Next to Spacex Sword and Matt Mason, one of my favourite toys was always Hot Wheels. The styling and the packaging was much better than any of the competitors and the cars themselves always felt heavier and more substantial than Matchbox or Husky cars. In my limited experience as a kid, I didn't realise that Mattel had gone beyond just cars and bikes and had designs on the sky too. A full page ad in the back of a US Aquaman comic in the seventies first brought
'Hot Birds' to my attention, but it wasn't till the advent of the internet and ebay that I actually found them.
The 1971 Wheels and Wings catalogue shows the elaborate sets available for the toys, which were essentially a variation on the awful Airfix Flight Deck - a gun arrangement with a spool of nylon cord and a wire hook to clip to the plane. The rest was down to gravity and a little fiddling by the user. But the awesome part for me was the planes themselves - solid metal jets with folding undercarriage and moving parts. The two I got with the Sky Solo set - 'Sky Scraper' and 'Regal Eagle' respectively have opening airbrakes and moving flaps.
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| Sky Scraper |
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| Regal Eagle |
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| Back of box of Sky Solo set |
The line didn't really take off (groan) and made a limited release. I'm not sure it reached UK at all, but the packaging and the marketing was cool. More to follow on Hot Wheels soon....
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| Repro Card |
How I loved these! Looking back, one thing I could never have known at the time was how spoiled we were with all these well made solid metal toys. The cost would be astronomical now but back then we thought nothing of all those die-cast wonders.
ReplyDelete(I also could not have known that these never made it across the pond...which makes me feel bad until I remember all the Century 21 toys we Americans never got to see.)