From Cutting Edge to Nostalgia: “The Hot Ones” and “Ultra Hots,” Then & Now

This topic has been raised recently by a couple of events. One is a particular car that I finally bought at Colorado Diecast after walking away from it 5 times due to its ridiculously high price: a Hot Wheels model of a 1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais “Hurst Olds” that I thought was so cool that I just had to have it, but they wanted $20 for it! $20!!! I tried to buy it online but every time I found it for sale it was even more expensive, and there was tax and postage on top of that, so after over 2 months of seeing that car on the peg, picking up and putting it back over and over again, I finally bought it.

The other is a memory Jason recently shared with me of his 7^th birthday, which for him would have been 1982, and his receipt on that day of a 3 pack of Hot Wheels. Specifically, this one:

What do these two things have it common?

Part 1: THEN

That was the year that Mattel introduced “The Hot Ones” with this unforgettably cheesy commercial starring a young – and then unknown – Steve Gutenberg:

This new wheel style with gold foil instead of silver and 6 dashes instead of 5 had a thinner axle, which brought back some of that lost speed that had made Hot Wheels famous back in the early “Spectraflame” years. The first 12 castings were released in late 1981 on a regular blue blister card with “The Hot Ones” printed in a “ka-pow” caption, but the card would change the following year to show off this new style with a completely new blister pack.

I’ve taken some time to try to remember which car was my very first “Hot One.” While I can’t remember for sure, I do know it was one of two cars: it was either the first “pressing” of the 1983 (officially ‘84) Corvette, or the Mercedes 380SEL, the original issue in silver over black. And yes, I still have them both. One thing I remember for sure was the one I most wanted, the ‘55 Chevy, and for months I couldn’t find it anywhere!

Mattel regained some of my respect for their brand when it became clear that The Hot Ones were a promise made and a promise kept: they were fast! VERY! And back in these days when the cars were still all metal and had some real heft to them, they were great gravity racers! Most of them still couldn’t beat my early (1970-72) Matchbox Superfasts, but I liked The Hot Ones. I didn’t love them because Hot Wheels still seemed inferior to Matchboxes to me in this era, but that was soon to change with the degradation of quality as Lesney went under and became “Matchbox Int’l Ltd,” and around the same time The Hot Ones appeared, Hot Wheels introduced metal flake paint. A year or 2 later we saw the first Real Riders, and I really liked those! Hot Wheels was upping their game, on their way up at the same time Matchbox was faltering. I remember these days well, and the excitement they generated with each trip to Kay Bee toys at the mall or Toys R Us when the folks would take me there! It was always a thrill to see what new models were being released as Hot Ones or, even cooler, which existing models were being issued with Hot Ones wheels!

All this good will kind of got squandered, IMHO, by Hot Wheels’ next product release, which was the “Ultra Hots” in 1984. Like the Hot Ones barely 3 years earlier, these brought out a new wheel style and claimed to be even faster than the Hot Ones, although the axles appeared to be identical.

I hated the “Ultra Hots!” Absolutely hated them! That “spacey” looking wheel design was F-UGLY, and they had revolting paint jobs; the base hues were actually very nice, but the tampo-printing with slashes of lightning bolts and jagged messes exploding all over them ruined that. What really chapped me was that most of them were re-issues of older models with new names, as if they were new cars. The whole thing just seemed incredibly cheesy and dishonest: I even hated the name “Ultra Hots.” Was that the best they could do? Everything with Mattel was always “Hot this” and “Hot that.” All of this was off-putting to me at the age of 13, as I was already beginning to show the early signs of the cynicism that would later lead me to punk rock!

I remember only 2 new cars being released “Natively” as Ultra Hots, the “Sol-Aire CX4” and the “Jet Sweep X5,” and I admit I liked both of those cars. This was why, in all my life, I only bought 4 of them, 3 of which which came in a 3-pack with a stamp; I remember getting this @ Toys R Us, and for some reason I wanted that stamp! I don’t know why, but I thought that stamp of the Hot Wheels flame was really cool. One of that 3-pack – originally the “Science Friction,” which was a car I always hated, and which was rebadged as the “Flame Runner” – was discarded immediately by the expedient of giving it to my little brother. The other two were worth keeping: the first issue of the “Sol-Aire CX4,” which was a really cool looking LeMans-style racer, and the “Speed Seeker,” which was a reissue of the “Mantis” from 1970, but it was kind of a cool car and I didn’t have an original “Mantis.” The next year I did buy the “Jet Sweep X5” when it came out, but that was it; that was all the “Ultra Hots” I wanted!

One thing I will give to the early “Ultra Hots” is that they were, at least, all metal, and very weighty! Around this same time, Matchboxes were also getting awful; their 1985 reissue of the vaunted “Superfast” name was another series of ugly cars with ugly wheels and ugly paint, and this was also when we started seeing a dramatically increased use of plastic in the models from both companies. I was also growing up: in 1985 I was 14 and about to enter high-school and getting interested in things other than toy cars, as boys that age will. What I remember about this time was that the toys in stores were getting crappier just like the music on FM radio, and at 14 I was already starting to feel nostalgic, so that was the year I got hooked up with some mailing lists that led to a local club called the SCMMCC (Southern California Matchbox & Miniature Car Club), and started going to swap meets looking for mint condition examples of Matchboxes from the ‘60s and early ‘70s: I tuned out of what was in the toy stores and started becoming a collector. The rest is history.

Part 2: NOW

Fast forward to today and an interesting dynamic has developed! Mattel’s sales of Hot Wheels have increased significantly in the last decade, and the company knows that its not young boys (who are only interested in video games), but nostalgic adults like yours truly who are buying all those cars. While originally they were focused on trying to recapture the magic of the early Hot Wheels, the “nostalgia market” is naturally a moving window, and today it’s guys who were kids in the ‘80s, who don’t remember the early Spectraflame years first-hand, who want to see their own childhood memories rekindled! Right on queue in 2011 comes the first reappearance of the Hot Ones name and packaging on a whole new series of cars, and there have been multiple releases since! Like the expensive “Neo Classics,” this “new generation” of Hot Ones are a mix of recasts of the originals and some newer castings done in the style of the originals. Like the recent “Flying Customs” series, most are painted in bright, non-metallic gloss colors with lots of tampo decor to mimic those halcyon years of the very early ‘80s before the introduction of metal flake paint, and they are packaged in blisters that look just like the originals!

One of the things that’s confusing, though, is that a lot of them don’t have Hot Ones wheels! Strange! A lot of them have the classic 5-spoke Cragers, most of which are chrome but some are gold; and some of them have the 6-slot wheels in the style of the original Hot Ones, but they are chrome instead of gold. Double-strange! I don’t know that anyone really cares, but its an interesting anomaly. There’s been several series of them since that year, each of them made in limited numbers and selling for quite the premium! Rather funny, though, when you consider that 44 years ago, The Hot Ones were the hottest new thing!

Name Confusion

Unfortunately, Mattel has muddied the waters quite a bit with the use of the “Ultra Hots” name. They’ve recently reissued that series as well, and along the same lines, but around 2006 they used the same name on a completely different series of extremely premium-and extremely cool-all metal collectibles with rubber tires and the works. These cars are very expensive and thus far I’ve only been able to obtain 2 of them, a ‘56 Chevy Nomad and a ‘57 Buick Caballero wagon (I was planning on opening both of these but so far I haven’t).

Regardless, in 2022 the “Ultra Hots” name was used again on a series of cars exclusive to Target stores; these mimic the awful paint styles of the originals but only about 2/3 of them have those ugly wheels; the rest of have either the classic Crager-style 5-spokes or something else. It makes you wonder if maybe some other people don’t have the highest opinion of those ugly wheels either! But what’s really interesting is that this latest iteration of the Ultra Hots are not reissues of what were originally…well, reissues! These are instead modern castings that have been repurposed for the Ultra Hots series, which is historically correct if you think about it, since that’s what they did with the original Ultra Hots!

Name Conclusion

Everything that’s old is new again, because those of us who played with the originals in the early ‘80s loved those toys then, and we love the memories they bring back now! The re-appearance of the Ultra Hots proves that even some of the more mediocre die-casts of the era are desirable to the right people, and, yeah, I’m one of ‘em! Here’s one of my new Ultra Hots right here!

Its all just a little bit of history repeating!