an inter-fanbase rebellion that resulted in the Blue Real Riders Club being created as a satirical website. In other news, around this time, 3 million cars would be manufactured each week at a rate of 150 million per year. It is during this time that Nathan Prosh, perhaps best known for castings such as 2000's Deora 2 and 2002's Slingshot, would briefly become Hot Wheels' head designer until a battle with cancer forced him to step down. He would be replaced by Junimei, who would hold the title until 2018. Undeterred from its then-recent failures, 2005 would prove to be Hot Wheels' most ambitious year yet. After the surprise success of its 2003 motion picture Hot Wheels World Race, a sequel would be commissioned in February 2004, initially under the name of XL Racers. Eventually this name would be retooled into the more catchy sounding Xceleracers, and Hot Wheels' quest to conquer contemporary pop culture could commence. Throughout 2004, the brainstorming department of Mattel went into overdrive as they sketched out concept art, put forth plot ideas for the movie series they were developing, and designed brand new, never-before-seen Hot Wheels with which this series would prominently feature. Alongside Hot Wheels' full-time design team, six other toy designers from across the whole of Mattel's various brands would be called in to help design the Xceleracers, including GM designer Blake Allen, who designed the baseline. The following year, the movies would premiere on Toonami and cause a massive stir, setting out all that Mattel had intended to achieve with the series, and then some. To say that the Xceleracers were a major success is a significant understatement. It has become its own independent fanbase from Hot Wheels in much the same way that Bionicle did for Lego around the same time period. That said, the whole line would only last for around two years, with four made-for-TV movies, an associated toy line, and crucially, perhaps rather stupidly given the generation these toys were aimed at, no video game. There were three video games produced around this period for Hot Wheels, and these were World Race, Beat That, and Stunt Track Challenge, but none of them had a focus on the Xceleracers. During 2005, Hot Wheels also unveiled its new Faster Than Ever line of cars. These had special nickel-plated axles along with bronze-coloured open-hole five-spoke wheels, which looked vastly different to any wheel Hot Wheels had ever engineered before, but a successful marketing campaign ensured that they would be a mainstay, and helped to recuperate the company's losses from the previous year. Meanwhile, for adult collectors, the classics range would be launched, which for the first time gave people an insight into what Hot Wheels might have looked like during the 70s and 80s had the company not suffered its many economic woes, with Spectra Flame paint, along with Red Line and Real Rider wheel types. Cashing in on the rise of contemporary pop culture and its celebrators, 2005 would also see Hot Wheels attend the San Diego Comic Con for the very first time, where it would and continues to release exclusive castings at to this day. But as much of a comeback 2005 was shaping up to be in the face of a majorly disappointing 2004, the year wasn't without its faults. For starters, the company would double down on the unpopular caricature-style castings which struggled to shift themselves off the pegs, following up the disastrous Hard Nose and Fat Back series with the similarly undesirable lineups in the Torpedoes and Drop Tops ranges. Though they had learned from the mistakes that the older two ranges had, in the sense they couldn't be used on the track, these product lines remained unpopular simply because they were just far too derivative in design from what Hot Wheels collectors had come to expect from the company. To rub salt in the wound, later that year it was announced Hot Wheels would lose the NASCAR license from the year thereafter, effectively ending its pro racing line in North America. It would continue to sell F1 cars for the next few years thanks to John Violet's update to the original 1999 Grand Prix Racer design, but it too would end after 2008. Strangely, Hot Wheels would also briefly hold the WRC license, designing a series of four all-plastic body representations from four of the major works manufacturers from the 2003 World Rally Championship season, including the only time Hot Wheels has made a Peugeot produced after the year 2000. The other three castings would be more successful, as they would be absorbed into the mainline and eventually recasted into metal, with the Subaru and Mitsubishi releases in particular becoming quite popular as they were the only Hot Wheels representations of these models at the time, discounting the awful Impreza Torpedo. After a tumultuous previous two years, 2006 was essentially the company starting over with a clean slate. The concept of the mainline was abolished, replaced with the open stock series, and the majority of the new castings introduced played things safe, with regular, everyday cars which had been normally proportioned. Many of the designs introduced in 2004 and 2005 were unceremoniously scrapped and never seen again, Mattel recognizing that their short-term over-ambitiousness, coupled with their steadfast insistence that these cars would be a success, had cost them dearly in the long run, and acted almost as though it were the company's awkward midlife crisis. It is during 2006 when Larry Wood, then in his 37th year of designing cars at Hot Wheels, Wood released what is arguably not only one of his most famous designs, but one of Hot Wheels' most well-known and popular designs of all time, the Bone Shaker. The Bone Shaker was a lowered ratrod design with a front grille in the shape of a skull, hence its name. The car was an immediate hit, and as of 2022 has appeared in the line-up every single year since its introduction, with no signs of slowing down any time soon, along with a full-scale rendition, and Wood himself would design a sequel to the car in 2019, the Turbone Charged, as his penultimate design with the company. In 2007, after 12 straight years of Treasure Hunt releases which varied from little more than glorified mainlines to higher detailed, limited-run vehicles with real-rider tyres, Hot Wheels had a bit of a dilemma. They knew the Treasure Hunt series was successful and brought a lot of money to the company, but it also took a lot of money out, owing to the high cost of manufacture. At the same time, Hot Wheels didn't want to lose potential sales nor alienate die-hard fans of the series, who preferred these cars in that form. As a result, Hot Wheels went and launched the Super Treasure Hunt's range. As the company had now turned 39 years old, preparations were well underway for the following year's celebrations, with Hot Wheels launching its Sint 68 series, along with a new wheel type, the Retro Red Line. Unluckily for the company, 2007 would be marred with a scandal it unfortunately had little to do with. Since 1993, McDonald's had employed a separate design team to produce their own cheap yet very cheerful castings which many people, myself included, were fans of. Despite the lower budget and lower quality than a typical Hot Wheels release, they were still respectable in their own right and could appear in a seasoned collector's collection without looking too conspicuous. Unfortunately, this would come to an end in 2007 due to Mattel's Pixar car toys, which were discovered to contain lead paint. The ensuing scandal meant that McDonald's' contract with the company producing die-cast toys was immediately terminated with zero prejudice. And starting from the year thereafter, a different supplier would be tasked with creating larger, plastic-based imitations of Hot Wheels' cars. And as devastating as this news was for Western consumers, it was even more devastating for the Asian toy manufacturers, with one factory boss, Zhang Zhuhong, even committing suicide. Though the replacement firm did a semi-decent job the first year, making cars that despite not being compatible with track owing to their scale, at least looked the part. This wasn't to last, as quality would soon fall in the years ahead to the point they'd become vague lumps of plastic with the Hot Wheels' name on them. When one looks at what rival company Tomica has been able to achieve with the Golden Arches, there is little excuse for these, which honestly deserve to be forgotten about now that McDonald's has stopped issuing hard toys in its Happy Meals, because a company that made its trillions in one of the most unsustainable industries on the planet now cares about the environment. 2008 would prove to be a momentous year for Hot Wheels, with the company celebrating its 40th anniversary and 4 billionth car to roll off the production lines. They would commemorate this occasion with a special diamond-encrusted custom Otto, named after Otto Cuny, which was designed according to the generic muscle car design Cuny had made for the original Hot Wheels' box art, as it needed to be a car that could represent just about any model from the original 1968 range in the days before specialised packaging. To further celebrate the company's ruby anniversary, Hot Wheels would launch a designer's challenge competition under the auspices of design director Alec Tam, which challenged automotive manufacturers to design their ideal Hot Wheels car. This competition would be headlined by Junime's HW40 concept, which sought to bring together 40 years' worth of design inspiration rolled into one car. The result was a design that employed many design elements from previous cars, such as a jet turbine engine seen in casting such as the jet threat, smooth body lines that echoed the original Twin Mill and Ira Guildford's other creations from the same era, and a one-piece glass hood and windshield, as well as a Corvette-inspired split rear window. As part of a movie tie-in, Hot Wheels would launch an extensive series of Speed Racer themed merchandise throughout 2008, which saw the final time the free-spoken five-dot wheel designs that had characterised the 1990s would be used. Several different lines were issued, such as the race-wrecked cars, which had dark grey paint splattered on the body on wheels, and the desert rally cars, which had brown paint sprayed onto the body on wheels. There were also larger-scale cars, playsets, chrome cars, transporters, see-through cars, and highly detailed die-cast cars, to go along with the company's promotion of the Wachowskis movie, which ended up being one of the most profitable films of 2008. 2008 would also see the release of what is arguably Alton Takeyasu's most well-known design: the Carbonator. The car was based off a bottle of Coca-Cola, and a fact unknown to some, its rear spoiler is designed so that it can be used as a bottle opener, though on carbonators which are painted this will chip the paint off due to the force required. To cap off 2008, Hot Wheels would hold a cross-country tour across the United States, with Larry Wood and other key Hot Wheels alumni, starting at the company's El Segundo base and heading eastwards with stops at automotive enthusiasts' cornerstones Bonneville, Watkins Glen, Detroit, Indianapolis, and the small town of Speed, Kansas, which has a population of less than 50 people. For 2009, possibly one of the biggest differences was the box art was now specialised to each car instead of a single, generalised design. This made it easier for collectors to spot their preferred releases. After working at the company for over 40 years, Larry Wood announced his retirement from Hot Wheels on January 2nd, 2009. 20 final castings from him would release that year, all of them part of HWC and/or RLC. The Try Baby 2 would be his final casting during his tenure as a full-time designer, forming a bookend to his career after having designed the original Try Baby in 1970 as his first design. Only 3,500 examples of the Try Baby 2 would be produced in all, all of them in spectroflame black with copper stripes and red-lined wheels. But even this wouldn't mark the end of Wood's career at Hot Wheels in its totality. Although he formally retired as Hot Wheels designer, he would release six designs in 2010, and continue to release at least one casting a year every year through to 2019, his 50th year with the company, before finally hanging up the pen for good. As the 2010s dawned, Hot Wheels could again begin to grow as a company and diversify. The Hot Wheels Garage series would continue for another couple years following the retirement of Larry Wood, before morphing into Hot Wheels Boulevard, a premium series that went on to inspire the later still Hot Wheels Entertainment, where the cars were decked out to resemble a car from a popular media franchise or as a rolling advertisement for a food or entertainment company. Hot Wheels would also begin to celebrate its past a bit more, with the launch of the revived Hot Ones series in 2011, which would be followed by the first full series of Flying Customs in 2013. A series which continues to this day, and much like the Since '68 series a few years before it, offered a glimpse into how Hot Wheels might have looked in a world where they weren't beset by economic woes in the 70s. The Cool Classic series would launch a little while later, and wasn't the success the company were hoping for, though they did help to introduce a cool little mag wheel design which has only recently been adopted by the mainline, in addition to the Hot Wheels Heritage series in the mid-2010s. There was also the Speed Machines launched in 2010, which were a massive success their first time around, but unfortunately Hot Wheels would overestimate the enthusiasm behind them, and so were cancelled midway through their second series. From there, Hot Wheels would only diversify further throughout the rest of the decade, as it continued to sell hundreds of millions of cars every year. Many of these were one-off series that many die-hard collectors aren't even aware of, and mostly appealed to younger audiences. In 2011, Hot Wheels would set a world record for the longest jump in a motor vehicle when American rally driver and US Top Gear presenter Tanner Faust would jump a Hot Wheels-branded rally-raid truck 332 feet down a giant orange ramp prior to that year's running of the Indy 500. But at the heart of it all, there was a very good reason this diversification needed to happen in the first place. Despite having already enjoyed decades of success, there eventually came a point where Hot Wheels had actually become boring. Variety had shrunk to the point most of the active lineup was comprised of classic hot rods, muscle cars, and modern European exotics with little in the way of diversity, particularly the tuna scene. Their range had become predictably stale, and it was clear by the end of the decade that Hot Wheels needed some new blood in its ranks. With the likes of legendary designers such as Mark Jones, Phil Reelman, and Greg Paginton all deciding to step down or significantly reduce their output as the 2000s gave way to the 2010s, Hot Wheels began recruiting some new designers at the behest of head designer Jun Imai, who had begun to centre Hot Wheels' newest releases around JDM in an early attempt to foster an interest in the Fast and Furious and Need for Speed generation. The first of these many new hirings was probably Kevin Cowell, who debuted in 2007 and designed many of the vehicles featured in Hot Wheels' Battle Force 5 series. Hot Wheels' subsequent attempt to relive their brief glory days from World Race and Acceleracers, but was ultimately not as successful. There were, of course, other designers who came and went in the meantime, such as Abe Lugo, Paul DeLorean, the nephew of John DeLorean, and perhaps most notably Brendan Vitusky, who became a prominent designer in his own right. Manson Shung is another designer well worth mentioning, as his intent attention to detail helped his primarily pop culture themed castings to pop out from the rest, a cut above regular Hot Wheels releases. Truth be told, I could go on forever about the many advances and unfortunate setbacks Hot Wheels faced in more recent years, but I would like to close this documentary out by focusing on and dedicating it to the life of Ryu Asada. From his earliest days growing up in Japan and California, Asada was fascinated with cars, and it seemed clear he would go on to work for either a video game company or something similar along those lines, after having made several add-on vehicles for the 1998 video game Need for Speed 3. And it was only natural he was therefore picked up by Mattel to help spur on the next generation of die-cast cars. After debuting in 2009 with the rather forgettable Geronimo and Formula Speed castings, he would strike gold on his third attempt in 2011 by designing the Honda S2000, and very quickly his higher-ups started to take notice. As the 2010s progressed, Asada was given more and more creative control as his castings continued to sell, and by the mid-2010s he was cranking them out at an alarmingly fast rate, almost as if his life depended on it. Unfortunately, many of us simply didn't know that was very much the case, as a terrible disease ate away at him in complete silence. And in March of 2021, after designing very nearly 200 cars for Hot Wheels, Asada would pass away from pancreatic cancer, a death which shocked the die-cast world to its very core as it was completely out of the blue and is a loss still felt within Hot Wheels to this day, with his close friend and colleague Dima Shakhmatov, along with Manson Shung, deciding to design a custom Honda Civic in his honour following the release of his final cars for Hot Wheels and Matchbox, leaving us with the mighty K and Lexus LS400 as an abrupt but poignant bookend to his short and bright career. Two years on from his passing, the impact Ryu Asada has left on Hot Wheels is still felt within the company to this very day, with designers such as Eric Hahn and Sonny Fisher in particular among the most inspired by his work, the latter having already produced several castings which look like Asada could have designed them from beyond the grave, with no disrespect intended to either designer. For me, what has to be Asada's finest work for Mattel, though very closely fought between several other deserving candidates, would have to be the Honda City Turbo Casting, which appeared for the first time in the 2018 Hot Wheels mainline, along with its own wheel type, the Aerodisc, which has since become ubiquitous within the range. This car was special to Asada as it was the car he dreamed of owning as a die-cast ever since he was a child, and becoming one of Hot Wheels' leading designers finally allowed him to make this dream a reality. Although Ayoshima had offered this car an RC form back in the 1980s which Asada actually based his own casting on, Hot Wheels was the first company to issue this car in 164, with even the mighty Tomica in a rare moment of mediocrity deciding to just repaint a stock version of the Honda City, rather than bother to cast the correct car. What is probably Hot Wheels' second biggest loss during that time would have to be the loss of Ferrari, who decided to discontinue their long-standing partnership with Mattel at the end of 2014, with the company's die-cast offerings now produced by the Meishion Group, and well, they're interesting to say the least. This decision ended a run of 28 straight years where at least one Ferrari was included in the year's Hot Wheels releases, and 2015 would be the first year since 1997 where a new Ferrari casting would not be added to the line-up. The LaFerrari, a new casting for 2014, would be produced for just one year in two different colours before being discontinued forever, along with a stray 599 GTB which snuck its way into the 2015 mainline due to being manufactured and released a few months prior to this decision. As it stands today, Hot Wheels undoubtedly remains the foremost name in die-cast cars as it has always done for the past 50 or so years, but this isn't to say they haven't lost a lot of ground to other marks in the meantime, with castings such as these sharing store rack space with castings such as these. There was a new video game developed by Milestone which was okay, nothing spectacular, but there is much room for improvement across the board, particularly in regards to quality control and the overall build quality of modern Hot Wheels castings, which have increasingly eschewed opening parts such as hoods and metal bases in the name of cost-cutting, and this I feel is a big shame for a name that has survived so much over the years and quite honestly deserves so much better. But no matter what may happen to the Hot Wheels name in the years and decades ahead, one thing will always be certain: "They're the fastest metal cars you've ever seen!" And with that concludes the story of Hot Wheels. I do hope you've enjoyed this video and if you would like to see more, please consider donating via Ko-Fi or subscribing to my Patreon to get exclusive updates on any future projects I may produce, as well as allowing me to make these videos in the first place. I am aware that it's been more than a while since my last major video and I hope you enjoyed this as it's something I've been wanting to make for a long while. If you're wondering about when this video was supposed to be out, yes it was intended to be one of my two videos for March, but I haven't had the best week and have only just managed to pull off a successful render. On the whole, I have decided to set a very clear goal with this video: if it is unable to attract at least 100,000 views, then I will opt to abandon this channel in favour of focusing on more Top Gear content for the near future. I've learned a lot over the past year and hope in the future I can make even more videos on a much more timely basis than you're used to, as I do love making these even if they take me an inordinate amount of time and effort to produce. Once more, thank you very much for watching and I hope to see you all in the next video.