Happy Saturday, world! To Celebrate this May 31 edition of the best day of the week, lets see how many of you remember this awesome little clip from a movie so famous and so iconic that I don’t even need to name it:
Remember that? Well of course you do! Its a scene that I bet has stuck in the head of everyone who enjoys scale modeling, regardless of your level of experience or devotion to it! It reminds me of something else much older, an awesome short story that I read in my childhood that I have never forgotten!
In 1963, a British author named Alex Hamilton published a story called “The Attic Express.” I first read it in one of those cool old Alfred Hitchcock collections! If you’re around my age, I bet you remember those; seems like every school library in America had them! “The Attic Express” was contained in the one called Alfred Hitchcock’s Supernatural Tales of Terror and Suspense, and told the story of a meticulous model train builder who builds a layout for his distracted and unappreciative son, whose fantasies about rail yards become very real and lethal when he “wills himself” into the model…in a way similar to how Adam and Barbara Maitland went to meet Beetlejuice!
An excellent story every toy car and train enthusiast-who also has a penchant for the macabre-should enjoy!
How’d you like to sit behind the wheel of this Guard’s Red ’80 Porsche 930 Turbo?
If you’ve got a scale-model world in your life, haven’t you always thought about how cool it would be if you could somehow “shrink yourself” to scale and walk amongst your toys? How cool would it be to kick a few Redline tires in person, or open the door to one of your Matchboxes and sit behind the wheel? I know I’ve often wanted to do what the Maitlands did! It’s not like I want to be miniscule, its just that it would be so cool to see your toys and creations come to life like that! Well dear readers, thanks to today’s technology, we can just about do that very thing! In fact, today, I’m going to go visit Drag City in person, and I’m gonna bring you along with me!
Are ya ready??? In 3…2…1….
BOOM!!! How does that grab ya, darlin’?
It is I, your humble blogger, here at the track! Here you see me on the edge of the infield on the way to crossing over the gantry at turn 16 to visit the paddock, the most exciting area of the track! I haven’t yet met the driver of that beautiful silver Ferrari 250GT you see behind me, but I’m aiming too, since my goal is to try to score some interviews with some of DC’s better known regular drivers! And what better place to pin a few down than a visit to the paddock! So let’s go see who’s there!
Suited up and ready to go! Two Drag City regulars on a Saturday race day! ABOVE LEFT: Gunner “Grizzly” Gustavson with his “QQ1 Light Blue Poly” ’68 Charger 440 Six-Pac “Cerberus,” and mingling with the European sports cars is Italian Leo “Forza” Farino with “Artemas,” a 1960 Maserati 3500GT
Since its a late spring Saturday and the weather is perfect, you can bet the track is crowded, and there is both a muscle car and a sports car tournament this weekend so everyone is here!
Caught in the paddock for a few words: ABOVE LEFT: I caught up with Oscar “Outlaw” Obermann out of uniform and realxing with hours before his run with his ’70 Chevelle SS454 “The Landlord.” ABOVE RIGHT: Less approachable by reputation but actually very personable was hedge-fund millionaire turned racing driver Paul “Pocket Rocket” Patterson, who wins races the same way he got rich: cool, calculating, and determined. Having “God Save The Queen,” a “built-to-the-hilt” 4.2 Litre XKE coupe, doesn’t hurt! Patterson is a very interesting man, both on and off the track.
While the Inspection Station is not open to the public, it is open to the man who created it, which of course would be me, so I’m gonna stroll right on over there and see what’s going out both outside and in. Come with me, dear readers, for a look at some of the “behind the scenes” action you don’t get to see as a spectator!
TOP and CENTER LEFT to RIGHT: A look inside the Drag City Pre-Race Inspection Station for a view most spectators never see! Track staff going over a ’67 Iso Grifo, a ’64 Corvette, and a ’64 E-Type roadster to clear them for racing. ABOVE: “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” Doug “Duster” Donaghue doesn’t look particularly happy at the poking and prodding his beloved Cobra Daytona coupe “Banshee” receives from the inspectors!
And finally: because I have “special clearance” and I’m taking you with me, let’s mosey on over to pit row and take a gander inside a couple of the bays! We can’t be too disruptive because it’s a busy day and the teams are scrambling, but we can take a quick peak inside a couple of the bays and see what’s in there being worked on! I poked my head into both the Jaguar and Porsche bays at each end of pit row, which were particularly active and saw some pretty nice machinery getting all primed for the track by mechanics who looked a little frantic! The folks in the Mercedes and Ford bays were so preoccupied that they made it clear my presence at that moment was not a benefit to them. Hey, it is race day; who can blame them?
Let The Races Begin!
Your H.B. climbs the gantry over turn 16 as the action begins!
The first action of the day was a ground-pounding muscle car race that kicked off at noon and ran into the evening! Even in the first heat there was some pulse racing moments!
’70 C3 “The Pharoah” runs neck-and neck-with ’70 Maverick “Gator Grease” as Texan Jim “Mongoose” Matheson and Floridian Bill “Blondey” Baldwin duke it out full-bore into banked turn #2A tense moment at the beginning of the chicane where Connor “Hellraiser” Haley in “Ace of Spades” went high and almost clipped Elliot “Standoff” Stanton’s “Revelator.” Disaster was averted, but barely!“Standoff” Stanton lived up to his name in the paddock after that race!
Naturally, your H.B. got a seat in the V.I.P. grandstands so there was a front-row view for all the action! And these races go all weekend, so who knows what may happen next!
So by now, what you’ve figured out is that while AI is fun, it’s far from perfect: it does a great job rendering some cars and some parts of the track, but it’s terrible with faces! Honestly, we should be thankful for that, for reasons too obvious to have to explain! Still, I’ve been working on my “Avatar” for weeks, and as you can see, I still get slightly different results every time. It doesn’t do well with tattoos either.
The other area where it really falls short is rendering scenes that are very crowded and busy, like the paddock and the area around the inspection station: it does great with close up details, but when I ask for a wide angle shot showing a bunch of cars and people, it renders things out of scale and with very weird errors. Its kind of creepy, actually; eveything looks all distorted and fun-house like; reminds me a little of some of the scenes of the infamous “Snake Man” sequence in that excellent 1984 flick Dreamscape!
Let’s Go Srollin’! Your humble blogger checks out the action in the paddock as the day goes long and afternoon heat descends!
But you know what? I still think its mighty cool to see a machine make your world come alive like this, even if it does make mistakes! AI means the world of storytelling is going to change forever, but maybe its not gone; its just going to be different! The Attic Express isn’t lost; it just moved to the basement! Now, let’s see what adventures we can come up with next here at DRAG CITY!
Maybe my 1:64 world is winding down…or maybe it’s just getting started!
As life changes and time becomes a premium, I am looking back on the last 5.5 years as a “slottist” and wondering where I should take my hobby next. Over that time I’ve floated a lot of ideas and discussed a lot of things I would like to do, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some readers of this blog (if there are any!) are starting to be like: “Yeah, you keep talking about doing all this stuff, when you gonna do it?”
Eastbound Interstate 8 passing Drag City…and its a safe bet which car in this picture is taking the next offramp!
That’s probably just a voice inside my head, but, OK! I’m going to list back all the ideas for upping my game at Drag City that I’ve talked about but haven’t done! I’m going to put them down here as bullet points in the order of which I hope they are most likely to occur in, but bear in mind this is no promise, to myself or to anyone else, as “life stuff” often intervenes at the most inopportune times to suck away the time and the money I need to accomplish these tasks!
Here is everything I’ve talked about doing…
Improve ambient lighting around the track
Install lighting on the diorama including track lighting and lighting inside bldgs
Matchbox Speedtrack acquisition and setup
Hot Wheels Thundershift 500 acquisition and setup
Diorama expansion: build additional “wings” to tables
The Heartbreak that IS the “Matchbox Motorway!”
Getting back to The Get-Backs
Now let’s take a quick look at each of these to see what’s feasible:
1. Improve ambient lighting around the track
This is the most important thing I need to do as quickly as possible. This is going to be expensive and its going to entail a lot of effort, running wires through the ceiling of my finished basement and doing so while the track and table are in place! I can take some steps to minimize the potential damage to the track from the work that must be done, but it won’t be easy and it won’t be complete: its a given that some damage will occur; some of the diorama will be lost, and I will have to do repairs to it after the lights are installed.
To that end, I may descontruct the carnival in order to prevent the extremely expensive 3D Printed carnival rides I waited over 6 months for from getting a light fixture dropped on them! I mean, you can just imagine that happening, right? This means that DC will be closed for a several days – and likely for a week or more – to complete the work.
There are so many different ways to do track lighting its impossible to even consider them all! Some of these can be quite expensive, but its the effort more than the money that concerns me. The thing is, I’ll need help with this; I can’t do it on my own, and I’m not event sure that even 2 guys working together is enough! My main man Patrick can do this, but he’s hundreds of miles away, and coordinating the time and effort with him will be a challenge, to say the least!
Even with all this, I’m rating this as the most important thing I need to do, and the one I want to do first…if I can!
2. Install lighting on the diorama including track lighting and lighting inside bldgs
While this has the potential to be less destructive to the existing track environs-at least a little-its also going to be a lot more work than installing the ambient lighting. However, its also going to be a lot more fun! Installing the ambient lighting is a construction project and nothing more: this is a diorama project!
A while ago I did a post showing my good friend Harrison’s O-Scale model railroad layout and all the fantastic lighting he has been able to add. Of course, finding stuff in O-Scale is much easier than 1:64/HO, and although I’ve found some pretty cool lights for the perimeter of the track, almost all of them are being sold through somewhat sketchy websites in Asia that I’ve never ordered from before. I’ve made the case that this is something you almost have to see in person to know if it’s going to work for you in terms of scale and quality, and every time I see something in person at a show or a hobby store, its either too small or too big, or if I like it, it’s something entirely scratch built. That’s impressive, and I’d like to be able to do something like that and I probably could, given enough time, but see, that’s what I don’t have enough of!
The lighting inside the buildings, however, should be a snap! All I need there is some wads of little LEDs on a wire and I should be able to set them up with no problem. A few small holes drilled in the table here and there to drop them throgh and viola, I should have them up in no time! So maybe this is where I should start! What do you think?
Check out this incredible YouTube channel of a scale modeler who lives somewhere in Europe – Germany? Holland? Denmark? Not sure, but he has awesome taste in cars, music, and is a builder who puts me to shame! Where he gets the time to do all this is beyond me!
3. Matchbox Speedtrack acquisition and setup
This is more a matter of buying than building, although the hard part is going to be finding the space! As big as my haus is, I’ve grown into it to the degree that I don’t know where I’m going to put it, but I believe I will be able to find a space with enough re-arranging, even if its not in the basement with the TomyAFX and Model Motoring tracks! I’ve been wanting about Matchbox Speedtrack and I went into this in detail here and here, so this is definitely on the short(er) list for the rest of this year…although, yes, it may spill into the next year!
4. Hot Wheels Thundershift 500 acquisition and setup
Again, this is buying, not building, but its going to be expensive! This track is clearly a hit with the nostalgia crowd, and good complete working examples of it are selling for hundreds of dollars! I don’t care, I’m going to buy one anyway! Only question is, when? The answer is likely some time in early fall, perhaps September or maybe October. For some reason I always seem to have a little more money around that time, but of course I’m also working my hardest, since the 4th quarter is always the busiest of the year in my industry.
So, I might not have time to play with it, but I would be able to at least set it up, and this is small enough that it would likely go in my living room or dining room! This is going to happen, so stay tuned and I will let you know when it does!
5. Diorama expansion: build additional “wings” to tables
Now this is one that I’ve been talking about for almost as long as this blog has existed, and one that gets the most scorn heaped on me by the “do it don’t say it” DIY’ers out there…and probably rightly so! A few years ago, for this post, I drew up this little “architectureal elevation” illustrating what this might look like:
The worst part of never having done this is that I bought almost all the lumber I needed to complete it way back in 2020 (and that wasn’t cheap, lemmetellya! Do you remember what lumber prices were like during the scamdemic???) I may need to fill in a few pieces that were used elsewhere over the least 5+ years, but most of the material is already here! So what’s stopping me?
A couple of things: for one, I need to move some furniture out of the basement and up into another part of the hosue which is a bigger job than it sounds like, as it involves moving heavy items in other rooms upstairs to make room for more things and probably also involves removing a door or two from their hinges. So again, these are things I need extra manpower for; can’t do it on my own, and what kinds of looks appear on your friend’s faces when you ask them to help you move furniture around your house?
More than that: the lighting I mentioned in item #1! There’s no point in expanding the diorama if I don’t have proper lighting, so I really have to do that before I do this.
And what else? Here’s the big one: FEAR! Fear of the future, fear of moving! That’s something I know I’m going to have to do some day no matter how much it will suck, and the most sprawling, costly, and awesome the Drag City Raceway project becomes, the more I’m going to hate it when that inevitable day comes that I have to break it all apart.
The way real estate prices are going, I’ll probably never be able to have a house this size again, so its unlikely I could ever reconstitute it elsewhere, which is probably an argument to just go ahead and do it and enjoy it while I have it! So, once I can get the help I need clearing out some of the obstructions, I can start nailing and screwing plywood and 2×4’s together! If I do this, I’m going to add a whole neighborhood and probably a S-scale train as well. And that brings me to the most contentious of the items I’m listing here, which is:
#6: The Heartbreak that is the “Matchbox Motorway!”
I’m going to just skirt the edge of what is a very very deep well here! This is a subject that requires not just its “own post” but its own series of posts! Virtually every 1:64 die-cast car fanatic out there must know about this famous, infamous toy! It is, at the same time, the coolest and the most frustrating model car contraption ever invented by man: both brilliant and maddening! This is the project that I was working on with my dear departed friend Dale after we finished the Model Motoring project; he got sick just as we were about to tackle this, and the rest, as they say, is history…that is, the history of things not happening. Whether or not its realistic to ever come back to this is something I will be discussing in great detail in future posts! For now, leave it at this: way back in 2020 when I first built Drag City and its diorama, the expansion I mentioned as item #5 was primarily planned to accommodate this! Once again, I reference our European friend Ricardo’s stellar work:
…while a slightly cheeky “intro” video to how this thing works can be found here:
Believe me kids, it’s not easy!
6. Getting back to The Get-Backs!
At the very end we come to something I’ve essentially tacked on, as this is another item that qualifies more as acquisition than construction. If any of you readers are wondering whatever happened to the Get-Backs project I blogged about so lovingly last year, the answer is that nothing happened to it; I just did exactly what you would expect: picked the low-hanging fruit of re-acquiring all the cars I once had that are actually obtainable, and left the very expensive and difficult ones unfound!
There is still quite a list, though! A lot of the Siku models, in particular, have been very elusive; I can find them for sale on all the usual online sites, that’s not a problem: the problem is that those sellers are always in deepest darkest Europe! And if you’ve seen the prices on postage lately, you know that buying a vintage die-cast that’ already expensive and then doubling or tripling the price with $30-40 or more in postage makes it an expensive proposition to rebuild that childhood collection!
More puzzling is the case of the many Majorettes I want to recapture, which seem like they shouldn’t be too hard to find, but they have been…which can only mean that I must have had some rare ones as a kid without knowing it!
Well, I’m getting them back one way or another, so I just have to remember to budget for some of these in the coming months instead of spending all my toy money @ CO Diecast every month! That’s also easier said than done but I should be able to do it if I put my mind to it: after all, not buying something should be pretty easy compared to some of the other things on this list!
So then, now that I’ve recapped everything I’ve talked about doing but haven’t done, I want to hear from you, dear readers!
Opine: what would you most like to see done and blogged about here? What suggestions do you have? What help or advice can you offer? Share your thoughts with me in the comments or send me an email here, and let’s get some of these projects started!
The infamous Balor “BARON BLOOD” Baddock with his ’85 Pantera GT5 “Dragon Fuel” at the starting gates after a qualifying run
It’s pretty amazing seeing your toys come to life like this based on nothing more than photographs and written descriptions! It adds a new dimension to The Lore of Drag City and the huge fleet of Thunderjets that race there. The images you see in this post were all generated by using the descriptions of the track, the cars, and the events that you can read about right here on this blog!
Are you ready to Rummmbllllle??? Muscle Car warmup as evening turns to dusk
Yeah, right now AI is fun; its like a new toy. It won’t be fun anymore in a year or two when we have become AI’s toy…and it will happen without us even realizing it. For now, though, I’m sitting here looking out my window as evening comes, and its well past 7:00pm; only a few short weeks ago it would been dark by now. Looking back over the last year or so of posts here at “thunderjetheaven.com” has got me thinking about how long its been since I’ve run a full tournament at track.
In the Paddock at Dusk… LEFT: Ronan “RUMBLE” Reynolds with “Duchess” RIGHT: Gavin “GLADIATOR” Gorman with “Springheeled Jack“
I’ve done a lot of work on the diorama, including construction of the carnival and a lot of additional cars, peeps, and other things to look at. I’ve done some racing too, especially with The Super Stocks with friends. I had Jason try his hand at the trigger for the first time a couple of nights ago; he seemed to think it was OK, but in his mind, its not MarioKart 😛 Fair enough, I guess.
Angus “METEOR” McKay with “Highlander” in the paddock getting ready for qualifying run
A crowd of race fans at hanging out in the parking lot at Drag City on a Southern California summer evening
Over the last year I’ve added some more Auto World T-Jets to the “overstock” area, acquired some really cool and really rare original Aurora T-Jets for The Road Crew, and done plenty of repairs and maintenance on all my roughly 400 slotties. But it has been a loooong time since I’ve picked out 64 or even 32 cars and lined them up for a full tournament! I just don’t have the time anymore; there’s too many other things to do. House work, yard work, maintenance on the 1:1 scale cars…and there’s hanging out with friends, too; that’s important. And of course there’s work: lots of that. I do more of that than I used too, kids; that’s the price I pay for advancement. I suppose I should enjoy it while I still have a job.
ABOVE: A cloudburst dampens the track as winning muscle cars take victory laps after a wash during the Independence Day Blowout
Summer is upon us, and at my house summer is the best time to race! My tiled basement stays cool even in the hottest weather. So far the late spring here has been remarkably mild and pleasant, but when the heat hits, it will be relentless; when I come home from a long hot day at work, its a great pleasure to take a short cool shower, pull on some shorts and a T-shirt, and descend to my happy place to get some music on and fire up the track! Which leads to the burning question: will there be any tournaments this summer? Well, I sure hope so! They are most likely going to go down on weekday evenings, and ever since breaking each fleet of cars into groups of 32, a race isn’t as long as it used to be, but with the time I have, it will still take several days to finish one.
Another infamously intimidating driver, Grant “Green Hell” Grennell with “Valedictory,” his ’68 Firebird 400
“Vindicator” draws an admiring crowd in the paddock on a packed and busy race day!
One of the things I want to experiment with is changing up my scoring methods; ever since I started, I’ve been going with the simplist format there is: whichever of the 2 cars has the fastest time around the track for the number of laps specified (which varies by race, usually 5 but some formats are longer) is the winner and advances to the next round. It works, but I’m thinking I’d like to implement a points system of some kind to keep things more interesting and shake up the results. Thing is, with a race between only 2 cars on 2 lanes, I’m not sure what that would look like. Gonna have to put some thoght into it. Open to ideas from other slot-heads! How do you score your races against the clock?
ABOVE: evening rain is rare in SoCal but not unheard of! The Sportscar 10-Lap Enduro rolls on, rain or shine!
Unfortunately, we’re already too late in the year for the full complement of tournaments I used to run: the Banzai Runner sports car races, some of the various Muscle Car Rumbles, even the Dale Pratley Memorial Challenge, have already been missed on the calendar. The next big event by calendar is the Independence Day Muscle Car Blowout, and then of course the Secret Oktober series this fall, which entails both muscle cars and sports cars. Some of the “one off” events such as the “Zombie Apocalypse” and the “No Mercy Memorial Day Muscle Car Brawl” may not return, because – in the case of that second one, at least – Memorial Day is upon us, and I’ve already got more to do this weekend than I can cram into the hours I have.
Racing into the night at the “Banzai Runner” sports car series!
This “adulting” thing is such a drag. How nice to know we’ll all soon be replaced by machines and have all the leisure time we need…and with no worries about keeping the bills paid, right, one-percenters? Oh, wait…maybe there’s still a few concerns with that… Oh well! Like I said, you can’t put that genie back in the bottle. So let’s do what we do best here at Drag City and take a look back! From March of 2021, here’s the video intro to the first muscle car tournament I ran when my fleet of slotties finally hit 64 cars! A lot of changes here; many of these cars are long gone from the fleet completely or, in more cases, have been changed or modified significantly over the ensuing 4+ years since this video was made. It sure was fun, though!
There will be time this summer to bring out the customized Auto World fleets; the tournments are likely to be far fewer and take longer to complete, but as a visitor to this blog, you won’t notice that: you’ll get the results and the cool stories and videos that go along with them! We should all enjoy this summer, dear readers, for by the time this season rolls around again, the world may look very different. So enjoy your own Thunderjets and Hot Wheels and whatever other scale model hobbies you enjoy, and I’ll see you here at the blog with reports from the track as the summer 1986 racing season continues at Drag City!
Summer night racing in the 1980’s: TAKE! ME! BACK!!!
Episode 18 marks the final installment of our Theatre of the Less Obvious column, focusing on those lesser-known car-themed flicks that YOU might have missed! There’s nothing wrong with a good low budget creature feature; such films won’t win academy awards, but most of us love them just the same, despite their flaws. For our last installment, I highlight just such a film: a little-known direct-to-video science fiction/horror thriller that introduces a unique twist to the “killer car” subgenre we already love! The film centers around a shape-shifting, sentient car that preys on unsuspecting victims by luring them into its cab, only to devour them! How’s that for a twist? You in?
Set in the heart of Chicago, Super Hybrid opens with a chilling scene: a gorgeous flaming red C5 coupe is left unlocked and unattended in an alley, needing only minutes to attract the attention of a teenage thief who thinks he’s won the lottery when he opens the door and sits behind the wheel. It is the last thing he ever does! Cut to a black primer beater ‘77 Chevy Nova hatchback on the prowl through the streets of the city after dark, where it collides head-on with a whale-sized Suburban, knocking it on its roof. After the incident, the remains of the Nova are towed to a municipal impound garage operated by the Chicago Police Department. The garage is a cavernous, underground facility, isolated at night and manned by a skeleton crew of mechanics, including the strong-willed Tilda (Shannon Beckner), her surly supervisor Ray (Oded Fehr), and a handful of blue-collar workers just trying to get through the night shift.
It doesn’t take long before strange events begin to occur—people go missing, and security footage shows nothing. The team begins to suspect that something inside the garage is stalking them. The truth is even more terrifying: the vehicle is not a machine at all, but a sentient, shape-shifting creature of unknown origin. It can morph into different types of cars, using its metallic body to create illusions and traps.
The creature is intelligent and adaptive, using the garage’s structure against the humans—sealing exits, manipulating the lighting, and hiding in plain sight. As the body count rises, Tilda must lead a desperate fight for survival. She and the few remaining mechanics must outwit the creature, using their knowledge of cars and engineering to turn the tables on the beast before it escapes the garage and unleashes its hunger on the wider world.
You can just imagine how this setup creates delight for gearheads as they wonder what car the unknown entity is going to take the shape of next! I don’t want to give everything away, but throughout the movie’s tight runtime, the creature appears as a ‘69 Chevy K-20, a ‘85 Chevy C-10, a “fat body” ‘71 Dodge Charger, and a ‘73 Mercury Marquis Colony Park wood-paneled wagon, among many others! In a parking garage filled with cars, which one is the creature?!
SPOILER ALERT! When the dust settles, the creature’s origin is never explored, and the film leaves much of the mythology unanswered. Some viewers may find this frustratingly vague, but I have always been a fan of movies that not only keep you guessing but also leave you wondering: everything is not tied up in a neat package at the end, and IMHO that is probably the film’s greatest strength!
At its core, Super Hybrid is a modern entry in the “killer car” horror tradition, tracing its roots back to films like Christine (1983) and The Car (1977). But unlike those, this isn’t a haunted car or a possessed vehicle—it’s a biological organism masquerading as a car, with transformative, chameleon-like abilities. That twist adds a layer of sci-fi weirdness that separates it from its predecessors. There are no oscar-winning performances here and the direction is taught but technologically metely adequate, but the interesting premise and some nail-biting action sequences make it worth a look for both sci-fi fans and gearheads alike. And if-like me-you’re both, you should definitely check out this “pulp thriller.” Don’t expect “emotional resonance;” do expect a high kill count and a tire-smoking good time!
SO…Where can you see it?
Likely due to its young age, this is fortunately another one that is readily available almost anywhere! You can see it on Amazon Prime, Netflix, Plex, or Apple TV! But why bother with any of that when you can watch it on Tubi for FREE…at least, as I sit here writing this! No telling what the future holds, but if you miss it there, you can also get it on DVD or Blu-Ray online for a low price!
Like the classic Hammer films of the ‘60s and ‘70s, I hope there’ll always be good fun cheesy flicks like this to get us through long snowy nights and rough summer weekends! These are the kinds of movies that teenage memories are made of; we need more like them!
ENJOY, FELLOW GEARHEADS!
Hope you liked this series of posts and some of the films discussed! Though this is the final T.o.t..L.O, we’ll do an epilogue featuring a recap, a look at one more film that’s outside the parameters we set, and a look into the future! You never know what adventures await here at DRAG CITY!
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 7th 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!
TOP: 3 of my “survivor” Hot Ones: a Mercedes 380SEL, a Pontiac Fiero 2M4, and a Chevy Citation X-11 – ABOVE LEFT: the first issue of the “80’s Corvette” ABOVE RIGHT: A later issue of the Datsun/Nissan 200SX: I remember this car distinctly, as when it was issued, it was the first Hot Wheels with an opening hood since the early 70’s; this was also one of the earliest Hot Wheels I got after they introduced metal-flake paint! It’s rough and play-worn, but I’ll never give it up!
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.
Another round of childhood survivors from the Tara 72-car case: “Speed Seeker,” “Sol-Aire CX-4,” Jet Sweep X5. These are the only original Ultra Hots I ever owned!
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!
Pic from the web: the exact set I got in 1984…I wonder what ever happened to the cool stamp?
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
These are awesome, but they are not the “Ultra Hots” I remember!
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).
The “new” “Ultra Hots.” These are not original castings from the mid ’80s, but like the originals, they have beautiful basecoats with ugly graphics and those hideous “spacey” wheels!
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!
