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Another week, another Road Noise brainstorming session with my friend who doesn’t even own a car.
“I was thinking of doing something about how much my nephew loves his little toy cars,” I IM’d my Cars-Are-a-Blight-On-the-Landscape collaborator.
His reply follows, verbatim:
Oh man, I LOVED toy cars as a kid, especially the micro-machine ones you could open and put other EVEN TINIER cars into! And those ones that came with a little credit card shaped bit of plastic that you could unfold and make a little landscape for your car to drive around on!
Toy cars it is, then.

You go, girl!

For an ’80s kid like me, there are three ways to go when it comes to toy cars.
Hot Wheels
Hot Wheels are the 800 lb. gorilla of the die-cast world. Their products, just the right size to be passed over in an evening pick-up-the-toys sweep and be stepped on in the middle of the night, range from highly detailed models of production cars to fantasy vehicles that look like something Boyd Coddington would think up after a two-week bender.

Its size isn’t the only thing keeping it from being street legal.
Hot Wheels also is famous for its loop-the-loop tracks and other race sets. They’re sort of like slot cars for kids whose parents won’t shell out for slot cars, figuring that gravity-fueled excitement was good enough for them, and damn it, it’ll be good enough for their kids. Those sets are the epitome of toys that look great on TV, but not when you get them home. I think the ones in the commercials were actually real cars on elaborate scaled-up sets, because I never got the toys to work as shown.


The Giant Uniroyal Tire in Detroit reminds me of the Hot Wheels case my uncle used to have. If someone put full-size cars in there, it would totally blow my mind.
Matchbox
Matchbox cars are your second-string die-cast toys. Getting Matchbox cars in your stocking instead of Hot Wheels isn’t quite as bad as the “Go-Bots instead of Transformers” horror some kids lived through, but with all the manufacturer licenses and movie tie-ins confined to Hot Wheels, Matchbox couldn’t quite measure up.


Wait, they used to come in real matchboxes? The world makes so much more sense now.
Micro Machines


Polly Pocket looks like Godzilla to these guys.
They were the perfect size to get stuck in the vacuum hose, in the bathtub drain or in your little brother’s nose. Sure, Micro Machines didn’t have the detailed paint jobs or strict scale rendering of the other brands, but no one cared. Why? Here’s why:

So. Awesome.
The Monday after that series of ads, starring sometime World’s Fastest Talker John Moschitta, started airing during the Saturday morning cartoons must have been the worst day of our elementary school teachers’ lives. Kids are bad enough when they’re making noise at normal speed; a classroom full of 8-year-olds trying to imitate this guy is a nightmare beyond imagining.

I can’t get enough of these.