SYSK's 12 Days of Christmas… Toys: How Hot Wheels Work

A everybody chuck Here for another one of our Christmas centric episodes with our twelve Days of Christmas Toys playlist, and today I'm very pleased to introduce to you an episode that I liked quite a bit because when I was a kid, I love me some hot wheels, and so this is that episode, How Hot Wheels Work. Pretty interesting story. Hope you guys enjoy it.

Welcome to Stuff you should know from HowStuffWorks dot com.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and Jerry.

You know that just sounded like, what like, that's what happens like, You're having a nightmare and you MEI wakes you up in the middle of the night and he just goes, hey, welcome to the podcast, and then she slaps you across the face.

Repart. That's true. Yeah, that is what that sounded like.

That's what it sounded.

It's pretty accurate. I don't know what got into me.

You were just supercharged about this topic.

Oh that's terrible. What supercharged?

I don't get it.

It's like a supercharged engine.

Oh I didn't even think about that.

Oh good, that makes me feel a little better.

Yeah, you know Jerry by the way before when I told her what we were doing, so, oh my gosh, that was my favorite toy when I was a kid.

Nice hot wheels are pretty great.

Yeah, I had quite a collection, and I don't know where they are today.

Oh really they're missing? Huh.

Yeah, I don't know if they were thrown out, or if if my brother has them, or they're my mom's attic or what. Because I'm kind of curious that I have any value.

You need to find them. Yeah, they could be apparently, as far as hot wheels collectors go, it could be in mint condition all the way down to beat condition.

Oh is that how they rank them? Yeah, mine would be beaters because I played with them like crazy.

That's good. I mean, that's what they're for sure, you know. And there's value for a beater too, like some people apparently harvest them for parts to rebuild like a you know, a new Frankenstein model.

Oh really, Yeah, that's pretty neat.

There's a lot of stuff you can do with them.

Yeah, and we should thank the fifth grader who wrote this article too.

Sad face.

I complained about that out loud to Holly. I was like, this article actually says sad face like as a sentence.

Yeah, I know had issues. I'm glad you said something.

Yeah what if it was a fifth grader? Your feelings are all hurt.

I think your feelings are hurt either way. Now, sad face. So we're talking about hot wheels today. I had a couple. My favorite toy was g I Joe, but I appreciated hot wheels.

Yeah, I had GI Joe too.

We do Gi Joe episode sometime. I had the older ones though you probably had huge ones. Yeah yeah, now I had the real ones.

Yeah, oh yeah, I don't that's fighting words.

Man. The ones that I had were so awesome. They were like there was a huge, fast collection of all of them. Yeah, there was like cobra. Cobra didn't exist when you were collecting g I Joe's.

No, but how could you say, like, oh, that one that's ten inches tall and has real clothes and fuzzy hair and the kung fu grip is inferior to this little plastic thing.

I think you just said it. All the fuzzy hair says it right there. I don't really mean that, Chuck. I don't have a dog in that fight. Like if you like the big Gi Joe's. That's cool. I got some problems.

Yeah, it's a quick side note. I have to tell this story, okay, when you know how he used to do book reports and you would have to have a visual aid. Yeah. I might have told this before. If I do, I apologize.

I don't recognize it.

I did a report on Franco Harris when in elementary school because he.

Was a football player.

Yeah. I don't know why I did on Franco Harris. Yeah, but I got my mom to make me a little Pittsburgh Steelers uniform for my Gi joe because he looked like Franco Harris.

Nice.

Yeah, and that was my visual aid.

Do you still have it?

No, of course not. We have the Gi Joe's, but I think the Steelers uniform is gone. Bye bye.

That's said. Yeah, you know, I'm sure your mom put a lot of work into that. Now I feel guilty, So, Chuck, I have a question for you. Yes, did you know that the number one vehicle manufacturer on the planet is, in fact Hot Wheels. I did it. Kind of It's astounding until you stop and think about it. Sure, like apparently since nineteen sixty eight, when Hot wheels were first introduced. More than four billion hot wheels have been produced. That's

Yeah.

Plus, Also, it's not like you're gonna go, I want this Buick Cutlass Supreme in every color, right, you know, Well, the hot wheels you can do that.

Yeah. What's the Lego stat is? They're the biggest manufacturer of tires?

Yeah?

Yeah, I wonder though, do these not count as tires because they're plastic they counts wheels?

I don't know, man, because.

Four billion times four that's sixteen billion tires.

That's a really great question.

I might have to challenge Lego or maybe just look up how many tires they manufacture.

Old Kirk Christensen is not going to be happy about this. Who was that the founder of Lego? Oh remember Old?

Oh that's right, I thought you were saying Old no over. Oh yeah, So.

Let's talk about the history of this stuff.

Huh okay.

So hot wheels, like I said, have been around since nineteen sixty eight and Anybody who's heard the Barbie Trademark podcast will recognize the name Elliott Handler. That's Ruth Handler, the inventor of Barbie Trademark's husband. Sure, and Elliott apparently saw a real chance to muscle in on an already extant market by a company called Tycho that had a line of miniature metal cars die cast cars is what they're called, called Matchbox cars.

That's right.

By the time hot wheels came around, match Box was already there and had established a market, and Mattel said, let's get in on that.

Yeah. And the rumor is that he saw his grandchildren playing with them and said, they kind of stink. I could make these better, yeah, cooler, And he had a as the story goes, had a designer, which we'll talk about in the second called Harry Bradley Sure, and he had a hot rod. And Elliott was in the parking lot one day and said, man, those are some hot wheels you got there.

And apparently if you go look look at the old original commercials.

For hot wheels, did they say that.

That's how well, that's how they pronounced it hot wheels.

Oh, instead of hot wheels.

Yeah, The emphasis is on the hot awkward. They're like, race your hot wheels.

You can make some of them, you can race them.

Just go buy some hot wheels. That's what they That's how they say it, collect all your hot wheels.

Yeah, but that makes more sense in the context of a sentence.

It does having been raised right right, you know post the in fact hot wheels is wrong. Yeah, hot wheels because wheels.

Now I'm trying to picture the guy in the parking lot saying those are some hot wheels you got on your there? You'd say hot wheels, you got there? You know, Yeah, oh boy, we can sure waste some time.

We sure can.

But the first nineteen sixty eight is, like you said, when the first line came out of sixteen hot wheels, they were sold initially for fifty nine cent apiece.

Yeah, And like you said, the guy whose car originally inspired the name hot Wheels was Harry Bradley, and he was the designer of that first sixteen cars. They were also called California Customs Miniatures. Was that first original sixteen group of hot Wheels that were released in nineteen sixty eight. So, and Harry Bradley designed them all, including apparently he got his hands on The first one, by the way, that

Yeah, the sixty nine Corvette.

That is so. Harry Bradley was an old hand in not just miniature car design, but car design in general. He was an old GM designer, and I guess he had connections still at GM, and probably under the table in a possibly illegal way, got his hands on the blueprints for the Corvette that hadn't been released yet, and Hot Wheels beat GM to the punch in releasing the nineteen sixty eight Corvette.

Yeah, sixty nine, thank you, that's all right. The Yeah, as the lore goes, he supposedly knew that the cafeteria door was unlocked, so he snuck in through the cafeteria door.

But that's called industrial espionage.

Yeah, that sounds like a story like just lore, okay, but maybe so maybe he committed industrial espian che. Yeah. So, like you said, those were the two of the first sixteen in that original lineup, that original collection, which if you have any of those, Yeah, Okay, yeah, you got some money that you're sitting on.

Because I mean, like they went all out on those that original line oh yeah, Like there were bushings to the suspension. Yeah, and the I mean the chassis it had suspension like shocks, like you could press them down and it would bounce back.

I had some of those. I don't think they were from sixty eight. But when did they quit making those?

It set up until seventy seven was when they stopped making.

The seventy is when the suspension got an overhaul.

Okay, so for the first couple of years, like they were really putting a lot into these things. The tires were red line racing slicks, yeah, and the things. The whole reason they went to so much trouble is because they really wanted to destroy their competitor, match box. And one of the ways they did that was by making these things far more functional than the match boxes were.

As we saw on the internet, a guy did that. Of course, he took two Volkswagens and two OUTI eight's I think, and one match box and one hot wheel, and he said they won by at least a car length every time he tried. And this was no loop de loop bring things, was just the straight race. They painted them originally in Spectra Flame, which was very shiny and sparkly and expensive. And I don't think we said that all hot wheels are built at one sixty fourth scale.

Yeah, that's a big point.

But not necessarily all matchbox cars. They kind of vary here and there, right, But like you said that Spectra Flame and the red line tires didn't only last until seventy seven, and the suspension only lasted untill nineteen seventy and they sadly a lot of that had to do with the fact that they moved them from Hawthorne, California to Hong Kong. Yeah, And like any product, you're like, hey, you can make it for half as much if you

Not only that, it's this Spectra flame pain is pretty expensive. It's awesome, it looks great, yeah, but it's pretty expensive. So with any collector's item. As they started to downgrade the components in the parts and the manufacturing and ultimately the final product, all that did was make the original stuff all the more valuable today, Yeah, because there was fewer and fewer of those as the years go on, proportionately speaking.

Yeah, they had actual axles, like you know, it was like a real They were designed by car designers and they were made apparently to reach two hundred scale miles per hour.

Yeah, that's pretty cool.

That's way cool.

Yeah. Remember, like in the Cockroach episode, we talked about how they're the fastest animal on the planet relatively speaking. Pretty neat stuff. Yeah, so chuck right out of the gate, Mattel had a hit on its hands. Oh yes, they released them in nineteen sixty eight. By nineteen seventy, Hot Wheels was a Saturday Morning cartoon in the vein of like Dune Buggy and Scooby Doo and all those guys. Hanna barbera dune buggy or speed Buggy, Speed Buggy. Yeah

Oh was that a cartoon?

Yeah, okay, went around solving mysteries and stuff like that.

Yeah, wonderbug was I think that was live action?

Oh, this was a cartoon, said Marty Croft. This is exactly like Scooby Doo by the people who did Scooby Doo, using the same people who did the voices for Scooby Doo. It just vaguely changed the characters. Hot Wheels was virtually the same thing, except it was about racing clubs. There were the bad guys and good guys and.

Do you know what this prus? What is the nineteen seventies, the doom Buggy was a very popular thing. You remember seeing those on the road, Like I used to see them all the time. Not all the time, but in the seventies it was a common thing. Yeah, you don't see him anymore, very rarely. Nope, No gremlins, no yukos, no, no wonder bugs.

You know I like gremlins. Do you okay for me? Though? The Kudi gras of car design is the AMC Pacer. Yeah, it's like the for Micah Kitchen of cars. Yeah, it's beautiful in all the weirdest ways.

So much window.

That would be my sought after hot wheels if I had a hot wheels that if I just could have one hot wheel, Yeah, it would. I don't know if that would be it. I'd be happy with that one.

Now do they have that it's a hot wheel? Oh?

Yeah, okay, And if you look up AMC Gremlin hot wheels, yeah, they went to town on those. They had some with like the intakes like sticking out of the hood and yeah, just all sorts of just awesome different variations like indie car Gremlins and stuff like that.

Yeah.

Because and that raises a pretty good point. Hot wheels has always been about the racing design, Like they've designed them to look like racing cars, but they've also manufactured them to actually be able to win a race, like we talked about with Matchbox.

Yeah, and one of the differences that is one of the main differences between the match box and the hot wheel is they were just much more interested in being sportier, like you could get you could get a match box like a delivery truck, right, you know they had that, but the match Boxes looked more real. They all were about looking realistic and not necessarily performance. And hey, if you want a bread truck, you can get a bread truck, right exactly, But you can't get a bread truck hot Wheel.

You know, we'll talk more about all of this jam right after this.

You want to go ahead and talk about some of the other differences between Matchbox and hot Wheel, Yes, sure, since we're at it. Match Box or I'm sorry, hot Wheel is the one that is more likely to have branded versions, oh man.

And do they ever like.

The Ghostbusters ectomobile.

Right or even more than that, Like they have a deal with eminem Mars for twenty fifteen, so they have like a TwixT trucks and a Skittles van and like all this stuff. They have licensing with DC and Marvel this.

Year, Fast and the Furious. I know they had a line yep.

So they're really big time into branded and a lot of times they'll have like a store will just have exclusives, access to an exclusive line of Skittles cars or something like that that you can only get it KB toys.

Yeah, I think they have a NASCAR deal too. If I'm not mistaken, I would not be surprised. And the hot wheels usually have a little bit wider, a longer axle, and wider wheels because it's just cooler that wheel sticks out from the body a little bit, you know.

Well, plus also supposedly, and we'll talk about this a little more, when you shrink a car down to scale, it looks a little weird.

Yeah, you might as well ahead and bring that up. Okay, it looks weird. You can't just shrink it and have it in the same proportion and have it look normal.

Right Like, it'll be as far as like shrinking a car down by scale, it will be in the exact same proportion. But it's just awful little bit like. So what they do to make a hot wheels raceable is they expand the wheel well a little more. Yeah, they break it out a little bit. Yeah, which is why the wheel stick out some on a hot wheels, but not on a match box. That's right, because match boxes are all about realism. To heck with how it looks, as long as it's real.

The one of my favorite ones, and I had one of these that they mentioned this article was the red barren. The person who wrote this said it was an inexplicable and inexplicably cool helmet over the cockpit. I don't know about inexplicable. It was just the roof of the car

Well hence the red baron, right.

Yeah, but it was It's easy now as an adulta look and say that looks like a little Nazi hot rod.

Yeah, but the red baron was World War One. He was pre Nazi Germany.

Yeah. And it was also I think at the time just like looked like the biker gang would wear like those helmet with the iron cross.

Yeah, and all of it was Southern California hot rod culture. Yeah, what gave rise to Hot Wheels, so it makes sense.

Yeah, I don't think there was any like sartitious intent.

Yeah. So, like I said, right out of the gate, hot Wheels was a hit. They had a cartoon within a year or so of the first sixteen being released. Sure, the second release they had I think twenty.

Two new cars, yeah, thirty three total.

And then the third year they had another. They released thirty three after that, right.

Oh no, yeah, I'm sorry, thirty three by nineteen seventy.

So they did sixteen, twenty four and then thirty three and all of them came in like different colors, right, So, like I said, if you had one, that didn't mean you had them all. You wanted to collect them all.

Yeah.

So kids were going crazy for it. And another way that Mattel very wisely targeted children was to get in with fast food. In nineteen seventy, the first Hot Wheels came out as a toy at Jack in the Boxes.

Oh really Yeah.

The big one though, the one that put them over the top, was in nineteen eighty three when kids who were lucky enough to be taken to McDonald's for dinner.

The happy meal exactly hot Wheel.

Which is what they called of at the time, Uh, or could get one of fourteen hot wheels. Yeah, in nineteen eighty three, and they had some cool once. They had a Chevy citation.

Did they really?

Yeah, they had one that was one of my favorite. Actually. It was a Toyota Mini Trek, which is like a station wagon camper and it even said painted on the side, good time Camper that you could get in your happy meal, which if I could have one hot wheel, it would probably be that.

You know what they were doing now that I look back through my adult.

Eyes, like snorting pot.

No, they were giving you a bunch of crappy ones because you wanted to keep coming back to get the cool one.

Yeah.

Probably you're like, ah, I got a citation, like, can I go back because I want to get the hot rod? Right, That's exactly what they were doing. Sure, man, I feel so like manipulated.

What did you think they were doing with happy Meals?

Well, I mean, I know it was all manipulation to get you to try and own all of them, right, but they should have been all cool ones. But you can't do that because the regular kid might be like, no, I got the cool one. I'm fine. But if you get the citation, you feel jipped off and you really want to go back and get one of the hot rods. Yeah, it's my eyes are wide open, my friends.

Well, that's why our friends down under in Australia have like outlawed marketing directly to children, which I think is a fantastic mode. Really, yeah, that's so unfair to market directly to children. It's just almost literally is like taking candy from a baby. Like kids aren't sophisticated enough to psychologically defend themselves from being like bombarded with by adults to say, go tell your parents to buy you this. You can't function correctly without this trapper keeper, so go get it.

The traffic keeper.

Yeah.

What do they make a law?

Yeah? Really yeah, it's a big one, very progressive law. Big all countries should adopt.

Well. In nineteen eighty three, I agree wholeheartedly. By the way, in nineteen eighty three is when that happy meal thing happened. And also the same year they moved from Hong Kong to Malaysia, and it said that's when they added their economy cars, so that must have coincided with the citation.

Yeah, the citation man one of the most disappointing Happy Meal toys you could possibly.

Get, Yeah, because it reminded you of your dad, who drove a citation.

Right, who was always mad.

Yeah, oh, dear so Chuckers.

Yes, After nineteen eighty three, not a lot happened. Hot Oils just kept going on, expanding more and more and more. I think they had another Happy Meals joint in ninety one or something like that. And in nineteen ninety five they said, we need, we need to do something big, and they did. They were at least something called Treasure Hunt series, which was a purposefully limited release car series

Yeah, And one of the cooler ones for me was the Oldsmobile for forty two.

Yeah. The thing is neat.

A dude at my church had a four forty two and it was just awesome, man. He was he had like the only muscle car in the youth group. And years, like two years ago, my brother I was talking about this dude, Jason Singleton. I was like, whatever happened to him? He's like, oh, he still lives in the so and so, and he went and you know what, dude, I went, no went, He still got it.

Oh yeah, why would you get rid of it?

He still has the car. Went to his Facebook page and it is like the center of his life. I'm sure it's his baby. I mean, he's had that thing since like nineteen eighty six and just it's juiced up and he's just gre the daylights out of me and that thing. But it was also exhilarating, you know, to be riding with him and he you know, like two hundred feet of drag. He would lay like power breaking and he would get like four sets of tires a year.

He'd be in the passenger seat going saved me Jesus.

Yeah, I was very scared because I was you know, I didn't flirt with the wild side back then.

No, so Oldsmobile four forty two is as close as you got.

Yep. It was exhilarating.

And then so that was nineteen ninety five. This treasure Hunt thing kind of went. It didn't go exactly as plan. Mattel was like, oh, we could make even more money if we put these into a wider release. Yeah, So the original ten thousand releases were redoing again and again and again. So treasure hunt kind of became commonplace, sure, but it was a good idea and it tapped into this whole idea of collecting. Like Mattel was like, we know you're out there, and we're going to design these

So they're all owned by Mattel at this point. Yes, all right, we'll get to the design and collecting it right after this. So back then, if you wanted to do a smaller version of a larger car and scale it down, you didn't have computer aided design and stuff. Sometimes you might have had a blueprint, which helped, but sometimes you just had to get out there in the parking lot with the tape measure yeah, and just take some measurements and then you know, be good at math, right basically.

And like like we said, Harry Bradley, who's the daddy of the Hot Wheels designs, who's the guy who did the first sixteen He was a GM designer. Originally in his footsteps followed Howard Reese and then after that Larry would and they those are some of like the legendary Hot Wheels designers.

That's the Mount Rushmore of hot wheels pretty much.

Yeah and yeah. They would just literally go out and measure these things. And that was one way that hot wheels were born. Another way was that And this definitely differentiates Hot Wheels from match Box is that there are hot Wheels that only exist in the Hot Wheels world.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

They they are called the fantasy cars, like they're just the designer's imagination come to life.

Right Whereas match Box only I believe, has bread trucks exactly, Well, they only have cars that are based on real cars, right right.

Hot Wheels has a whole fantasy line.

It's interesting that they're owned byes of the same company still and they just have kept that distinction. Yeah, you know, I guess some people are Matchbox kids and some kids are Hot Wheels kids. I had both. I think I had a bread truck.

Is that why you keep going to the bread truck?

Well, no, I didn't have a bread truck, but I do remember having a couple of like weird utility type vehicles. Huh huh. That I don't remember. There were probably gifts or stocking stuffers or something.

Huh.

I don't think I like sought it out.

I was always into Tonka trucks. I thought Tonko was great. They were obviously much bigger, but those were like construction vehicles, like dump trucks and stuff like that. And still today that Volvo dump truck, the giant one, yeah, with the huge wheels, I think is one of the coolest vehicles ever created. Yeah, I think I had one of those. When I was a kid.

I didn't have a lot of Tonka stuff. One of my favorite hot wheels though, was the little red Express truck.

I don't remember that if.

You saw it, you might it might a bell that was basically uh, I can't remember what kind of truck it was. I think it was a Dodge, but it was just a cool red step side pickup truck and it had the two vertical mufflers on each side that went up above the truck.

I think I know what you're talking about.

Yeah, yeah, it's really cool. And if you go to the the Peterson Automotive Museum in La oh, yeah, They have a really cool exhibit there that I haven't been to in person, but I was looking at it, a line permanent exhibit where they have the real life versions of the hot wheel cars and they have a little red express truck, a full size one. Yeah, and I saw it and I was like.

Whoa, did you just die from nostalgia?

Look might have teered up a little bit at the desk, but they have, you know, the the gussied up corvettes with the big chrome engines coming out of the hood.

And do they have the four to four to two.

I don't know if they have the four forty two.

But I'm very well, when your friend dies, but it's in his will.

I'll go straight to the muse. Yeah, I'm gonna go to this thing though at some point I don't know, on this next LA trip or not. But it's right there near the labri of tarpets. I think, oh yeah, so I want to go check it out.

I've been there. Yeah, it's neat.

It is neat. But back to the design. These days, you're not gonna need a tape measure and stuff like that. You're gonna photoshop designs and you're gonna even get a three D printer to your prototype.

That had to have helped them tremendously. Yeah, because you know, with if you're designing real life cars and you have a three D printer, that's pretty handy, but with Hot Wheels, like, you can print out pretty much exactly what it's gonna look like. Sure, and once they have the the prototype done, they'll make them. They'll make a mold out of it and then inject it with molten metal under tremendous pressure. Yeah,

Yeah, and I think they're made with less metal than they used to be, but they they still have metal components, right. Oh yeah, I haven't seen a new one in a while.

I haven't either, but I'm almost positive they do. And apparently they're still about like a dollar. Oh really Yeah. I was on the Hot Wheels collector site today and like they kept making reference to about a dollar. So just what's called the mainline? Yeah, the ones that they make on mass.

The citation exactly.

I'll bet if you've got your hands on that nineteen eighty three citation it'd be worth a few books. You're right, but they kept referring to the mainline stuff about a dollar.

Well, they've just kept making their manufacturing cheaper and cheaper, so they've maintained that cost. I guess. Yeah. So as far as collecting goes, the most valuable and that is not this crazy one made out of diamonds for the fortieth anniversary, which we'll talk about in a minute, But the most valuable regular hot wheel is the sixty eight beach Bomb, which was a VW bus and hot pink that had real surfboard stick it out of the back.

Yeah. Originally they only released I think twenty five of them like that. There were a couple of problems. It was difficult to manufacture them with the surfboard sticking on the back, even though it was more realistic sure, and it also was terrible on like a loopy loop track, yeah, because I guess the surfboards would either way them down or it would get stuck. So they only made just a few of these things. The beach Bomb that was the highest selling the hogh Wheels ever, was a pink one.

Yeah, it's a lot of money for a tiny little car.

Yeah it is. And that's the highest one ever apparently by a long shot too.

Yeah. I mean I've seen others that were worth like ten grand and stuff, Like I think one of those four to forty two originals is like ten grand.

Yeah, I guess like nineteen seventy mongoose or cobra are worth about ten grand these days, and a lot of them, just like with any collector's item, you'll see if there was just a few of them made, obviously they're gonna be worth a lot more if there was something that where they adjusted the design, like for example, the python

Used like every anifast animal name.

Right, exactly. Yeah, so they changed it to the python, but that was after they'd started manufacturing the cheetah. So there's some out there that say Cheetah stamped on the bottom, and if you have one of those, it's for ten.

Yeah, it's funny to think about. It's the same with Star Wars, like sometimes the mistake ones are the ones that are super valuable because like there was some recall, but they're like, oh, but you want that one because the Boba FET's rocket really shot out before kids started joking on them, right or catching on fire. Yeah, and that's the one you want. Yeah, But like you said, it's all about scarcity and supplying to man.

Dude. This whole thing is reminded me of a really great gallery I put together about hilarious knockoff toys.

Oh that's a good one.

Yeah, go to stuff youshould know dot com and look that up. It's pretty awesome. There's some really strange interpretations of beloved toys, including Star Wars toys, that people who make counterfeit toys come up with to try to skirt trademark law. Maybe or something or else. They just fully don't understand the toy and what it's a lure is, so they just make it in this weird interpretation. It's pretty hilarious stuff.

Yeah, it's a good one. We'll post that again, okay. And then I did mention the diamond studded one. I always think these things are just ridiculous. But like to take any like of the diamond studded bras it was worth, you know, oh yeah, for million bucks. I just always think it's kind of dumb. But they did make a fortieth anniversary in edition in nineteen I'm sorry, in two thousand and eight with twenty seven hundred little diamonds and rubies for tail lights and black diamonds for the tires

I'm sure it's gaudy. It's a gaudy hot wheels. Yeah, so the car's cool. It looks like Mad Max's car.

Oh you get is that a picture of it?

Yeah?

I don't think I saw that.

Can you identify that car? Uh?

What is that looks familiar? It does look familiar to its sort of like a Dolorean, but I don't think it is.

I don't think so either.

No, man, that new Mad Max looks good though.

Are you making Mad Max?

Well, there's a new reboot I guess is what they call it these days?

Cool? Who's in it?

What's his face that played Bain So? Yeah, Tom, Tom? What's no? But uh, it looks it's the same director, Tom Hardy. Yeah, Tom Hardy. But it's the same director from all the Mad Max series. So it's oh really yeah, yeah, yeah wow, And it just looks it's the whole it's supposed to be just like one long intense chase battle.

Yeah, sounds a lot like a Mad Max movie.

Yep, what you want?

Have you ever seen Vanishing Point?

I think so? What is that?

It was? Like, Man, I can't remember the car, but the car was basically the Star. It was on long car chase from like I think Colorado to California.

Yeah, I remember that.

It's a good one from the seventies.

Yeah, two lane Blacktops Challenger.

It's another the car. Yeah, I haven't seen that one.

Yeah, that's good. When that one weirdly had James Taylor in it when he was young and like on drugs and cool.

Were they apologizing to France?

I don't know what they deal was.

Did you hear about that? No, so that whole Charlie Hebdoh Solidarity March the US sent like, yeah, I think the assistant that could be in charge of the USDA or something like that. Yeah, So to apologize, John Carey had James Taylor go to France to perform. You've got a French shut up for the French government.

Yeah, just talk about beer. I know, isn't it send guns n' roses or something at least well not guns n' roses from nineteen eighty eight.

Any guns n' roses? Man. One more thing about collecting. If you wanted to be the coolest collector of hot wheels on the planet, you would have to build a time machine and go back to nineteen eighty seven to my hometown of Toledo, Ohio, which is where the first ever hot Wheels Convention Collector's Convention was held. I really wish I would have gone to that because I was there at the time. What year was it, eighty seven?

Oh? Yeah, yeah, I can't believe we sent James Tayler still just like, yeah, I can't focus on anything.

Well, if you want to know more about James Taylor, hot wheels, or just about anything there is in the universe, you can type it into the search bar at HowStuffWorks dot com. And since I said search, bart's time for listener mail.

I'm gonna call this minimum wage argument not argument proposal.

All right.

Listened to How Homelessness Works from quite a few years ago, and you guys commented that part of the problem was a low minimum wage. In comparison the cost of renting a two bedroom apartment, you'd have to work something like eighty seven per hours eighty seven hours per week to afford it, the implication we need to raise minimum wage. After hearing this, a clear solution occurred to me. I think disagreements on raising minimum wage as a result with

Yeah, I love that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's a great proposal. I mean, I think that is what it's based on.

Sure, but as far.

As I know, the cost of living calculations are really date Yeah, and take a lot of stuff into account that doesn't really apply any longer.

Plus, regardless of what you think it should or should not be, the fact is, adults with two kids are still going to be working these jobs. It's not just going to be teenagers looking to advance.

But it would be nice to put that issue to bed, to say, like, this is what we're trying to achieve, or this is not what we're trying to achieve. At the very least you get everybody talking.

Yeah, because should some teenager at his first job make like fourteen bucks an hour?

I don't know.

I don't know if that's sending the right message either.

I don't know. I don't know we'll leave it up to you guys, our dear listeners.

When I started working, it was like three bucks an hour or something. It was ridiculously low.

That is ridiculously low. Yeah, if you want to let us know how you feel about Joe's proposal, was it Joe?

I believe it was Joe Reno, Joe Reno Joe.

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