Sitting behind
the wheel of a fully-blown custom Mustang, revving
that engine and listening to it roar; the flag is
waved and I roar down a long downhill stretch of
orange roadway, make a dizzy run through a loop
and then go hurtling through thin air, soaring ten
car lengths to land with a thud and let the car
coast down the remainder of the track. It comes to
a halt and I sink back into the plush seat,
exhausted from the thrill. Now that's excitement!
I was about 7 years old when Hot Wheels
came out. I guess I got them for my birthday – I
don't really remember. I do remember the track,
though; it was a dual track with two loops, two
jumps, a starting gate and a finish gate. The cars
were true classics, the Custom Mustang and the
Custom Barracuda.
I was instantly hooked.
My Legos went into a box under the bed. Major Matt
Mason and Billy Blastoff went into a drawer,
forgotten. All I could think about or talk about
was getting more Hot Wheels cars.
Before
Hot Wheels, I had my share of Matchbox and Tootsie
Toy cars, which my friends and I would use to play
in the dirt. One place in particular was an arroyo
with a soft, sandstone wall. Using sticks, we were
able to carve out an intricate set of roads,
tunnels, and caves where our toy cars could be
pushed around, our mouths making various motor
sounds. "Brooommmm, screeeech, aaaaaahhhh!" Lots
of careless pretend drivers drove right over
cliffs.
Hot Wheels changed all that. These
were bright, sparkling little jewels of cars. They
were pristine and very cool. They were fast and
came with plastic roads, and did amazing things.
We could race them and not automatically know who
was going to win. What a perfect toy!
I
collected them in three phases.
The first
phase started with my very first cars. I was very
persistent in collecting, trying to get one of
every model. I didn't care if it was cool or ugly
– if I didn't have it, I needed it. By 1972 I had
about 50 cars.
The main way I got these
cars was to surreptitiously collect all the
"market money" that the local grocery store gave
my mom when they went shopping. This was the
market's own internal cash, a promotion to keep
customers loyal. I would snag every single one and
horde them, so that the next time we went I had
enough to get a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes I'd even
ride all the way over there on my bike, all by
myself (I was 7 years old). If my parents ever
found out, they probably would have had heart
attacks.
Later, after we moved to
California and I was a bit older, I had a vast
amount of the orange plastic track. I had so much
that the inside of the house was just too
confining for me to design my raceways, so I would
send them down the driveway and have them curve
onto and run down the sidewalk. One day after a
particularly joyful session, I was distracted by
hunger and went inside for a snack. Then a cartoon
or something caught my attention and kept me
inside. By the time I realized I'd left my Hot
Wheels track and cars outside, the cars had been
stolen. Every single one of them, along with the
four wheel-shaped car cases.
My world
ended. I couldn't believe someone could be so
cruel. It was like being stabbed right in the
heart.
My parents rightly blamed me for
being so stupid as to leave them out in the front
yard. But I was so mournful for so long that my
mom broke down and took me out to buy more. I
think she bought me ten all at once. This became
phase 2 of my collecting.
It wasn't quite
the same. The new cars didn't seem as fast or as
dear as the originals. The wheels still had red
lines but no longer had the little white bearing.
Still, they were Hot Wheels, and I still had the
track. I kept collecting.
Shell Gas
started a promotion where they would give out free
Hot Wheels with every fill up. This was an
incredible boon to my collecting. My dad would
bring home new Hot Wheels every other day. A lot
of them were duplicates of ones I already had, but
that just gave me cars to trade. Then my friends
and I found that we could ride our bikes down to
the local Shell station and the attendants, who
didn't give a darn, would just hand them out.
Because of this, and because I was getting older
and had a bigger allowance, my car collection
swelled to some 300-odd cars.
Then
something really terrible happened. I grew out of
them. They were toys and I was a teenager. I lost
interest, and this was the worst thing of all: I
ceased caring about them. I started destroying
them during moments of boredom. Firecrackers and
BB guns blew them up in a very satisfying way. Or
we would race them down the waterslide and into my
dad's pool. I would even use lighter fluid to set
the track on fire, and send the cars down into the
flaming death of molten plastic.
Oh, the
stupidity!
Cars worth $40 today on eBay
were crushed by hammers. Or chopped in half with
an axe. Or set on the railroad tracks to become
warped Hot Wheels drink coasters. Some did survive
this onslaught of destruction, only to be given
away without much thought to neighborhood kids.
The track sat in a box alongside my long
unused Lego blocks in the attic above the garage.
I came and went, and then learned that my father
had thrown them all away. Oh well, it didn't
matter that much. They were just toys.
Years passed. I became a husband and then
a father. My baby girls grew from toddlers to
young ladies. Then the younger one developed a
fascination with toy cars, sparked by my
brother-in-law's collection of Hot Wheels. So I
started buying her a Hot Wheel every time we went
to the store, and in 1996 Hot Wheels came out with
the coolest thing I'd ever seen: a red Radio Flyer
Wagon with a big chrome engine and the familiar
mag rims. I had to have one!
Thus was
planted the seed of phase 3 in my collecting. I
kept telling myself and my wife, "No, I'm not
going to go through this again." How wrong I was…
mainly because my wife got hooked on them too.
I'm now up to over 1000 cars. For a while
there my Hot Wheels budget was over $40 a month in
cars alone! We got the track again, we got cases
(they sell good generic cases at Wal-Mart) and I
started taking pictures of each and every one.
Then I put these pictures up on a website to help
people identify them – just in case they lost
track, like I did, of which model was which.
Some adult collectors (and kids, too) keep
their Hot Wheels inside the package, pristine. Me,
I open them and send them down the track. Every
single one, even the rare "Treasure Hunt" cars.
And you know what? My 1000-odd car collection is
puny compared to a real collector. There are
collectors out there with tens-of-thousands of
cars, some of them worth hundreds or even
thousands of dollars a car.
Now when I'm
at the store and I see a Hot Wheels car I don't
have yet, I feel the same way as I did when I was
a kid. Wow! Eureka! A new one! I buy it without a
thought, adding it to my growing collection. And I
have finally come to realize something.
It's an obsession.
Jerry Davis
is a longtime Hot Wheels collector residing in
Plano, Texas, where he is often spotted racing
from store to store trying to find the latest Hot
Wheels cars. His latest science fiction novel,
Travels, is now available at all major online book
stores. |
.gif){kind=spacer}
.gif){kind=spacer}