Well, another weekend, another trip to Colorado Diecast! But there was a difference this time: due to my being hit with a series of heavy and unexpected expenses lately – I know we all love it when that happens – and when the month is barely half-over yet, I’ve had to tighten the belt for the remainder of May, especially since I already blew a pretty phat wad @ COD on payday! But that kind of limitation is a lot less of a problem than it used to be now that I have my own “Hot Wheels Whisperer.”
Yep, my cub Jason’s ability to ferret out amazing things on the back pegs of big box stores and in the bargain bin @ COD remains unparalleled in my experience, and if anything he’s honing his skills and improving! I’ve mentioned that his personality is very different than mine: he is highly organized and methodical in his approach to everything, where I tend to be a spazz. This top-down mindset of his means he can see things through that I would get bored and frustrated with and walk away from much sooner, and this is how he manages to find things that everyone else seems to miss!
Now, as is probably obvious from my organized fleets of slot cars, all of which have names, driver names and nicknames, and backstories, you can probably tell that your bumble blogger one of those types of old skool guys that likes to give the people in my life nicknames. I tell my friends to not take offense at that, because in my world, if I give you a nickname, it means I love you! I’ve called Jason my “Frontier Cub” due to his birth and upbringing in the “wilds” of Alaska, but as of this weekend, I’m now bestowing upon him a parallel nickname: “The Hot Wheels Hunter.” Think I’m exaggerating? Well, check this out…
Found in the street – LITERALLY!
Early last week while we were on the phone after a day at work, J informed me he had collected a little pile of 1:64 diecasts from the pavement in the street right outside his tony 3rd floor bachelor pad! He thinks they got there because they were stuffed into a trash bag that was thrown into a nearby dumpster; it had been particularly windy that day, and some of the dumpster contents had managed to blow over the little retaining wall and into the street. He saw these from his balcony and decided to run down there to pick them up, mainly to prevent them from being flattened by passing 1:1 scale cars! After rounding them up and bringing them inside, he sent me pics of this find. There were in 10 total: 3 Hot Wheels, 5 Matchboxes – one a McDonald’s Happy Meal special – one Maisto – which interestingly is a copy of one the Matchboxes, and the last one was a Hot Wheels “Monster Truck” that was bigger than 1:64.
Initially, he thought he’d just try to donate them to the 50¢ bin @ COD, but when he showed them to me, I jumped at one immediately and asked him if I could have the yellow Dodge Dakota pickup, to which he
acquiesced! I have the original issue of this model from the mid 1980’s (red with white and black stripes) and I have always been fond it, and I thought this one done up as a highway crew truck was pretty cool! In addition, another of the MBX’s, a Mercedes ML430, bears the unusual tampo printing of a newspaper in Connectcut…some type of promo model? And found on the street in Colorado! Interesting…probably interesting enough to be worth keeping! I doubt its worth much, but it may be rare!
Overall, this lot that someone had discarded in the trash wasn’t in bad shape, and with the rest of the find consisting of a black version of the HW Lincoln(esque) stretch limo and the Matchbox Land Rover Defender 90, I thought it wasn’t a bad haul for “mana from heaven!”
So, when was the last time you found a cool little bevy of die-casts in the street waiting to be picked up and taken home? Well, The Hot Wheels Hunter did! And that was only the beginning of the week’s adventures!
Killer MBX releases!
The same week, Jason’s trips to various big box stores around the area where he works and lives brought more treasures right off the retail rack! He frequently spends weekday evenings after working hours driving around to all the many Target and Wal-Mart locations surrounding the areas where he lives and where he works, and finds astounding things at these stores that I can virtually never lay my hands on! This week his adventures yielded some stupendous Matchboxes, including a newly released pale orange version of the Morris Minor cabriolet, and an AMC Eagle wagon in a burnt orangey-copper color. I’ve known this one was out there and I’ve been looking for it for months, in part because I’m an AMC nut, but particularly because years ago I had a friend who had a real one exactly like it. Thus far, every time I’ve found the Eagle wagon “in the wild” it’s always the black version, which I don’t like and have never bought. His best find? A new release I didn’t even know existed: a fantastic Porsche 356A coupe in a deep greenish-blue hue with a tiny opening hood revealing an amazingly detailed engine compartment! He only was able to find one of those, but he did pick a few things up for me, which I saw that weekend and was thrilled with!
The Hunter Scores…and gifts follow!
In addition to the obvious Target and Wal-Mart locations, J hit a couple of less obvious stores including Dollar Tree and Dollar General, and overall managed to score more goodies, and I’m happy to say he was thoughtful enough to pick up a few for yours truly! Of the 4 he got me, the most spectacular were the newly released bright blue version of the Matchbox Bizzarrini 5300GT Corsa, and a stellar Hot Wheels issue of the ’75 Chevy Blazer ragtop in black with red sides, a model I’ve been after for over half a year and has been impossible to find! The Hunter scores, The Hunter gives! Good Karma ensures future successful diecast hunts!
Cometh the Weekend @ COD…
So back to Saturday, and we’re hanging out in Parker with very little scratch to spend, but I wanted my own copy of that Porsche 356 coupe, and I knew where I stood the best chance of laying my hands on it! So I said, “What if we went to Colorado Diecast so I can grab that 356 coupe from the Matchbox section, and then we didn’t buy anything else except stuff on the dollar wall and the 50¢ bargain bin? What would that look like?” Well, here’s the answer…
The 50¢ bin looked like it had been recently restocked, but a lot of the cars therein this time around were pretty rough, obviously the playthings of kids that had outgrown them and obtained via donations or garage sales or who knows where. Nonetheless, Jason used his keen powers of “Hot Wheels sense” to find some amazing stuff buried in those huge piles! I found a few good nuggets myself, and – for the first time – I did grab a couple of really rough cars because I found a couple I liked and, hey, they’re 50¢ fer crissake, so why not?! My better finds included a just slightly used copy of the Cobra Daytona coupe in dark blue with Gulf logos and an early 80’s Matchbox #38 Ford Model A van, a highly collectible model; this one was the Kellogg’s Rice Krisipies promo, and, while this is not one of the more rare ones, it is a very handsome livery, and other than being dusty it was is very good order. Yet, as usual, it was “The Hot Wheels Hunter” who made the best finds, including a hard-to-find and sought-after version of the ’72 Chevy LUV dragster in dark metallic blue with an orange base and orange “seaweed” flames with FTE wheels, and pristine, flawless copies of the Triumph TR6 racer in a style I hadn’t ever seen before, and the limited edition release of the VW SP2 featuring a very ’70’s-cool paint scheme!
Mainlines Aplenty!
Here was the only bad part: I didn’t get that Porsche 356 coupe! They didn’t have one! But since I was in the Matchbox section anyway, I did find quite a few other cool MBX releases, including a newly reissued ’75 Eldorado ‘vert in pale yellow, a bright blue version of the racing Mercedes-Benz 220SE “Heckflosse,” and a really cool ’68 Dodge D200 truck on mudder tires in a very historically correct pale blue. And of course I returned The Hunter’s generosity, making sure he got an orange VW Bug and a white ’65 Mustang GT fastback with gold stripes, both “standard issue” Matchbox releases which aren’t easy to find!
The rest of the day’s scrores for us both came from the dollar wall, where I got a first issue of the “Rigor Motor” from way back in the late ’90s still sealed! – and from the “mainline” aisles of Hot Wheels they sell for anywhere between $3 and $6, including a 2nd copy of the awesome ’70 Chevelle SS wagon in dark satin metallic gray with green and yellow flames – an exceptionally cool release! – and a “first edition” copy of the ’70 Skylark GS-X in “Saturn yellow,” another one I’d missed despite having half a dozen later variations of the casting.
Of course, its COD: So there’s “Premiums” and “Specials” in there too!
Well…yeah, I mean, I couldn’t prevent myself from buying any of the Premiums…could you? So for the higher dollar stuff, I grabbed a “Car Culture” copy of the ’72 Mercedes-Benz 280SEL in lime green, and a couple of Spectraflame “Classics,” a ’62 Bel-Air bubbletop in green, and a ’71 Plymouth GTX in pink, both which came at good prices, and its good thing I got them, since COD’s once predigious stock of these beautiful releases is dwindling fast!
Some Flights of Fantasy
I did a post dedicated to the topic of the Hot Wheels “fantasy cars” a while back. Throughout my life I’ve never been a big fan of these; there are a few models here and there that I like, but ever since my youngest days, I’ve always preferred models of real cars: I like my 1:64’s to be as realistic as possible. Jason, however, has the opposite preference: he likes the wild fantasy cars, and it often seems like the weirder they are, the more he likes them! This is one reason why he’s a fan of Hot Wheels over the other brands, and it may be that some of his preferences are rubbing off on me a little! So he indulged his whims and brought home a pile of very weird creations…these are shapes that have no business being on 4 wheels IMHO, but he likes them, and for what we paid, who can argue?
However….because the 50¢ bin was so heavily stocked and everything was so cheap, I took the liberty of picking up some stuff I wouldn’t normally buy just because I thought it looked cool! These included a couple of scraped up but still in-tact copies of a car called “Dieselboy” (isn’t that a comic book character?), a really clean Matchbox off-road sand-rail thing (hey, it was purple, how could i say no?), a weird contraption called “Z-Rod” in a rat-roddy flat rust color with bright green FTE wheels and a cool tiki mask pinstriped on the roof, a slate blue and gold copy of the “Max Steel,” and a flamed version of the “Mod Rod” (a name cribbed from a totally different Matchbox car from the early ’70s), which is a model I find interesting when you look at its motor, as it appears to be powered by a punched-up “Stovebolt” inline-6; both of these last ones being cool “fantasy vintage hot rods.” Unfortunately for me, Jason scored the best copy ever of the Mod Rod, a satin black version with red scallops that came out of this very same bargain bin on another trip, and which I have never seen anywhere else! I’m still trying to get him to trade it to me for something else, but I haven’t convinced him to let go of it yet!
It’s The Thrill of the Hunt that counts!
And that’s the thing: this isn’t about finding stuff you can’t get anywhere else; if I wanted to pay the scalper’s wages, the postage, and the tax, I could get all of this stuff on eBay with a few clicks of a mouse button. What this is about is having fun! It’s not unlike my days collecting rare Punk Rock and New Wave vinyl records with my friends in CA back in the day: it’s less about what you get than it is about how you get it! It’s the “thrill of the hunt,” something that’s increasingly missing in our modern world where everything is online and instant gratification is the rule rather than the exception. None of this stuff is important; none of it is going to change our lives or hold back the horrors that are coming. But In a world where cheap, affordable fun is becoming almost impossible to find, my “Frontier Cub” and me are building some memories…and that is the most valuble thing in the world!
It’s amazing what people throw away! While some have been lost in the mists of time, I’ve never thrown one of them away! I’ve found a precious few here on the property but nothing too super interesting or in good shape. My head is spinning at these cool models, I especially love the quartet with the AMC, Cadillac, and Dodge truck. Lots of cool stuff and having fun however we can is the most important thing! Well Done and your quite the finder yourself!