What Were Your Favorite Car Toys? Autopian Asks

Autopian Asks is supposed to be a light and breezy item easily whipped up and presented to you, our esteemed readers, so you can provide the real content: your insightful, amusing, thoughtful, and/or wry comments on whatever it is The Autopian is asking.

I did not do this, and instead lavished far too many words to the topic at hand because it’s near and dear to my heart: toys. Specifically, toy versions of cars and other vehicles, as I’m sure you aren’t hoping for an extra 1,000 words on Big Jim or Soaring Sam or Vertibird (though I will happily discuss them in the comments).

With actually operating a car more or less a decade away for a typical car-crazed kid like myself in the 70s, toys were the outlet for my nascent automania. Thankfully, it was a golden era for playthings, and as I’m sure you geezers my age will attest, we had some bangers. Here are just a few of the car-themed toys from my youth that have really stuck with me:

Stick Shifters

One of my earliest car memories is riding in the passenger seat of my Dad’s Super Beetle (unbelted, of course) and wondering what exactly was going on with the shift knob and how Dad knew what to do and when to do it. It certainly looked fun, and when Dad let me run through the pattern in the driveway while he explained it all, precisely none of it registered in my 5-year-old brain – but pushing and pulling that shift lever stirred something in me as surely as it had stirred the Beetle’s four-speed internals.

 

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And so, when Hasbro’s Stick Shifters landed under the Christmas tree that year, I was thrilled to have a four-speed of my own. The stick action wasn’t nearly as satisfying as the real thing, and I shot the car out of the launcher exclusively in fourth gear which made shifting irrelevant, but still, the toy made a real impression.

It also made me wonder why Dad never tach’d the Beetle to redline and dumped the clutch in fourth to wheelie off the line, which was Stick Shifters whole schtick. “Stick Shifters, get ’em in gear, gonna make a wheelie, gonna disappear!”

Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle

Oh man, Evel Knievel. Kids went nuts for the star-spangled daredevil in the 1970s, and Ideal Toys had a monster hit on its hands with the Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle. In toy form, Evel was an 8-inch “bendy” figure made of vinyl molded over a wire skeleton that rendered a much more durable rider than Evel himself ever was, and the Stunt Cycle was kid-powered via a hand-cranked launcher. The launcher meshed with a gear on the Stunt Cycle’s rear wheel that spun a metal flywheel up to a bazillion rpm to not only store energy, but also act as a gyro that kept Evel and the Stunt Cycle balanced on two wheels.

It worked! The “King of the Stuntmen” could really put on a show with impressive speed, wheelies, and sky-high jumps. Perhaps most entertainingly, nearly every trip out of the launcher ended with Evel painfully ejecting from his machine (it looked painful, anyway) and eating shit in spectacular fashion – “the full Caesar’s Palace,” if you will.

Ideal’s Evel Knievel line expanded into a whole range of vehicles (you can see them all in the UK-market commercial above), but the Stunt Cycle was always the star of the show. So much so, in fact, that it’s been brought back twice; Playing Mantis resurrected the toy in the late 90s (yes, I have one), and you can get your own Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle right now at EvelKnievelToys.com. There’s a whole scene for these things, with kids and adults really going wild with their Evels Knievel.

SpinWelder & Riviton

I was always a construction-toy kid, and these takes on DIY fun from Mattel and Parker Brothers were absolutely mesmerizing to me. I never actually owned a SpinWelder or Riviton set myself, but the neighbor kid had them. However, they weren’t really his thing since he preferred the mindless frenetic action of toys like Gnip-Gnop. And so, he let me weld and rivet to my heart’s content.

Weld, you say? Indeed. SpinWelder was a friction-welding toy that enabled you to construct all sorts of vehicles by jamming a spinning plastic rod against the butt joints of the pieces you were assembling. Friction turned the plastic rod and the parts to be mated molten, fusing them together when the plastic cooled. It took skill, patience, and an ample supply of lantern batteries to produce good welds (good as in structurally sound, there was no way you were gonna stack dimes with this thing), and the fumes cast by the melting plastic were surely toxic, but still: real welding. Neat!

Riviton held similar “real car-building technology” appeal as SpinWelder, and as you might guess from the name, it allowed kids to rivet panels, girders, and other parts together to make cars, boats, helicopters, you name it. But unlike SpinWelder models, creations built with Riviton could be disassembled thanks to the clever, reusable rubber rivets.

Here’s how it worked: when you placed a Riviton rivet in the gun and squeezed the handle, the rivet would be captured by its flange and then stretched by a pin that extended into the rivet as you squeezed the rivet gun’s trigger to its stop. Then all you had to do was insert the rivet through the holes in the parts you wanted to mate, release the trigger, and the rivet would return to shape, now too large to pass through the holes. Presto, the parts were joined. The gun also removed the rivets and the whole process was pretty satisfying, as I recall.

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Kenner SSP – Super Sonic Power

Kenner’s SSP line captured my kidmagination with wild designs and a few real-car subjects including that favorite of 70s kids, the Superbird. I wasn’t alone, as SSPs were a big hit. SSPs tapped the Hot Wheels zeitgeist but with larger-scale models, and they were pretty dang fast by the standards of my seven-ish-year-old self. Each SSP carried a metal flywheel wrapped in a solid rubber tire. A toothed “T-Handle Power Stick” engaged a small gear cast into the flywheel to spin it. Bigger kids could really yank the Power Stick and get that wheel spinning up to serious RPM before sending their SSPs down the street at ankle-shattering speeds. Good times.

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Stomper 4X4s

The toy cars of my era were exclusively devoted to speed. Hot Wheels leaned hard on velocity, Johnny Lightning upped the ante, and slow-rolling Matchbox took a drubbing until it introduced new Superfast wheels to satisfy kids’ need for speed. And then Stompers came along, with battery power and low gearing (as in numerically high ratios) that let the little AA-powered, Hot-Wheel-sized trucks crawl over steep grades and off-road obstacles on their gear-like tires.

Schaper licensed a whole bunch of real-truck designs for the Stompers line, and I spent hours creating courses for the authentic little rigs. Every kid I knew had at least one Stomper, and collectors are still crazy for the tiny 4X4s – just take a look at Ebay. Schaper offered terrain playsets for trucks, but the plastic courses paled in comparison to what could be achieved with couch cushions, blankets, books, and whatever else was around the house – not to mention the uncharted realms of the backyard.

Lego Expert Builder Sets (It’s Technics Now)
Unless you were a Lego kid in the late 70s, you cannot fully appreciate the massive leap the brand made when the first Expert Builder kits arrived on the scene. Other than wheels, pulleys, and parts (sorry, elements) that allowed hinge motion, Lego was very light on elements that would let you build functional mechanical models. But with Expert Builder, hoo boy, now the possibilities were seemingly endless. Gears! Pivots! Shafts! Axles!

I had the forklift set seen above, and though it looks crude today, it was downright revelatory in 1977. The rear wheels steered via rack and pinion, and the fork raised and lowered with a pair of racks – endlessly fascinating stuff to kid-me. But the set that really blew every Lego builder’s mind was the 853 Car Chassis, as seen below. It had an inline-four engine with pistons that go up and down you guys. Look at that steering setup, complete with a universal joint to get wheel motion down to the steering rack. And adjustable seats! Again, it’s almost laughably simple compared to any modern Technics set, but back in the 70s? This was peak Lego.

Hot Wheels Sizzlers
Yes, of course Hot Wheels are on this list– but it’s not the free-rolling models I want to discuss here, though I certainly had plenty of those. Instead, it was Sizzlers that really revved up kid-me, pun intended, as Sizzlers were motorized machines. It was novel enough that Mattel managed to fit a battery and motor in the 1/64 scale cars, but it was even more impressive that they were actually fast, and could be recharged in a few minutes via the “Juice Machine.” Fittingly designed as a miniature gas pump, the Juice Machine housed a pair of D batteries to transfer the titular juice to your Sizzler.

Mattel offered Sizzler sets with the traditional orange track components, but the Fat Track sets were where the real fun was to be had. True to their name, the fat (as in wide) laneless tracks gave Sizzlers plenty of room to run free, and the high-banked turns kept them from flying off the racecourse as they battled flat out on the plastic superspeedway. You weren’t controlling anything, of course, but that chaos was part of the fun, and the action was thrilling.

Alright, I have certainly gone on long enough. Now it’s your turn: what were your favorite car, truck, motorcycle, and you-name-it vehicle toys?

To the comments! … or, if you want even more toys, check out these toy-takes from Torch: A Gun That Shoots Cars, Punchcard-Controlled Cars, And Tiny Gas-Powered Toy Cars: Weird Commercials Of Toys Past