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:Â A Gun That Shoots Cars, Punchcard-Controlled Cars, And Tiny Gas-Powered Toy Cars: Weird Commercials Of Toys Past
I wasn’t a kid in the 80’s or 90’s, so I feel like I when I was a kid there was a wider array of toys to choose from. Still, I only had to major groups.
Always having been a fan of trucks and machinery, my favorite toys were Bruder vehicles, like a CAT excavator, a cement mixer, tractors with ploughs, and front loaders… I’ve spent countless hours loading up the trucks, or just driving them around.
And, of course, Lego. By far my best and most used toys. I had (and have) giant bins of it, plus the sets I kept built on the shelf. Of course, most are vehicles. I have some big Technic sets, like the Mercedes Arocs, the CAT bulldozer, and the remote controlled Volvo wheel loader. I even have the old Unimog set, which is a gem in my collection. Anyway, the best part is of course building your own stuff, and I just build better and better City-scale trucks. Definitely my favorite toys.
When I was a tiny Wail, I was gifted a Remco Flying Dutchman vintage car of enormous scale – probably 1:18 and over a foot long. It used 4 D-cells powering an electric motor that would run it straight ahead or in circles. The feature I remember most is that it had a switch on the dash that would illuminate its single headlight. That meant I could run it in the dark which was all that to a tyke. I have no idea what happened to it but I imagine my parents got tired of me constantly running my car into my bedroom wall at speed.
Some years later, relatives who owned a hobby shop retired and gave me some of their closeout inventory: an Aurora HO-scale slot car set and some extra O-gauge (larger) track with HO adapters, meaning I had enough track to cover a 4×8 foot piece of sheetrock resting on a ping pong table. I only had two powered cars, a Porsche 904 and a Ford GT, but I filled the empty infield with a bunch of old Matchbox cars that were pretty close in scale. Many epic races were held for several years until someone – possibly an older sister – reclaimed the ping pong table and the track was lost to “urban development.”
Some great stuff already in the list. I had bunch of those Stompers. They were a blast as is, even the non-motorized ones they gave away at McDonalds were a good time. Then after getting tired of regular play, the motors could be repurposed into all kinds of experimental things. At one point I tried attaching one to a balsa-wood airplane. Didn’t fly, but was fun to try.
Seeing the Evel Knievel set reminded me of the stunt-set I had that was absolutely one of my favorite toys as a kid. The Joey Chitwood Dare Devil Stunt Playset by ERTL. I actually got to see them live at the fair when I was around four, so playtime with that set was extra awesome. The included pull-back Chevette, shot through the card-board cut-out “explosion” at the end of the giant can of Mr Pibb was just the coolest thing ever. The set even came with a little mini-ramp that was supposed to allow the Chevette to do an up on two-wheel maneuver. It never really worked, but that didn’t stop me from wearing out the pull-back mechanism trying to get it to. I was so enamored with that set that I would even build card-board carnival “set’s” with grandstands, rides and such just to recreate the whole experience the best I could. Mom did however put a kibosh on my idea to bring in garden dirt for maximum realism. I also had a few Nylint steel trucks that would stand in for the “road crew”.
Hot Wheels and the garage-sale track I had amassed were also a fun go-to for a young car-obsessed me. Although if I’m being honest, the Tomica cars were actually my favorite, even though they were a little hard to come by in my neck of the woods. They were so much more realistic and I loved their actual springy suspensions. I had both the ’76 Fleetwood Brougham and the ’78 Jaguar XJS, which to this day are also two of my favorite existing production cars.
It would be hard to pick a defined favorite. In addition to the above I had the luck of having an uncle who never got rid of anything, but never really played with it much when he was a kid either. So, at certain family get-togethers I had access to a bunch of old-school track and OG 1st-gen Johnny-Lightning cars along with original Hot Wheels Redlines. He also had an old slot-car track I got to mess with. It never worked quite right, but did let me get a crash-course in basic electricity, little motors, and other things I was more than happy to experiment with at the time.
With an entire upstairs currently filled with various Die Cast, I never really did grow up. Thanks for the trip down memory lane! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to check on the eBay prices of the last remaining Joey Chitwood Thrill Sets. I’ve got my own house now and can bring in all the dirt I want.
We had the Thundershift 500, an oval Hot Wheels-scaled race track with a fun gimmick- to keep the cars moving you had to pull a “shifter” at the exact moment that the car passed over a red plastic lever that sat in a depression in the base. That lever would jump out and shove the car forward.
You could get a car moving pretty damn fast; I can still remember the distinct sound the card made as they whipped around the banked curve at the opposite end of the track, and the ka-chunk of the shifter.
Missing a shift with this toy was like accidentally shifting from 5th to 2nd instead of 4th in a real car- it would jump out of the track and fly off into oblivion under the sofa.
My brother had a Pit-Change Charger, a large replica of an early 70s Dodge Charger. It came with a slightly crumpled fender the you could put on to simulate damage, and a removable hood with an engine you could take out using the provided engine hoist, powered by a little electric wrench.
My brother went to town on it- he added a white vinyl top, trimmed with thin strips of- get this- lead to simulate chrome. He built a whole steel front subframe that could be adjusted to simulate (and subsequently repair) frame damage. He got extra wheels and melted flat spots on them to simulate flat tires. He got extra front end parts to creat a truly wrecked version of the car. He cut the trunk lid off and made it openable, and mounted a spare tire in there.
Almost 50 years later and he still has it.
Starred for the mention of the Thundershift 500, which I also mention in my comment later. The base track was a little short, so extending it with extra track segments made it even more fun.
Plastic model kits, with a XKE Jaguar being a favorite. Mashing up various kits to make custom cars. Hot Wheels and the like. Basic Lego back then when I got a set that had gears and wheels, so cars got built!
A Triang Spot On Gogomobile red with a black roof.
It was so small I found it appealing.
Later I turned to plastic model making and then slot cars, gokarts, motorcycles and eventually full scale cars.
Does anyone remember the “Incredible Crash Test Dummies”? Apart from the vehicles, my other favorite was the plush version with Velcro limbs.
All of the above! Plus Tyco and AFX slot cars, plastic model kits (I still have MPC Golden Wheels to cash in, though I don’t think they’re good anymore), RC cars of course, and one I bet you remember: the Hot Wheels Master Caster. Put a wax pellet in the top tray, stick two axles in a silicon mold, turn the crank, and presto! Your very own molded wax Hot Wheels car.
Regular Hot Wheels, Lego, Matchbox, Tonka, SST Sizzler, and various models, Revel, AMT and others. Also had some Tamiya’s. My favorites where a Tipo 33 Alfa, Ferrari GTO, 330 P4. Was also into slot cars and had a huge track in the basement.
Hot Wheels and Matchbox mostly the real cars, and Lego.
Still do all three.
I saw the lede and immediately thought of the… Stomper 4x4s.
ZipZaps. I had a few of them in 2002, including the Fast And The Furious Eclipse and Mustang Cobra R. We used to trade bodies at school and bet on who would be the fastest to complete courses made of random shit we found.
They were great because they were cheap, modular, and lended themselves to do it yourself mods like working headlights or bigger electric motors really well. RadioShack had a really big success with them, and it’s always been a question as to why they seemingly fizzled out after 2005.
Fuck yes ZipZaps. I was given the X-Men 2 RX8 set for Christmas and then of course used my paper route and gift money to buy the upgrades and then the 2 Fast 2 Furious Yenko Camaro and Challenger bodies.
I had Tonka cars and trucks and plenty of Lego as a kid. In fact, I still have that 853 Car Chassis pictured stored away. Time to get it out and build it again!
Slot car sets. I can’t recall the names/brands but I had a couple of different ones. There never seemed to be enough track pieces to get a satisfying layout and the 80s plastic had the fit and finish of a Pop Tart, but I spent hours with my friends staging elaborate races and smearing the track with baby oil for a proper drift or burnout.
There was a hobby shop that carried cars, parts and individual track sections and tons of other cool stuff (model rockets, kits), chemistry sets and individual chemicals, tv planes and parts, back issues of pop sci and mechanics; it was nerdvana. We used to hot rod the slot cars with larger and custom wound motors, gears and other tuning stuff.
After I was married we saw the Stompers on TV.
Mentioned to the wife I thought that were cool.
On Christmas morning there was one in my stocking.
Also Corgi 1/43 First issue 007 James Bond Aston Martin.
Corgi 1/43 First issue Batmobile.
“Fittingly designed as a miniature gas pump, the Juice Machine housed a pair of D batteries to transfer the titular juice to your Sizzler.”
Use 2024 Duracells and you get the excitement of a fuel tank leak and hazmat cleanup.
I had 5 or 6 stompers. I dug up the backyard making tracks for them. Mostly they crawled right over the bank that was supposed to be turn 1
My absolute favorite was a BIG TRAK. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Trak. I got pretty good at programming it to harass the dog.
Matchbox was king in our household. We would get several cars every Christmas from the relatives. Still have most of them.
As a ‘poor’ kid, Matchbox cars ‘and the mostly generic ones’ were about it. My brother and I would build miles of roads/bridges in the dirt floor of our outbuilding ‘garage’.
Hot Wheels weren’t popular or easily available in my country. But yes, we would dig holes in our backyard to build mountains with roads for our cars. And fill the hole with water so the cars had something to splash into when they drove off the mountain. The little pyros that we were would also fill up the beds of the pickups with a small amount of gas, then set it on fire. Didn’t do the paint any good.
Good times.
I had so many cars but one of my favorites was a programmable corvette. Back when actual wireless R/C cars were too expensive the next best thing was one you had to program beforehand and hope you entered all the distances and turns in correctly or you’d have to start all over again. Hours and hours of frustration, err, fun.
https://youtu.be/J5Jvj62YYkg
My catalog of 1:64-scale cars has 1,417 entries (it’ll go up by eight when the Matchbox cars I bought on eBay yesterday show up), including almost all of the ones I had as a kid. My favorite then was probably the blue over blue Matchbox Mercedes 300E, which shows a bit of wear and tear now but still has its stand-up hood ornament intact. I was never a race ’em and smash ’em up kind of kid; more of a put them in order by color/year/marque kind of kid—you know, Autistic. So most of them survived in pretty good shape.
If you want to see something incredible, look up the new Tomica Limited Vintage release of a 1994 Chevrolet Astro EXT LT AWD. Eight-year-old me would have DIED if there had been 1:64-scale cars like that then, thirty-eight-year-old me is just glad I don’t have kids so I can sometimes drop $40 on a toy car.
Hot wheels crack ups. The ones that had a panel that would flip around and show crash damage when bumped.
Tomy turbo. First driving sim toy i ever saw. begged the hell out of my parents to get one. still wish i had it.
That’s what they were called! I couldn’t remember, so thank you! Or even the one that I had where the entire cockpit would flip to cracked and deformed.
Mattel had these Attack Pack toys, which were monster trucks that had mouths and other monster features that moved when you pushed on it: https://www.lulu-berlu.com/upload/image/mattel-hot-wheels-attack-pack–1992—-the-darkclaw–ref-0694—p-image-314715-grande.jpg
Big Trak!
I was wracking my brain trying to remember that name as I read the article. Thing felt like the future back in the day.
The LEGO 8860 car chassis, the one after this. It had a shiftable transmission, independent rear suspension, differential, and rack & pinion steering.
And most importantly for Jason, a flat four. I still have mine in the basement. Unfortunately when I was a kid I broke a couple of the long pieces testing out the suspension.
You can definitely get more of those long pieces online. Your younger self demands it.
Aurora Model Motoring HO slot cars. I still have all of mine, still have a track set up in my basement that I play with during the winter months. And I’m nearing Social Security age.
I also had tons of Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars. Spent many hours racing them down a dirt hill behind my school with my buddies. Good times.