Here’s An Artifact Of The Zine Era, A Jokey Review Of Kiddie Cars I Did In The 1990s

Have I told you that I’m old? So painfully, miserably old? I am. I’m not really exactly sure when it happened, but I think I can narrow it down to sometime in the last 40 years or so. I didn’t choose to get old specifically, but I think it must have happened as a byproduct of a process most scientists like to call “staying alive” or philosophers call “existing,” both of which I’ve done a fair amount of over the past few decades.

One of the nicer quirks about being old is that you would have spent a good amount of time in a period most people call the “past,” which is kind of like the present but with less internet bullshit and more lead in the gasoline. At some point in the past, a period of time called the 1990s, the internet as we know it was barely getting started, and while the World Wide Web was opened to the public in 1993, print was still very much alive, and there was even a boom in small-scale publishing in the 1990s via something called ‘zines.

The name was a shortened form of “magazine” and before everyone you know would bore you with bad ideas put up on a webpage, they would bore you with bad ideas printed as zines and distributed around town, in physical piles. I was one of these people, and worked on a wonderful zine called Stay Free! with my friend Carrie McLaren. I found a bunch of these old zines in my office tonight, and happened to come across a somewhat automotive-related thing I wrote, a silly review of a lot of kiddie cars.

I was 25 when I wrote this, way back in 1997. Holy crap. That was so long ago. You’d think I’d have developed more as a human being in the nearly three decades since this was written, but in reading this again I think I can safely say that, no, maybe I haven’t actually done much of that. I’ll get to that sometime in the next three decades, I suppose?

Anyway, here’s the bit, possibly online for the first time? I can’t exactly recall:

The joke of this was the implications that I took these things on public roads and highways, and mentioned things like crash-testing. Also, the inclusion of a $600 used VW Beetle, too, I thought that was pretty funny.

You know what else is kind of amazing? Back in 1997, a Little Tikes Cozy Coupé cost about $30, and today you can still get one – with the eyes finally back in the headlights where they belong, thankfully – for about $40. If you do the conversions, $30 in 1997 dollars are worth about $60 today, so despite so much else in our modern economy being so miserably expensive, at least the basic Cozy Coupe has become more affordable.

Also, was the Cozy Coupe actually once called “Little Lincoln?” I can’t seem to find a reference to that, but I must have seen it somewhere. They did have a Lincoln Continental-type rear tire hump in the bodywork, after all. I’ll look into that more.

That’s a discounted price, it looks like, but even the baseline price of almost $65 is still pretty close to what it would have been equivalent to back in the day.

I remember borrowing a friend’s very early digital camera – one of the first on the market, and Apple QuickTake 100 – to get some of the images for this story.

That camera stored 32 images at 320×240 or eight at 640×480, images sizes that are postage-stamp sized by today’s standards, but I was pretty happy to have back then. There was no screen to see whatever images you took, so it was more like an old film camera that way. I remember taking this to a local Toys-R-Us to get most of the images I used. The images of the Beetle I may have scanned or possibly found online, using something like AltaVista to search?

I was driving the ’73 Beetle I still have at this time; the price of that ’68 I mentioned in the article was what I paid for my own first ’68 Beetle from when I was 16, which, at the time I wrote this, was only nine years prior. Holy crap.

The article references a Wall Street Journal article about fancy overpriced kiddie cars from December 24, 1996 called More Tots Want To Be King Of The Road. This seems to be it here, but I’m not entirely certain because, like then, I don’t pay to subscribe to the WSJ. It’s nice to know some things stay the same.

The zine era of culture was an exciting time. In fact, I look back on most of the 1990s with a lot of nostalgia; this was a fun time in my life, and it’s remarkable just how different the world was back then. I guess nostalgic thoughts like this are part of being old. One day I hope you’ll get to do this, too, as you read me re-hashing this very article on the version of The Autopian that you get on your neural implant in your stasis pod, and I can reminisce about how we used to read these things on phones and laptops back in the mid-2020s.

Good times.