u/Hot_Wheels_guy

I'm still missing a bunch of mainlines but the '77 Firebird collection is slowly growing

I never wanted this many sheriff patrols buy everytime I buy a group of color changers there's a sheriff patrol or three included. If you don't already know, the casting is based on the real life 1978 California Highway Patrol Dodge Monaco and debuted in its hot wheels form that same year. In the last pic you can get a good look at that robust cop pushbar attached to the cop front grille and beneath the cop headlights. You don't really get a sense of how imposing it is until you look at it up close.

The gimmick with the color changers- specifically the ones with tampos- is that when the car is in its darkest (coldest) color only the white "TAXI" tampos are visible, and when in its lightest (warmest) color only the POLICE tampos are visible. In theory. Unfortunately it's been 37 years and their ability to change colors has diminished quite a bit and doesn't really sell the illusion anymore. (Is there anyone here who had these back in the '80s and can tell us if they ever worked that well, at all?)

There are only 4 body color variations, of which I have 3. The 4th has yellow stars, white "STAR TAXI" and "TAXI" text, with all other tampos being a nice shade of royal blue. It seems to be the most difficult variation to locate.

I recently found out through someone else's ebay listing- of all places- that there is an uncommon base variation featuring the number "75" above the word "SHERIFF." The first release of the sheriff patrol was in 1978, so I have no clue what the number 75 is referencing. Aside from that, there are only 2 other base variations I'm aware of. One is identical to the 75 SHERIFF version but without the 75 SHERIFF part, and the other prominently features the HOT WHEELS banner logo. The variation with the banner logo only appears on the Automagic version of the car.

STACKABILITY: 9/10. Fantastic. In just a couple minutes I was able to get two different styles of stacks that were each 6 cars high. I'm sure if I kept at it for an hour I could get 8 or more in a stack. I don't like to fiddle with car stacking for too long, though, because it only takes a couple oopsie daisies before paint chips start appearing. And I don't know how many of these hefty metal-on-metal cars it takes before the axles on the bottom-most car start to bend, and I dont want to find out.

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Corgi was a British die-cast manufacturer bought out by Mattel in 1989. Hot Wheels subsequently re-released some cars using Corgi's old castings, thus we have a few hot wheels releases from the 1990s known as Corgi cars. This period only lasted a few years however, as the Corgi company was purchased back from Mattel and allowed to be their own company again in 1996. Corgi regained rights to their old designs and Hot Wheels was forced to make their own dies from their own designs should they ever want to release those car models again. And that's exactly what happened. Let me know if i got any of the details wrong; I'm only just now learning about Corgi myself.

Personally i much prefer the contemporary Hot Wheels casting of the 308 GTS over the old Corgi design. The same goes for the Corgi Testarossa and Corgi Ferrari 348. I am not a Corgi fan 😐

This was not AI generated. I'm autistic and I write like a robot.

Metal body and metal base

Did anyone else here go to the show this year?

No telephone needs that much horsepower. It's outrageous. Pure lunacy.

It was a part of a 3-pack that was missing half the card. I didn't notice it was an error until after it arrived in the mail.

you can use this feature to mix and match wheels with different bodies. Or you can just have a fun little go-kart to drive around in 😊

From the wiki:

>Sharkruiser is a hot-rodded shark on wheels. The upper body fairly accurately reproduces the upper jaw, body (minus the tail) and dorsal/pectoral fins of a Great White shark. The interior molding continues from front to back to form the fish's huge teeth and the car's two massive V8 engines and tail-pipes. The car's base extends to form the shark's lower jaw at the front and the tail at the rear. This unusual design means that certain versions actually have a tail and lower jaw that are a different color from the rest of the body. Unrealistically, the tail fin is horizontal, like that of a dolphin, rather than vertical like that of a real shark! (This is due to the way the car is designed. The engine placement would not allow the tail to be vertical.)

These are color changers but they no longer change color. Originally their cold color would have been bluish grey. They don't swim.

i included some images to sort of show my improvised step by step process, starting with a photo, to messing around with different filters, to messing around with hues/saturation/vibrance, to plagiarizing Andy Warhol. Bing bang boom i have a new desktop background.

I have no idea why i started with an old photo of my hot wheels bulldozer. Maybe I'll tell people it's a statement about deforestation or something 🤔

this came out looking about a decade more vintage than is appropriate for color racers, but i really like the aesthetic. I plan to make more of these using my other blackwall pics.

Every little variation is an excuse to buy another one 😏👉👉

DAT CORVETTE!

DAT CAMARO!

THAT OTHER CAMARO!

THAT RX-7 oooooo weeee i tell u whut! 🔥🔥

THAT. STEPSIDE. JEEP. BOIIIIIIII 😍Be still, my beating heart.

And LAWD ALMIGHTY.... dat 1997 McLaren F1 🔥🔥🔥🥺🥺😭

please dont mock me for liking these cars so much 😭

First time in all my years of collecting i've ever left a store with more than one matchbox car. I couldnt believe how many cool cars i was finding on a display no more than 3 pegs wide. Dollar Tree btw.

Matchbox collectors be like "Calm down, OP. Matchbox has always been this cool. Nice of you to finally notice." 😭

Left: ColorFX "Super Stampers" Racebait 308, ca. 1995

Right: Racebait 308 from Ferrari 5-pack, ca. 1994 (don't tell the mods these aren't from the '80s 🤫) Most Racebaits in those 5-packs were metal bodied, but some were plastic. I guess they ran out of metal that day and just started smelting plastic trash from the dumpster (that's a joke).

The second photo- I don't know why the original photo i took with my phone made the ColorFX car orange. The other Racebait and the Ferrari team transport in the background have perfectly red hues. To my naked eye the ColorFX car was muted red color, but when I took the pic it said "Nah m8. Gonna be orange today." If anyone knows of an ez way to fix this in Pixlr/photoshop please let me know. I had to mess around with saturation, hues, vibrance, contrast, etc. to get that car looking right. Surely there's an easier way.

I found these at a swap meet 15ish years ago for a dollar or two each. Yesterday I found them again in a box in storage and figured I'd share them. They've stayed in great condition for having been sliding around in an oversized cardboard box with a couple other random carded cars for all these years, through 6 different moves.

Series 1 (308 and Testarossa) is dated 1988

Series 2 (F40) is dated 1989 and the words "World Class" and "Diecast" each appear on the front of the card 3 times, just in case you forget. Series 2 also added the line "Diecast vehicles with Plastic Parts" to the short bulleted list on the card front. Maybe someone at MB said "Why does series 1 have a list on the front with only 2 items on it?" and so a third item was lazily added to justify the list format 🥴

All of these were made in Macau.

One of them has a weird 6 digit number written in pen on the front. It makes my ADHD brain wonder what situation would cause a number to be written there. It's 1 digit too short for any phone numbers at the time.