SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: How Hot Wheels Work

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1:42Chuck here for another one of our Christmas-centric episodes with our 12 Days of Christmas Toys playlist. And today, I'm very pleased to introduce to you an episode that I liked quite a bit because when I was a kid, I loved me some Hot Wheels. And so this is that episode, How Hot Wheels Work. Pretty interesting story. Hope you guys enjoy it. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

2:13Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W., Chuck Bryant, and Jerry. You know that just sounded like that's what happens. Like you're having a nightmare and Yumi wakes you up in the middle of the night and you just go, Hey, welcome to the podcast. And then she slaps you across the face real hard. That's true. Yeah. That is what that sounded like. That's what it sounded like. That's pretty accurate. I don't know what got into me. You were just supercharged about this topic. That's terrible. What? Supercharged? I don't get it. It's like a supercharged engine? Oh, I didn't even think about that.

2:51Oh, good. That makes me feel a little better. Yeah. You know Jerry, by the way, before when I told her what we were doing said, oh my gosh, that was my favorite toy when I was a kid. Nice, Hot Wheels are pretty great. Yeah, I had quite a collection and I don't know where they are today. Oh really? Nope. They're missing, huh? Yeah, I don't know if they were thrown out or if my brother has them or they're in my mom's attic or what because I'm kind of curious if I have any valuable ones. Yeah, you need to find them. Yeah. They could be, apparently, as far as Hot Wheels collectors go, It could be in mint condition all the way down to beater condition.

3:26Oh, is that how they rank them? Yeah. Mine would be beaters because I played with them like crazy. That's good. I mean, that's what they're for. Sure. You know? And there's value for a beater too. Like some people apparently harvest them for parts to rebuild like a new Frankenstein model. Oh, really? Yeah. That's pretty neat. There's a lot of stuff you can do with them. Yeah, and we should thank the fifth grader who wrote this article too. Sad face. I complained about that out loud to Holly. I was like, this article actually says sad face, like as a sentence. Yeah. I know. I had issues. I'm glad you said something.

4:04Yeah. What if it was a fifth grader? Your feelings are all hurt. I think your feelings are hurt either way now. Sad face. So we're talking about Hot Wheels today. I had a couple. My favorite toy was G.I. Joe, but I appreciated Hot Wheels. Yeah, I had G.I. Joe too. We should do a G.I. Joe episode sometime. I had the older ones though. You probably had the - The huge ones? Yeah. Yeah. Now I had the real ones. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. I don't, that's fighting words. Man, the ones that I had were so awesome. They were like, there was a huge, vast collection of all of them. There was like Cobra. Cobra didn't exist when you were collecting G.I.

4:44Joes. No, but how could you say like, oh, that one that's 10 inches tall and has real clothes and fuzzy hair and the kung fu grip is inferior to this little plastic thing. I think you just said it all. Fuzzy hair says it right there. I don't really mean that, Chuck. I don't have a dog in that fight. Like if you like the big G.I. Joes, that's cool. I got no problems. Yeah, as a quick side note, I have to tell this story. Okay. You know how you used to do book reports and you would have to have a visual aid? Yeah. I might have told this before. If I do, I apologize. I don't recognize it. I did a report on Franco Harris when I went to lunch school because he was a - The football player?

5:27Yeah. I don't know why I did it on Franco Harris. Yeah. But I got my mom to make me a little Pittsburgh Steelers uniform for my G.I. Joe because he looked like Franco Harris. Nice. Yeah, and that was my visual aid. Do you still have it? No, of course not. Yeah. We had the G.I. Joes, but I think the Steelers uniform has gone bye-bye. That's sad. Yeah. You know, I'm sure your mom put a lot of work into that. Now I feel guilty. So, Chuck, I have a question for you. Yes. Did you know that the number one vehicle manufacturer on the planet is, in fact, Hot Wheels? I did. It's astounding until you stop and think about it.

6:07Sure. Apparently, since 1968, when Hot Wheels were first introduced, more than four billion Hot Wheels have been produced. that's more than the big four Detroit automakers combined. You're like, wow. And then you think, oh yeah, it costs a minute fraction of the cost to build a Hot Wheels than it does a normal car. Yeah. Plus also, it's not like you're going to go, I want this Buick Cutlass Supreme in every color it comes in. You know? With the Hot Wheels, you can do that. Yeah, the Lego stat is they're the biggest manufacturer of tires? Yeah, yeah. I wonder though, do these not count as tires because they're plastic?

6:51Do they count as wheels? I don't know, man. Because four billion times four, that's 16 billion tires. That's a really great question. I might have to challenge Lego, or maybe just look up how many tires they manufacture. Old Kirk Christiansen is not gonna be happy about this. Who was that? The founder of Lego. Oh. Remember Ole? Oh yeah, that's right. I thought you were saying old. No. Yeah, I remember old. Yeah. So let's talk about the history of this stuff, huh? Okay. So Hot Wheels, like I said, have been around since 1968. And anybody who's heard the Barbie Trademark Podcast will recognize the name Elliot Handler.

7:30That's Ruth Handler, the inventor of Barbie Trademark's husband. Sure. and Elliott apparently saw a real chance to muscle in on an already extant market by a company called Tyco that had a line of miniature metal cars, die-cast cars is what they're called, called Matchbox cars. That's right. By the time Hot Wheels came around, Matchbox was already there and had established a market and Mattel said, let's get in on that. Yeah, and the rumor is that he saw his grandchildren playing with them and said, they kind of stink. I can make these better and cooler. And he had a, as the story goes, had a designer, which we'll talk about in a second, called Harry Bradley.

8:18And he had a hot rod and Elliot was in the parking lot one day and said, man, those are some Hot Wheels you got there. And apparently, if you go look at the old original commercials for Hot Wheels. Did they say that? Well, that's how they pronounce it, hot wheels. Oh, instead of hot wheels? Yeah, the emphasis is on the hot. It sounds awkward. They're like, race your hot wheels. But it makes sense, though. You can race them. Just go buy some hot wheels. That's how they say it. Collect all your hot wheels. Yeah, but that makes more sense in the context of a sentence. It does, but having been raised post hot wheels.

8:59The emphasis is wrong. Yeah. Hot wheels. Hot wheels. Now I'm trying to picture the guy in the parking lot saying, those are some hot wheels you got there. You'd say, hot wheels you got there. You know? Yeah. Oh, boy. We can sure waste some time. We sure can. But the first, in 1968 is, like you said, when the first line came out of 16 hot wheels. They were sold initially for 59 cent apiece. Yeah, and like you said, the guy whose car originally inspired the name Hot Wheels was Harry Bradley, and he was the designer of that first 16 cars. They were also called California Customs Miniatures was that first original 16 group of Hot Wheels that were released in 1968.

9:52So Harry Bradley designed them all, including apparently he got his hands on the first one, by the way, that came out was a Chevy Camaro. Of course. The second one that came out was the Chevy Corvette. Of course. And apparently the Chevy Corvette came out before the actual Corvette came out. Yeah, the 69 Corvette, that is. So Harry Bradley was an old hand in not just miniature car design, but car design in general. He was an old GM designer. And I guess he had connections still at GM and probably under the table in a possibly illegal way, got his hands on the blueprints for the Corvette that hadn't been released yet, and Hot Wheels beat GM to the punch in releasing the 1968 Corvette.

10:36Yeah, 69. Thank you. That's all right. As the lore goes, he supposedly knew that the cafeteria door was unlocked, so he snuck in through the cafeteria door. That's called industrial espionage. Yeah, that sounds like a story, like just lore. Okay. But maybe so. Maybe he committed industrial espionage. Yeah. So like you said, those were the two of the first 16 in that original lineup, that original collection, which if you have any of those, you got some good money that you're sitting on. Because they went all out on that original line. Oh yeah. There were bushings to the suspension. Yeah. I mean the chassis.

11:23It had suspension, like shocks. You could press them down and it would bounce back. I had some of those. I don't think they were from 68, but when did they quit making those? It said up until... 77 was when they stopped making the... Oh, no. 70 is when the suspension got an overhaul. Okay. So for the first couple years, they were really putting a lot into these things. The tires were redline racing slicks. Yeah. And the whole reason they went to so much trouble is because they really wanted to destroy their competitor, Matchbox. And one of the ways they did that was by making these things far more functional than the Matchboxes were, the Matchbox cars were.

12:08So they really could race. And if you put a Matchbox car up against a comparable Hot Wheels, say the same model car, the Hot Wheels will destroy it every time in the head-to-head race. As we saw on the internet. A guy did that, of course. He took two Volkswagens and two Audi 8s, I think, and one Matchbox and one Hot Wheel. And he said they won by at least a car length every time he tried. Right. And this was no loop-de-loop or anything. It was just the straight race. Right. They painted them originally in Spectra Flame, which was very shiny and sparkly and expensive. And I don't think we said that all Hot Wheels are built at 164th scale.

12:51Yeah, that's a big point. But not necessarily all Matchbox cars. They kind of vary here and there. Right. But, like you said, that Spectra Flame and the Redline tires only lasted until 77. And the suspension only lasted until 1970. And sadly, a lot of that had to do with the fact that they moved them from Hawthorne, California to Hong Kong. Yeah. And like any product, you're like, hey, you can make it for half as much if you make it in China. So let's move, let's ship the operations overseas. Well, not only that, it's the Spectra Flame pane is pretty expensive. It's awesome. It looks great. Yeah.

13:29But it's pretty expensive. So with any collector's item, as they started to downgrade the components and the parts and the manufacturing and ultimately the final product, all that did was make the original stuff all the more valuable today. Yeah. Because there's fewer and fewer of them as the years go on, proportionately speaking. Yeah. They had actual axles. Right. It was like a real, they were designed by car designers, and they were made apparently to reach 200 scale miles per hour. Yeah, that's pretty cool. That's way cool. Yeah, remember like in the cockroach episode, we talked about how they're the fastest animal on the planet, relatively speaking?

14:09Pretty neat stuff. Yeah. So Chuck, right out of the gate, Mattel had a hit on its hands. Oh, yes. They released them in 1968. By 1970, Hot Wheels was a Saturday morning cartoon in the vein of Dune Buggy and Scooby-Doo and all those guys, Hanna-Barbera. Dune Buggy? Or Speed Buggy. Speed Buggy? Yeah. Remember Speed Buggy? Yeah, it was like a Dune Buggy that could talk, and it was basically - Wonder Bug? No, it's Speed Buggy. Oh, okay. Because there was Wonder Bug, too. If you took Shaggy and put some racing goggles on him and then turned Scooby-Doo into a Doom Buggy? Yeah. That's Speed Buggy. Oh, is that a cartoon?

14:52Yeah. They went around solving mysteries and stuff like that. Yeah, Wonder Bug was, I think that was live action. Oh, this was a cartoon. Sid and Marty Croft. This is exactly like Scooby-Doo by the people who did Scooby-Doo using the same people who did the voices for Scooby-Doo. It just vaguely changed the characters. Hot Wheels was virtually the same thing, except it was about racing clubs. There were the bad guys and the good guys. Do you know what this proves? What? It's the 1970s. The dune buggy was a very popular thing. You remember seeing those on the road? I used to see them all the time.

15:25Not all the time, but in the 70s, it was a common thing. Yeah. You don't see them anymore. Very rarely. Nope. No gremlins, no yugos, no wonder bugs. You know, I like gremlins. Do you? They're okay. For me, though, the coup de grace of car design is the AMC Pacer. Yeah. It's like the Formica kitchen of cars. Yeah. It's beautiful in all the weirdest ways. So much window. That would be my sought after Hot Wheels. If I had a Hot Wheels, if I just could have one Hot Wheel. Yeah. It would, I don't know if that would be it, but I'd be happy with that one. Now, do they have that as a Hot Wheel? Oh, yeah.

16:06Okay. I looked it up. And if you look up AMC Gremlin Hot Wheels, they went to town on those. They had some with the intakes sticking out of the hood and just all sorts of awesome different variations like IndyCar, Gremlins, and stuff like that. And that raises a pretty good point. Hot Wheels has always been about the racing design. They've designed them to look like racing cars, but they've also manufactured them to actually be able to win a race like we talked about with Matchbox. Yeah, and one of the differences, that is one of the main differences between the Matchbox and the Hot Wheel is they were just much more interested in being sportier.

16:45Like you could get a Matchbox like a delivery truck. Right. You know? But the Matchboxes looked more real. They all were about looking realistic and not necessarily performance. Yeah. And hey, if you want a bread truck, you can get a bread truck. Right, exactly. But you can't get a bread truck Hot Wheel. Right. You know? We'll talk more about all of this jam right after this.

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19:55You want to go ahead and talk about some of the other differences between Matchbox and Hot Wheel? Yeah, sure. Since we're at it. Matchbox, or I'm sorry, Hot Wheel is the one that is more likely to have branded versions. Oh, man, and do they ever. Like the Ghostbusters Ectomobile. Right, or even more than that, they have a deal with M &M Mars for 2015. Oh, they do. So they have a Twix trucks and a Skittles van and all this stuff. They have licensing with DC and Marvel this year. Fast and the Furious, I know they had a line. Yep, so they're really big time into branded. And a lot of times they'll have a store will just have exclusives.

20:37Oh, right. You have access to an exclusive line of Skittles cars or something like that. That you can only get at KB Toys. Yeah, I think they have a NASCAR deal too, if I'm not mistaken. I would not be surprised. And the Hot Wheels usually have a little bit wider, a longer axle and wider wheels, because it's just cooler if that wheel sticks out from the body a little bit, you know? Well, plus also supposedly, and we'll talk about this a little more, when you shrink a car down to scale, it looks a little weird. Yeah, you might as well go ahead and bring that up. Okay. It looks weird. You can't just shrink it and have it in the same proportion and have it look normal.

21:14Right. Like it'll be as far as like shrinking a car down by scale. It will be in the exact same proportion, but it's just off a little bit. So what they do to make a Hot Wheels raceable is they expand the wheel well a little more. Yeah. They break it out a little bit, which is why the wheels stick out some on a Hot Wheels, but not on a Matchbox. That's right. Because Matchboxes are all about realism. To heck with how it looks, as long as it's real. One of my favorite ones, and I had one of these, that they mentioned in this article, was the Red Baron. The person who wrote this said it was an inexplicably cool helmet over the cockpit.

21:58I don't know about inexplicable. It was just the roof of the car was a helmet. But I looked it up again today and I was like, oh yeah, I had that thing. But it was, it wasn't a Nazi helmet per se, but it was that shape of the helmet. Like the U.S. soldiers have that shape now, you know, where it's cut lower around the ears. Right. Instead of just a straight, you know, like the World War II helmet. Right. But the Nazis used those first, you know, because it's a better design for war. And it also had a black iron cross on the side of it. Well, hence the Red Baron, right? Yeah, but it's easy now as an adult to look and say, hmm, that looks like a little Nazi hot rod.

22:39Yeah, but the Red Baron was World War I. He was pre-Nazi Germany. Yeah, and it was also, I think at the time, just looked like the biker gang would wear those helmets with the iron cross. Yeah, and all of it was Southern California hot rod culture. Yeah, exactly. Is what gave rise to Hot Wheels, so it makes sense. Yeah, I don't think there was any surreptitious intent. Yeah. So, like I said, right out of the gate, Hot Wheels was a hit. They had a cartoon within a year or so of the first 16 being released. Sure. The second release, they had, I think, 22 new cars. Yeah, 33 total. And then the third year, they had another.

23:21They released 33 after that, right? Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. 33 by 1970. So they did 16, 24, and then 33. And all of them came in different colors, right? So like I said, if you had one, that didn't mean you had them all. You wanted to collect them all. So kids were going crazy for it. And another way that Mattel very wisely targeted children was to get in with fast food. In 1970, the first Hot Wheels came out as a toy at Jack in the Boxes. Oh, really? Yeah. The big one, though, the one that put them over the top, was in 1983 when kids who were were lucky enough to be taken to McDonald's for dinner.

24:03Happy meal. To get a hot wheel. Which is what they called them at the time. We could get one of 14 Hot Wheels in 1983. And they had some cool ones. They had a Chevy Citation. Did they really? Yeah, they had one that was one of my favorites actually. It was a Toyota Mini Trek, which is like a station wagon camper. And it even said, painted on the side, good time camper that you could get in your Happy Meal, which if I could have one Hot Wheel, it would probably be that. You know what they were doing, now that I look back through my adult eyes? Like snorting pot? No, they were giving you a bunch of crappy ones because you wanted to keep coming back to get the cool one.

24:49Yeah, probably. You're like, ah, I got a citation. I'm like, can I go back? Because I want to get the hot rod. Right. That's exactly what they were doing. Sure. man I feel so like manipulated. What did you think they were doing with Happy Meals? Well I mean I know it was all manipulation to get you to try and own all of them. Right. But they should have been all cool ones but you can't do that because the regular kid might be like no I got the cool one I'm fine. But if you get the citation you feel gypped off and you really want to go back and get one of the hot rods. Yeah. It's... My eyes are wide open my friend.

25:24Well that's why our friends down under in Australia have outlawed marketing directly to children, which I think is a fantastic moment. Oh, really? Yeah, that's so unfair to market directly to children. It's just almost literally is like taking candy from a baby. Right. Kids aren't sophisticated enough to psychologically defend themselves from being bombarded by adults to say, go tell your parents to buy you this. You can't function correctly without this trapper keeper, so go get it. The Trapper Keeper. Yeah. What, did they make a law? Yeah. Really? Yeah, it's a big one. Very progressive law. It's a big law.

26:05I think all countries should adopt. Well, in 1983, I agree wholeheartedly by the way, in 1983 is when that Happy Meal thing happened and also the same year they moved from Hong Kong to Malaysia and it said that's when they added their economy cars so that must have coincided with the citation. Yeah. The Citation, man. One of the most disappointing Happy Meal toys you could possibly get. Yeah, because it reminded you of your dad who drove a Citation. Right, who was always mad.