Having been in the toy business for a while, one of my favorite things to spot is a trend. Much of the time one movie dominates the scene for a while, but what's fun is when companies who don't have a license make something anyway. In 2003, nobody had a Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl license, but Mattel had the foresight to put out its "Boulevard Buccanneers" Hot Wheels collection with a kid-friendly generic Pirates theme. And that's how I came to find this Bread Box at an antique mall over the summer. "Hey, that's neat" I said, and I dropped a couple of bucks on it.
When I was a small kid, there weren't many pirate toys outside of the occasional Playmobil set. By the end of the 1980s we'd see a lot more, like the very first LEGO Pirates sets. There were more explicit piratey things on TV, like The Pirates of Dark Water, ghost pirates in Garfield's Halloween Adventure, and tons of other appearances as bad guys-of-the-week. Much like mummies and Greek myths, pirates are a public domain thing that's a brand name that gets eyeballs and moves product. If it weren't, Disney wouldn't have given Johnny Depp all the money to impersonate Keith Richards on a boat.
Before this pirate version the Shoe Box car first came out in 2000 as yet another cool car based more or less on the 1949 Ford Custom Club Coupe. Not coincidentally, car licensing wasn't in full swing yet - that's just before we saw Hasbro get slapped by not having a Dodge license for Side Burn in Transformers: Robots in Disguise, kicking off either licensed cars or cars being changed significantly more to avoid a lawsuit.
This is a lot of rambling before I say this is a neat car. I assume it's not clip art - the sides of the car have what seems like coloring book art with a brown sash and a red belt, seemingly stretched horizontally (and flipped) for both sides of the car. It looks pretty good at a distance, but when I get close it feels like it may have been designed for something else before being applied to the metallic, sparkly white painted car. The hood and trunk are blank, but what makes this car truly cool? The roof.
A tattered riff on the classic Jolly Roger flag has a Hot Wheels logo over the skull and crossed swords, matching the colors of the car itself. The driver and passenger windows are down, but the remaining elements are cast in red plastic.
It rolls nicely, and it's incredibly charming. The base is vac-metal plastic, matching the engine, but lacking the heft of many of the 20th century mostly-metal automobiles. It's not quite as lightweight as many of the modern cars either, with graphics that show signs of the growing sophistication with printing on these surfaces. I think it's utterly stunning what Mattel can do today, but cars like this are pretty impressive for what we got 21 years ago. For a relatively cheap, common, but old car I'd say it's worth tracking down. There are no shortage of cars in the bins at the local Kroger-owned grocery stores here, but the pegs and bins at your local antique mall may have some pretty incredible toys for roughly original retail price, plus or minus a few pennies and 20 years of inflation. As a kid who was going to toy shows in the 1980s, the thought of getting toys from the 1960s for almost nothing was never something I considered - but in 2024, it's a treat to pick up something that's (for a toy) absolutely ancient.
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