Hot Wheels 1997 Basic Cars
Item No.: Asst. ??? No. 16811 Manufacturer:Mattel Includes:n/a Action Feature:n/a Retail:$$1 Availability: ca. 1997 Other: Previously sold as "Inside Story," often with licenses like Spider-Man and The Silver Surfer
One of the most exciting things about coming late to Hot Wheels is that with the right mindset, it is an incredibly fun hobby. If you don't care about what's rare and can live without holy grails, you can wander to an antique mall on a Friday night and find a 1997 Beach Blaster for $3. You can get it for less - technically - online as it's worthless, but sellers have to charge you shipping - so your $1.29 car winds up being $7.28 in no time. $3 works for me.
It's a big van, with an angular design that first hit toy shelves in 1979 as "Inside Story." What's interesting is that it's not too far off from other toys of its era, reminding me a lot of things like Fisher-Price's Adventure People Alpha Star and some Kenner Star Wars Mini-Rigs. It has a big window and it's very boxy - you could see where things were going in the world of cars. By the end of the 1990s, the custom van craze that was big in the 1980s had long since ended. If you saw a weird van, it no longer had a cool wizard painted on the side - but it probably had some weird mattresses and was referred to as "the shaggin' wagon" by teens who saw it parked on their street.
Mattel made the most of their tooling, and this was the end of the line for what would have been a nearly two decade tour of duty in toy aisles. (Admittedly, it didn't get a lot of use in the 1990s.) The massive winoshield had sculpted windshield wipers on it, but the chassis lacked such niceties as doors. The base is relatively simple, cast in gray plastic with a couple of greeblies - a far cry from the detailed undercarriages we see on most modern releases. Everything is very flat, you can see some vents and some clever ideas like making the red interior show through the headlights, setting them apart from the gray plastic bumper. It has black wheels with silver hubs - nothing special, nothing terrible.
The van has a "Hot Wheels" logo stamped around where the gas cap could be, and everything else is a little more abstract. Each side of the white van has a big red stripe plus some large purple shapes which seem like the natural evolution of those Jazz Stripes and graphic art you may have seen on Dixie cups or other home essentials of that era. It's shapes - it's nothing in particular, other than being a splash of color that you may find instantly appealing or revolting.
I saw this one at an antique mall's die-cast car booth, kept looking at it, and put it down - and when I went back to get it a few weeks later, it was gone. And a few weeks after that, it was back again - I snapped it up and was happy to do so, because the shape is unlike anything in the modern Matchbox and Hot Wheels lines. There are plenty of vans, but this is some tip-top late-1970s toy design, when licensing was still something of the wild west and Mattel could (and indeed did) make a car of the Mach 5 from Speed Racer and changed it just enough so nobody would sue them. There were a lot of whimsical cars, vans, and trucks from that era and some of them just look like they came out of a dream, or at least a designer sketchbook that had not been thoroughly vetted for roadworthiness.
With the big skylight in back, no doors, and presumably a lot of storage space to transport illicit produce over state lines, it's hard to not like this strange little van. When I go to the stores and see staton wagons with faux wood paneling or vans that seem like the style was antiquated when the NES was hitting shelves, I can't help but shell out a couple of bucks. To 21st century eyes it looks more like a toy than something you'd get at a car dealership, and its charming paint job isn't even the best one the mold ever got. But it is charming, and a weird 1990s paint job on a weird 1970s design, so it's the kind of toy I needed to pick up and the kind of thing I hope other companies consider making in the future. Just make something original, it grabs the imagination.
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