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
Fun fact: Stompers were worm-gear driven so when you stuck a running one into your sibling’s hair, it would wind up until the motor stalled, pulling his hair at maximum force, and couldn’t be removed without disassembly or cutting hair with a sharp knife. It was fun to watch mom panicking with the scissors, trying to contain her own rage, despite all the screaming and crying and carrying-on.
I was a bit too young for Stompers, but I did get them as hand me downs from my older cousins. We were that house that never had batteries for anything though. My big car toy of the late 80s was my Nikko RC buggy. It was basically a cheaper version of the Tamiya grasshopper. It wasn’t quite as fast as the grasshopper but it was basically indestructible. That thing was my prized possession for a few years.
We built racetracks in a vacant lot for Tonka trucks.
I used to have a gas-powered Baja Bug that would basically run until it ran out of gas or hit something.
I had a 1/16 scale Honda 250cc six-cylinder model with working suspension.
My mother started buying Matchbox and similar cars for me right after I was born in France and continued taking me to the toy store to get them for many years after. I had a larger-scale DeTomaso Mangusta with a body that could be separated from the chassis.
Do Puffalumps count? I put them in my cars all the time!
I was always mesmerized by Barbie cars, though. I had a lot of Hot Wheels/Matchbox cars (and some other car toys like a plastic red 911), but I could stuff Puffalumps and other stuff in the Barbie cars, too. Heck, I even wrote about how awesome Barbie cars were and I’m still jealous of her 911: https://www.thedrive.com/news/33973/barbie-has-the-best-toy-cars
Don’t sleep on (but do sleep IN) Barbie’s Star Traveler GMC Motorhome! https://youtu.be/0FoB1P36Ytk?si=J4vOWkjAEu5xz4NS
oh heck yeah
I am conflicted between the options I was gifted with as a child.
The one that was definitely given to me too early was a string-guided Cox Corvette Stingray with a .049 two-stroke engine. I was like, six or seven, and had no idea how glow plugs, batteries and special formula fuel worked. And probably not up to the task of setting up the string guidance either. I don’t remember what happened to it.
(I was also gifted a string control Piper Cherokee airplane in the same time frame, with similar non-results.)
Next was a 1/32 scale slot car track and cars. That one provided many hours of my brother and I racing. Eventually, we got bored with the basic track and cars and started spraying the track with WD-40 and laughing at the ensuing mayhem. I still love the smell of WD-40 these days, even though it’s usually while dealing with some unfunny domicile situation.
And being in late elementary school in the late 60s, we had quite the collection of Hot Wheels cars that I now wish we hadn’t abused back then. We had 30+ feet of the orange track, jumps, loops, and eventually, a Super-Charger.
But we took some of our Hot Wheels to a nearby park and ran them down a cement slide. Those hard plastic “tires,” combined with polished cement weren’t a great combination and their high velocity wipeouts were epic. The videos we would have shot had today’s technology been available back then!
Late 70s, early 80s, for Christmas, I got a car toy, maybe 12-16 inches long. Plastic. It was a 80s F1 open wheel style race car, but came with a separate Blazer body that could be mounted on top of the car, and changeable wheels and tires to go from race car to blazer. To this day I haven’t been able to figure out what is was to be able to find it. So if anyone reading this knows what that toy is…. Post up.
Most likely the Power Shifters Quick Change Machine, take a look: https://youtu.be/dAxUnBwfVK4?si=8zdJ8G5SitbEJXFU
Lego Technic #8865 from around 1990. It was a hell of a project for an 8 year old. Still have it today! Also, any number of R/C cars I had back then.
I learned so much about cars from putting #8865 together. Up to that point, I was mostly into the aesthetics of cars, but getting to see and touch all the major mechanisms set me on a long-term path towards mechanical engineering. I’m so grateful to Lego and my aunt for putting that set into my life.
What a great story! I suspect Lego Technic has an outsized impact on many an engineer’s career choice. I’m not a mechanical engineer, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
The hot wheels cars and tracks!
LEGO Racers sets were my childhood. The Tiny Turbos in particular – basically the LEGO equivalent of Hot Wheels cars – as they were budget-friendly and thus I had a lot of them. I also had a lot of the larger Racers sets with pull-back motors in them, which always had some kind of gimmick, whether it be ramps they can jump off of or internal levers that make the car explode when it crashes. Much fun was had with all of those 🙂
I also had some kind of motorized R34 GTR toy, which had speakers in it and drove back and forth flashing its lights as if choreographed to the beat of music when some button was pressed. Weird gimmick, but for whatever reason it stands out in my memory as something I liked playing with as a kid.
But yeah, for the most part I was a LEGO kid and therefore made my own toys. Still kinda am and do, lol. So really my favorite “car” toys weren’t specific toys, but specific things I made out of specific pieces. Shout-out to the LEGO RC buggy motor, of which I had one, which made for some epic homemade “RC” vehicles tethered to the controller with comically long wires. Steering accomplished by using one motor as a generator to power the steering motor, getting pretty close to proportional steering. Basically RC, minus the weight of batteries in the car, super fast and agile as long as you can keep up and not step on it. I played with, crashed, and rebuilt vehicles that way with that motor until the wires were shot. Good times, great motor.
I had some SSPs, and something related called, I think, TTP or Turbo Pumpers? It used an air pump / ramp that the car hooked to, and you pumped the plunger until the flywheel was screaming and then tripped a lever on the tower to send it on its way. I remember I had a blue metallic Mercedes C111 version.
That said, my real favorite was probably my Hot Wheels Thundershift 500 racetrack. Had a great time sending the stock cars (and any other car that would fit) around lap after lap. The cars did end up with huge scratches on the driver’s side from scraping the outside of the launcher (the track went clockwise).
Iloved my SSP Racers Smash Up Derby set. It was by far my favorite toy car or otherwise.
I loved how the body parts flew off when they hit each other or when there was a hard crash off the ramp.
Heck, I was the kid that pointed the ramps at the wall just to get a bigger crash out of them.
Oh yeah – I had the SSPs – A Green Dune Digger and a Red SuperBird.
Also had the Hot Wheels Sizzlers – it was a red ’69 Mustang Boss and a white/blue stripe TransAm.
Lots of regular Hot Wheels too – starting with a set for Xmas of 1968, where the starter was clipped to the back of a chair and they ran down the parallel tracks, did the loop, then the winner would set off a flag at the gates, and they’d run across the living room floor under the sectional…
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And Tonka Trucks. Lots of little red cab-forward Tonka Trucks.
Plus a big green Tonka car carrier with three split window Stingray Coupes.
And lots of plastic cars – some were quite detailed too, with full interiors.
I’d often line them all up in lanes like on an Interstate – passing one another and pulling off into rest areas & driving under bridges….
….or racing one another down winding two-lane roads, like something out of “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World”. The 62 Cadillac Eldorado convertible was forever trying to pass the red Beetle, car carrier, Bronco and Trailer, and USPS delivery truck…
I had a massive collection of hot wheels and matchbox cars that I got to pass down to my kids. Pretty soon they’ll be old enough for my old Legos and I must have at least a hundred wheels and tires in that collection.
Oh, goodness! My first was the Fisher-Price parking garage. I had Technics before they were called that (I had the chassis shown above), of course lots of Matchbox, Hot Wheels and other small models, Nylint truck models, a Hess Training Van from ~1978, some large-scale 67-68 Mustang model in blue that I have not been able to identify, The Tonka Jeep, and an Ideal slot car track with semi tractors. I’m sure i’m forgetting some. My major hobby as a kid was building model cars, but those aren’t toys. My favorite was probably the Tonka Jeep. It’s one of the few toys that I’ve kept.
Hot Wheels, Matchbox, Tonka. All great fun back in the day. I should see if any of those are still kicking around in my Mom’s garage.
It’s amazing now if I look back since I realize why some cars and trucks from the 80’s and 90’s now really resonate with me. Because I grew up playing with them as toys. That and the addition of R/C and I was basically immersed with playthings involving vehicles.
A lot of RC stuff. I remember running laps in my driveway with a cheap RC Nascar replica that didn’t have enough power to drive and steer at the same time, so if you wanted to turn you had to let off the “gas” for a moment. Also a cheap wired RC truck that I bought at Aldi and played with until I wore out the gears, as I recall.
RC was also where my proto-wrenching skills came from. When stuff would break I tore it down to figure out why (and sometimes fix it) and I built a nitro-powered truck when I was in high school. It turned out to be a poorly designed PoS that broke in stupid ways all the time, but I guess it was just preparing me for real truck ownership. 😉
Mostly Tonka trucks and then Stompers. Then of course I had a ton of Transformers and GoBots!
I grew up with the yellow technic sets! I had a huge float plane with operational ailerons. =) Someone should build a super car with exactly the proportions, including and especially of the pistons, of that car chassis.
Of course, I started with Hot Wheels, but quickly advanced to HO sized slot cars. I had my own track, but on weekends, kids from all over the city would meet and race at Dell’s Raceway. They had several slot car tracks, an 8-lane HO track and they gave away big trophies and prizes. Then, I bought a mini bike….
Oh wow, I completely forgot about the Kenner SSP. I had one of the Superbird models.
In the genre of shifter-based toys I really loved the Hot Wheels Thundershift 500, which used a shifter lever to propel the car around a track. This went along with a decent little Hot Wheels/Matchbox collection.
Then of course Legos were the greatest but my builds usually took a more naval than automotive bent. I used to love doing aircraft carriers.
SSP was my jam, full sized mini ones my mom got though cereal box tops, and the demolition derby
I once had a gold SSP El Camino. I lost it and still wish I had it today.
I still have my Stomper AMC Eagle SX4, and Jeep CJ-5. I just recently found a Chevy S10 Stomper. I never knew that ne existed.
And I just found a Sizzlers Ford GT-90. It’s missing its rear right wheel. I’m trying t find a replacement now. Any help is appreciated.
I had the requisite Huge Bucket full of Hot Wheels/Matchbox (always preferred the more realistic Matchbox), and a bunch of model cars. Loved them all. But my favorite toy was the one I never got: the Tyco RC Bandit. Basically a scaled-down Nissan Hardbody in either black or red, with typical awesome early ’90s graphics, big knobby tires, and full suspension. The commercials convinced 12-year-old me that it was the single greatest toy ever conceived, and my life would not truly be complete without the never-ending, intense off-road adventures the radio controlled truck would provide.
I had a slot car set that featured Jackie Stewart, AJ Foyt and Richard Petty on the box.
I had a lot of legos but the one I loved the most was the LEGO model 5580-1. I remember how cool that was. I also had a lot of toy boats. Loved boats.