The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
Spend any time on the internet and you will come across ads that breathlessly proclaim the featured product is “disrupting a billion-dollar industry.” In reality, these companies aren’t so much disrupting an industry as they are applying a slightly different marketing and/or distribution spin on the industry.
In 1968, though, a product did disrupt a billion-dollar industry. It sold for just a dollar, blew away even the most optimistic sales projections and redefined boy-centric play for the next two decades.
Before the invention of Hot Wheels, die-cast toy cars were more or less faithful models of actual vehicles. Matchbox had been selling reproductions of various vehicles since 1957. Its very first vehicle was a replica of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation carriage, and its second was a green and red street roller, but by the mid-60s, 1:75 scale automobiles made up the bulk of its sales.
While Matchbox cars were popular, they had some definite limitations as toys. The fidelity to existing car designs limited the product line and made them relatively static in terms of play. A child could push them and go “vroom,” but that was about the extent of it.
An engineer named Elliot Handler saw his son playing with a Matchbox car and had an idea: What if there were a line of toy cars that were more like the custom hot rods of the day with flame paint-jobs, outlandish proportions and hood blowers? He took his idea to Mattel, whose Barbie doll was by far the leading toy for girls at the time but who hadn’t had a real hit with little boys.
The original Hot Wheels line consisted of 16 cars, from a custom blue Camaro to a Dodge Deora concept vehicle. In addition to their bold designs, the cars had a patented tire assembly that allowed them to roll faster and farther than Matchbox cars. Mattel created the now-iconic orange track to take advantage of this feature, which allowed kids to race their cars through a customized course that could include loops, curves and crossovers.
Both the cars and the track were massive hits, and I can tell you from personal experience that Hot Wheels were the MUST HAVE toys of Christmases in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
My frustration with Hot Wheels, ultimately, was that they were not a very interactive toy. Unlike slot cars, you had no input into the performance of your car. You were not the driver or the mechanic; you were just the owner. Mattel did sell a tool kit that purported to let you make “adjustments” in your car, in particular, the alignment of the wheels. I never had one of those, but the consensus of my friends who did was that they made very little if any difference. Because of the weight and center of gravity, some models were inherently faster than others. Once you figured this out, “races” became pretty predictable.
The engineers at Mattel came up with a couple of interesting workarounds for this. They devised an oval track with a “booster” tunnel that used battery-powered rollers and an air powered “brake.” A car coming out of the tunnel was moving too fast to take the turn without crashing, so the “driver” had to apply enough brake to keep it on the track. From experience, I can tell you that sounds a lot cooler than it was in reality.
Then, in 1970, Hot Wheels came out with its Sizzler line. Sizzlers were powered by a tiny electric motor and battery. The charging device, called a Juice Machine, used four D batteries and resembled a gas pump. Ninety seconds of charge time allowed the car to run for three-five minutes. They were fun while they lasted, but battery technology in 1970 was different from today, and those cars had a relatively short lifespan. My recollection is that you started seeing noticeable performance declines after a dozen chargings or so.
I had one other Hot Wheels toy, and while I was never able to get it to work quite right, it was unquestionably the coolest of all. The Hot Wheels Factory was a plastic injection molding machine for children. Let me say that again, a PLASTIC INJECTION MOLDING MACHINE FOR CHILDREN. Now, I was 9 years old when I got mine, and that was on the very low end of the “For Children Ages…” label, but still.
The Hot Wheels Factory was about the size and shape of a small stand mixer. You plugged it in and inserted a rod of colored plastic into the heating chamber. While heating, you prepared the molds (about the size of a cigarette pack), one for the chassis, one for the body and one for the windows. When the plastic was molten, you positioned the mold under the nozzle and depressed the plunger, which lowered the nozzle onto the mold and forced the molten plastic into it. The molds never filled completely. Never. Ever. You’d get three-fourths of a chassis or two-thirds of a window.
The obvious question is whether it’s a good idea to give 9-year-olds access to pressurized molten plastic. I’m pretty confident the 2022 answer to that is “absolutely not,” but parents in 1970 had more of a “boys will be boys” attitude about such things. Or, as a popular meme goes, “I died once when I was 5, and my father made me walk it off.”
If you happen to own one of those original 16 “redline” cars, it is worth thousands of dollars today. Some of the early ’70s cars I owned are worth hundreds. But, of course, I destroyed them all long ago, along with my $5,000 GI Joe Gemini capsule.
The good news is that Hot Wheels are still basically a dollar, which is impressive considering that they should be around $8, accounting for inflation. Honestly, I cannot think of anything else that costs the same today as in 1968.