Collecting Cars

I’ve never really understood collecting things other than comics and toys. I’ve had some dalliances with other hobbies, most notably in my childhood when my parents desperately tried to widen my narrow range of interests and turn me into a real human being.

Football? No. Try as I might, it just seems pointless to me. No real stakes.

Collecting stamps? Difficult to see the appeal. As an adult, I can maybe appreciate the history behind…. Oh Heavens I just got bored even typing that out.

Coins? Nope.

My wife collects depression era glass. This I find interesting. It’s obviously not for me, but I think that it’s neat that she does it. She’s picked a pattern that she likes. She ‘inherited’ the hobby from her mother. It has its origins in a time period I’m highly interested in. There’s an actual goal to fight for. And it all ends up in a fancy display. So yeah, there’s that.

But that’s girly.

Now collecting toy cars is not girly. I’ve crossed paths with Hot Wheels collectors a couple of times in my hobby days. They seem to be a tad more intense than your usual comic and toy collector. Directly after the one Toy Fair I attended in New York one February I was approached by a toy car collector on the street who offered me fifty bucks for a toy car that Mattel had been handing out to Toy Fair attendees. I didn’t give mine up, but instead took it home to Lorie where she put it on eBay and got quite a bit more for it. So yeah… those people seem a little intense.

I never really understood toy cars, nor my attraction to them. As a kid in the seventies, I had a brief phase where I got really into cars. Put them all in a car case, pestered my mom for more and ‘played cars’ with the other kids in the neighborhood. But the WHOLE TIME I was searching for some point. Are we really just pushing a car around a road that we made in the dirt? Where was the action? Where was the intrigue?

One of my earliest signs of obsessive compulsiveness was centered on toy cars. I was on the porch of our New Hampshire house with my box of cars and the neighborhood kids. It was my porch and my cars; therefore it was my rules in how we picked who got what cars and what scenario we would play out. I kept switching the rules for how we would pick our cars. So much so that the other kids revolted and left to go play at someone else’s house. As an adult I realize it was the act of organization that I was enjoying and not so much the actual play.

I was ten.

Of course… there WERE some cars that I completely understood as a kid.





















The history of toy car companies goes back a ways. Hot Wheels hit the scene in 1968 and proved to be so popular they changed the way toy cars were made. Matchbox is probably the closest runner up, and they’ve been making toys since 1953. Corgi was always the company I remember as a kid, as they made the super-hero cars I ended up loving so much. They’re an England based company and have been in the business since 1933. And then there’s Dinky. Dinky makes die-cast metal toys and has been around since 1901. In the seventies, they made the Enterprise.





I got this from Santa one year for Christmas. We moved around so much that I don’t have many of my childhood toys. But I have this little beauty. As an adult, it’s one of the more treasured pieces of the collection. I remember even as a kid being fascinated with its construction.

That might be what attracts me so much to the toy cars. The engineering. The lines and metal and simple functionality.



I could stare at this Batmobile all day.





Currently, they make super-hero cars in three different ways. There’s the model of something actually seen in the comics:


Or movies:



And then there’s something that the hero would never actually drive, but the design is inspired by the character:






And then there’s just a car with the hero’s picture on it:





As an adult, I’ve been able to slim my collecting hobbies down to the bare bones. I don’t buy physical comics anymore, just digital. I’ve stopped toy collecting, except for the occasional Aquaman or Hawkman figure. Or maybe the rare impulse purchase if I actually go to Target. I don’t buy DVD’s anymore, as I prefer to stream things through Netflix where possible and buy digitally through iTunes when I want to. The act of minimalizing the physical things in my life is pleasant. One of the things I continue to buy are super hero cars. They’re small, relatively inexpensive, they don’t get produced often, and they’re great to display.

Which, I think, is the point for all those toy car collectors. The display.











Alex arranged this last one at my request. Ugh. I take no responsibility for the chaos and lack of architectural design. I'll speak with him.

Thanks,
DCD