The Toy SSP Smash-Up Derby Gave Malaise Era Kids What They Really Wanted: Repeatable Carnage

It’s a matter of much dispute as to when the “first car” was actually made, but I can imagine that it was only a matter of weeks later that toy cars were in kid’s hands. Again, I can’t say for sure but it’s almost guaranteed that when two kids each got together with these new scaled-down automotive playthings, the first or second thing they did was crash them into each other. Oh, come on; you know it’s true. Sure, some kids lovingly cared for their toys but many if not most loved the satisfying thunk of cast metal banging together. The only things that was a bit disappointing was that parts didn’t go flying as they would in a real vehicle altercation, and even if they did it would only happen once.

Nearly sixty years ago, one toy maker realized that this awful streak existed in little tikes. Their solution was to make little cars that could hit at high speeds, explode into bits and quickly go back together to do it again.

Don’t Forget Pinky Tuscadero

I’ll admit that I’ve never had much interest in auto racing, but as little kids the parts of the sport we were most exposed to was the sheer violence. ABC’s Wide World of Sports always showed clips of stock cars flying and flipping or banging into each other. Who can forget us grade schoolers seeing Allison and Yarborough taking each other out and then physically going at in the awesome, infamous 1979 Daytona 500?

The coolest motorsport thing we witnessed, though, was demolition derbies as seen in the Happy Days episode where Fonzie has to avoid the dreaded “Malachi crunch.” Hey, if this was supposed to be the fifties those were nearly new cars!

With such images in our brains you couldn’t blame us for wanting things under the Christmas tree that did the same thing. The problem was our own toys simply couldn’t satisfactorily replicate such carnage. That would change in 1971.

“Take Those Damn Things Outside”

The Smash-Up Derby toy actually began with products that did a lot of destructive work of their own. Launched in 1970 by the company Kenner, the SSP (Super Sonic Power) toys were cars with different bodies like a Charger Daytona on top of a chassis with a single, rather hidden gyroscopic wheel (the wheels on the bodies of the cars never touched the ground).

You took a “T” shaped rip cord handle with teeth on the long end and inserted it all the way into a slot on the top of the car. As you yanked out the handle quickly, the single wheel spun rapidly with a surprising amount of momentum, making a distinctive high-pitched YINNNNNNNN noise that, if you hear it now, will take you back decades.

You then placed your car on the rompus room floor and watched it take off like a bat out of hell. Seriously, the marketing material claimed that they would hit “scaled speeds of up to 400 miles an hour,” which was later changed to 800 miles an hour in some ads because why not. I can say from experience that they did haul ass, and they could do some serious damage; almost any house circa 1980 with kids would have baseboard marks from these SSPs. These had to become “outdoor” toys in homes with more discerning moms which sucked because, despite what the ads showed, they just didn’t really work on the street or sidewalk.

No, the best answer that Kenner seemed to come up with was to reduce or eliminate some of that drywall-blasting energy by having the toys actually run into each other.

Now I Have That Jingle Stuck In My Head

Looking back, the execution of Smash Up Derby was rather ingenious. The idea of making a product that can break apart spectacularly, be easily reassembled and then do it all over again countless times is a great one, but to actually produce something with a mechanism that would survive seventies kids was a tall order. Kenner pulled it off beautifully. Imagine seeing this ad appear on the television during an after school rerun of the Brady Bunch. You just had to have it.

The cars in Smash Up Derby (initially a ’57 Chevy Nomad and the ’57 Ford) used the typical SSP mechanicals, but the bodies mounted on top had a twist. The “wheels” (which, like other SSPS, weren’t really the actual wheels), doors, hood, and other body panels quickly snapped in place in the empty apertures of the car body that was molded to look like it had already been in a few accidents.

You can see the teeth on both sides of the wheel for the T-handle to mesh with:

When the car hit an object, there was a tab in front that in turn activated tabs or pins behind each of the snapped-on panels and causing them to fly off in a dramatic fashion. Early ones simply had that tab, which proved to be too small to actually activate in anything other than a direct center hit. This was solved by attaching the front bumper to the tab and vastly increasing the ability to make parts fly.

Here’s a toy set available on eBay; you can see that it’s missing a lot of body parts which makes this example a perfect way to relive your childhood.

You only had a full set of doors, hoods and trunk lids for about a week after getting the toy, after which time parts slowly just disappeared into the rug or under a cabinet to be discovered when your parents finally moved out in 1998.

Of course, with the set you also got twin ramps in the box to allow the cars to go airborne, meeting in a crash that would scatter parts even further.

A Beetle against a GMC pickup? Hey, I’ve heard stories of Jason’s old VW crashes (and our Type 4 that drove away after getting rear ended by a LeMans at 40mph). I think it was a fair battle.

Thank God we had wood paneling and Herculon-covered furniture in the rec room or we’d never have been able to own these things. What a great time.

Now All Of Our Crashes Involve State Farm

I can’t tell exactly how long Smash Up Derby lasted on the market, but it appears in the 1978 Kenner toy catalog (about the time we got one at our house). My research found that they disappeared not long after that as the toy market started to shift and kids wanted Simon or Colecovision Football for Christmas instead. Maybe the best part about these toys is they gave kids an outlet to wreck things, and it meant that a lot of now-collectible Matchbox cars were spared being blown up by firecrackers.

If you want to relive your childhood, you can get a set on eBay or similar for around $125 to $300. Of course, you now own the house you’re playing with them in so you’ll need to yell at yourself when you dent the drywall.

The environment around GenXers caused us to choose violence as kids in the seventies, which probably explains why we’re so chill today.

topshot source: eBay