Toy Cars

Well, I'm all on autopilot until my wedding vacation about 6 weeks. Week after week it feels roughly the same. So I'm not really finding any good juicy news to post about much lately. This reminds me of the few times I tried to do a journal as a kid and I'd end up with about 4 or 5 entries in a row that said "Dear Diary....nothing much happened today." Seriously, not much happens when you're generally stuck in the home office all day.

If there was anything interesting lately was the birthday party for my best friend's little boy Ethan. My little ring-bearer-to-be is 5 years old now. Man how time flies.

So I went shopping for his gift lately...which is usually pretty fun for a little boy his age. It's SO easy... he likes toy cars just as I used to love them when I was his age. I'm so glad not all of today's kids have totally abandoned traditional toys in favor of video games.

So anyway, I'm at the shop looking for these cars (trying very hard not to pick some up for myself), and I got really disappointed that the toy car selections really suck these days. Those of you guys out there who used to play with toy cars probably know what I mean. These days all they have are Hot Wheels. And CRAPPY ones at that. All the cars are funky looking and bizarre. Half the fun of getting a good car when we were kids was finding the actual replicas of cars on the road at the time. Not these bizaare things with wacky dohickies all over it.

Whatever happened to all the other types of die-cast car models as well?

Anybody remember Pocket Cars? These were the cars that were the most authentic & detailed. They usually came with real moving parts where you could open the doors or trunks. They had suspension and usually extra parts for things like the lights and interior. If you rolled these cars, these rolled the best. They were SMOOOOOTH. I actually had the one pictured above too. What twisted sick kid left this car in the original blister pack? I had some damn good Pocketcars until my younger brother came along like a freak hurricane and wrecked them all. That sucka.

I don't see Matchbox around as much anymore either. These were a little more heavy duty then the Pocketcars. Sometimes they had good moving parts. Both Pocketcars and Matchbox had good wheels...if you rolled them they generally ran straight and true. Unlike Hotwheels cars which always drifted all over creation.

And then you got the granddaddy of all die-cast cars which were the Hotwheels. These were the cars that withstood the most abuse. I remember taking firecrackers to these things and they still held together. You could take these to the beach, you could roll these through Slime & Playdoh...and they'd STILL come out ok. I had the "Poison Pinto" pictured above too! Oh the memories.

Only Hotwheels seems to have survived today. That kind of sucks. Maybe I should start a die-cast car company.