Stuff You Should Know - How Hot Wheels Work

Episode Date: January 29, 2015

If you're an American who had a childhood, you probably have some nostalgia for Hot Wheels. Get your engines revved for this trip down memory lane as we discuss these fun and iconic toys. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.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, like that's what happens, like you're having a nightmare

and Yumi wakes you up in the middle of the night and you just goes, hey, welcome to the podcast. And then she slaps you across the face with a heart. It's true. Yeah. That is what that sounded like. That's what it sounded like. That's pretty accurate.

I don't know what got into me. You were just supercharged about this topic. That's terrible. What? Supercharged? No, 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, said, 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 my brother has them or they're in my mom's attic or what, because I'm kind of curious if I have any valuables. Yeah, you need to find them. Yeah.

They could be, apparently as far as Hot Wheels collectors go, they could be in mint condition, all the way down to beater 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, you know? And there's value for a beater too, like some people apparently harvest them for parts to rebuild like 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. Add 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 GI Joe, but I appreciated Hot Wheels.

Yeah, I had GI Joe too. We should do a GI Joe episode sometime. I had the older ones though. You probably had those. The 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. There was like Cobra. Cobra didn't exist when you were collecting GI Joe's. No, but how could you say like,

oh, that one that's 10 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 no problems. Yeah, as a quick side note, I have to tell this story. When, you know how I 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 a munchie school because he was a- The football player? Yeah. I don't know why I did on Franco Harris. 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. You still have it? No, of course not. We had the GI Joe's, but I think the Steelers uniform is gone bye-bye. That's sad. Yeah, 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's astounding until you stop and think about it. Sure.

Like apparently since 1968 when Hot Wheels were first introduced, more than four billion Hot Wheels have been produced. That's more than the big four Detroit automakers combined. You're like, wow. And then you think, oh yeah, it costs a minute fraction of the cost to build a Hot Wheels and it does a normal car. Yeah.

Plus also, it's not like you're going to go, I want this Buick Cutlass Supreme in every color it comes in with the Hot Wheels. You can do that. Yeah, what's the LEGO status? They're the biggest manufacturer of tires. Yeah, they're, yeah. I wonder though, do these not count as tires

because they're plastic? They count as wheels? I don't know, man. Because four billion times four, that's 16 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 Kurt Christensen is not going to be happy about this.

Who was that? The founder of LEGO. Remember old? Oh yeah, that's right. I thought you were saying old. No, old. Yeah, I remember old. Yeah.

So let's talk about the history of this stuff, huh? OK. So Hot Wheels, like I said, have been around since 1968. And anybody who's heard the Barbie trademark podcast will recognize the name Elliott Handler. That's Ruth Handler, the inventor of Barbie trademarks' husband. Sure.

And Elliott apparently saw a real chance to muscle in on an already extant market by a company called Tyco 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, Matchbox 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 can make these better and cooler. And he had a, as the story goes, had a designer, which we'll talk about in a 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 look at the old original commercials for Hot Wheels, that's how they pronounce it, Hot Wheels. Oh, instead of Hot Wheels? Yeah. The emphasis is on the hot. It sounds awkward. They're like, race your Hot Wheels.

You can suck 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, but having been raised. Right, right.

You know, post Hot Wheels is wrong. Yeah. Hot Wheels. Hot Wheels. Now I'm trying to picture the guy in the parking lot saying, those are some Hot Wheels you got on 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 in 1968 is like you said, when the first line came out of 16 Hot Wheels, they were sold initially for $0.59 a piece. 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 16 cars. They were also called California Customs Miniatures, was that first original 16 group of Hot Wheels that were released in 1968. So, and Harry Bradley designed them all, including apparently he got his hands on the first one,

by the way, that came out was a Chevy Camaro. Of course. The second one that came out was the Chevy Corvette. Of course. And apparently the Chevy Corvette came out before the actual Corvette came out. Yeah, the 69 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 1968 Corvette.

Yeah, 69. Thank you. That's all right. 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.

OK. But maybe so. Maybe he committed industrial espionage. Yeah. So like you said, those were the two of the first 16 in that original lineup, that original collection, which, if you have any of those, that's good. Yeah, you're doing OK.

Yeah, you got some money that you're sitting on. Because, I mean, they went all out on that original line. Oh, yeah. Like, there were bushings to the suspension. Yeah. 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 68. But when did they quit making those? It set up until 77 was when they stopped making the. Oh, no, 70 is when the suspension got an overhaul. OK. 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 whole reason they went to so much trouble is because they really wanted to destroy their competitor matchbox. And one of the ways they did that was by making these things far more functional than the matchboxes were.

The matchbox cars were. So they really could race. And if you put a matchbox car up against the comparable hot wheels, say the same model car, the hot wheels will destroy it every time in the head to head race. As we saw on the internet, a guy did that, of course. He took two Volkswagen's and two Audi 8s, I think, and one matchbox and one hot wheel.

And he said they won by at least a car link every time he tried. And this was no loop-de-loop or anything. It was just the straight race. Right. 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 164th 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 77. And the suspension only lasted until 1970. And 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 make it in China. So let's move the ship, the operations overseas. Well, not only that, it's the spectra flame. Pain is pretty expensive. It's awesome. It looks great, but it's pretty expensive.

So with any collector's item, as they started to downgrade the components and the parts and the manufacturing, and ultimately the final product, all that did was make the original stuff all the more valuable today because there's fewer and fewer of them as the years go on, proportionately speaking. Yeah, they had actual axles. It was like a real, they were designed by car designers.

And they were made, apparently, to reach 200 scale miles per hour. Yeah, that's pretty cool. That's way cool. Yeah, remember in the cockroach episode, we talked about how they're the fastest animal on the planet, relatively speaking? Pretty neat stuff. So Chuck, right out of the gate, Mattel had a hit on its hands.

Oh, yes. They released them in 1968. By 1970, Hot Wheels was a Saturday morning cartoon in the vein of like Dune Buggy and Scooby-Doo and all of those guys, Hannah Barbera. Dune Buggy? Or Speed Buggy. Speed Buggy?

Yeah. Remember Speed Buggy? Yeah, it was like a Dune Buggy that could talk, and it was basically. Wonder Bug? No, it's Speed Buggy. Oh, OK. Because there was Wonder Bug too.

If you took Shaggy and put some racing goggles on him, and then turned Scooby-Doo into a Dune Buggy, that's Speed Buggy. Oh, was that a cartoon? Yeah. We went around solving mysteries and stuff like that. Yeah, Wonder Bug was, I think that was live action. Oh, this was a cartoon.

Sid and Marty Cross. 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 the good guys and.

Do you know what this proves? What? It's the 1970s, the Dune Buggy was a very popular thing. Remember seeing those on the road? Like, I used to see them all the time. Not all the time, but in the 70s, it was a common thing. Yeah. You don't see them anymore.

Very rarely. Nope. No gremlins, no yugos, no Wonder Bugs. You know, I like gremlins. Do you? They're OK. For me, though, the coup de gras of car design is the AMC Pacer.

Yeah. It's like the Formica 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, if I just could have one Hot Wheel, it would, well, I don't know if that would be it.

I'd be happy with that one. Now, do they have that as a Hot Wheel? Oh, yeah. OK. And if you look up AMC Gremlin Hot Wheels, they went to town on those. They had some with the intakes sticking out of the hood and just all sorts of just awesome different variations,

like IndyCar, gremlins, and stuff like that. Because, and that raises a pretty good point, Hot Wheels has always been about the racing design. 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 Matchbox and the Hot Wheel is they were just much more interested in being sportier. Like you could get a Matchbox like a delivery truck. Right. You know? They had that.

But the Matchboxes looked more real. They all were about looking realistic. Right. And not necessarily performance. Yeah. 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. Right. You know? We'll talk more about all of this jam right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips, with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

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on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You want to go ahead and talk about some of the other differences between Matchbox and Hot Wheel? Yeah, sure. Since we're at it. Matchbox, 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, they have a deal with Eminem Mars for 2015. Oh, they do. So they have a Twix trucks and a Skittles van

and all this stuff. They have licensing with DC and Marvel this year. Fast and the Furious. I know they had a line. Yeah. So they're really big time in the branded. And a lot of times they'll have a store will just have exclusives like access

to an exclusive line of Skittles cars or something like that that you can only get at 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, longer axle and wider wheels because it's just cooler if that wheel sticks out from the body a little bit.

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 go ahead and bring that up. OK. It looks weird. You can't just shrink it and have it in the same proportion

and have it look normal. Right. It'll be as far as shrinking a car down by scale. It will be in the exact same proportion, but it's just awful a little bit. 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, which is why the wheels stick out some on a Hot Wheels, but not on a Matchbox. That's right. Because Matchboxes are all about realism. To heck with how it looks, as long as it's real. One of my favorite ones, and I had one of these that they mentioned in this article, was the Red Baron.

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 was a helmet. But I looked it up again today, and I was like, oh yeah, I had that thing. But it wasn't a Nazi helmet per se, but it was that shape of the helmet.

Right. Like the US soldiers have that shape now, where it's cut lower around the ears instead of just a straight, like the World War II helmet. Right. But the Nazis used those first, because it's a better design for war. And it also had a black iron cross on the side of it.

Well, hence the Red Baron, right? Yeah, but it's easy now as an adult to look and say, that looks like a little Nazi hot rod. Yeah, but the Red Baron was World War I. He was pre-Nazi Germany. Yeah, and it was also, I think at the time, just like look 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, exactly. It's what gave rise to Hot Wheels. So it makes sense. Yeah, I don't think there was any like a surreptitious 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 16 being released. Sure. The second release, they had, I think, 22 new cars. Yeah, 33 total. And then the third year, they had another. They released 33 after that, right? Oh, yeah, I'm sorry, 33 by 1970.

So they did 16, 24, and then 33. 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. Yeah. In 1970, 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 1983 when kids who were lucky enough to be taken

to McDonald's for dinner. The happy meal. To get a hot wheel. Which is what they called it at the time. Or could get one of 14 Hot Wheels in 1983. And they had some cool ones. They had a Chevy Citation. Did they really?

Yeah. They had one that was one of my favorites, actually. It was a Toyota Minitrek, 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. I'm 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 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. Right. 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 friend. Well, that's why our friends down under in Australia have outlawed marketing directly to children, which I think is a fantastic move. Oh, really? Yeah, it's so unfair to market directly to children.

It's just almost literally is like taking candy from a baby. Right. Like kids aren't sophisticated enough to psychologically defend themselves from being bombarded 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 trapper keeper. Yeah. What, did they make a law? Yeah. Really? Yeah, it's a big one. Very progressive law, which I think all countries should adopt. Well, in 1983, I agree wholeheartedly, by the way.

In 1983 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 cards. 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 1983, not a lot happened. Hot Wheels just kept going on, expanding more and more and more. Sure.

I think they had another happy meals joint in 1991 or something like that. And in 1995, they said, we need to do something big. And they did. They released something called a Treasure Hunt series, which is a purposefully limited release car, series of cars. Yeah. I think they did 12 models at 10,000 each originally.

And hence the name Treasure Hunt. They were hard to find. Yeah, and one of the cooler ones for me was the Oldsmobile 442. Yeah, the thing is neat. A dude at my church had a 442. And it was just awesome, man. He had the only muscle car in the youth group.

And 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 so-and-so. And he went, and you know what, dude? I went, no, he still got it. Oh yeah, why would you get rid of it? He still has the car.

I 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 1986. And it's juiced up. And he used to scare the daylights out of me and that thing. But it was also exhilarating to be riding with him.

And he, you know, like 200 feet of drag he would lay. Sure. Like power braking. And he would get like four sets of tires a year. He'd be in the passenger seat going, save me, Jesus. Yeah, I was very scared. Because I was, you know, I didn't flirt with the wild side back then.

No. The Oldsmobile 442 is as close as you got, huh? Yep, it was exhilarating. And then, so that was 1995. This treasure hunt thing kind of went. It didn't go exactly as planned. Mattel was like, oh, we could make even more money if we put these into wider release.

So the original 10,000 releases were re-done 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 just for you.

And we'll talk more about collectors. But just to kind of button up the history of Hot Wheels, it all came full circle in 1996 when Mattel bought Taiko and hence Hot Wheels bought Matchbox. So they're all owned by Mattel at this point. Yes. All right, we'll get to the design and collecting 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 and just take some measurements and then be good at math, basically. And like we said, Harry Bradley, who's

the daddy of the Hot Wheels designs, who's the guy who did the first 16, he was a GM designer originally. In his footsteps followed Howard Reese. And then after that, Larry Wood. And those are some of the legendary Hot Wheels designers. That's the Mount Rushmore of Hot Wheels. Pretty much, yes. And 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 Matchbox, is that there are Hot Wheels that only exist in the Hot Wheels world. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They are called the fantasy cars. They're just the designer's imagination come to life.

Right, whereas Matchbox 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 by the same company still, and they just have kept that distinction. Man.

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? No, I didn't have a bread truck. But I do remember having a couple of weird utility type vehicles that I don't remember.

They were probably gifts or stocking stuffers or something. I don't think I sawed it out. I was always into Tonka trucks. I thought Tonka was great. They were obviously much bigger. But those were construction vehicles, like dump trucks and stuff like that.

And still today, that Volvo dump truck, the giant one, with the huge wheels, I think is one of the coolest vehicles ever created. 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, it might ring a bell. It was basically, 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 Peterson Automotive Museum in LA, they have a really cool exhibit there that I haven't been to in person. But I was looking at an online 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? Might have cheered up a little bit at the desk. But they have the gussied up Corvettes with the big chrome engines coming out of the hood. Do they have the 442? I don't know if they have the 442, but I'm going. They will when your friend dies.

But it's in his will. It'll go straight to the museum. I'm going to 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 La Brea tarpits, I think. Oh, yeah. So I want to go check it out. Been there.

Yeah. It's neat. It is neat. But back to the design. These days, you're not going to need a tape measure and stuff like that. You're going to Photoshop designs, and you're going to even get a 3D printer

to make it to your prototype. That had to have helped them tremendously. Oh, yeah. Because if you're designing real life cars and you have a 3D printer, that's pretty handy. But with Hot Wheels, you can print out pretty much exactly what it's going to look like. Sure.

And once they have the prototype done, they'll make a mold out of it and then inject it with molten metal under tremendous pressure. And that's why it's called die cast. You create a die that you cast all of the ensuing ones from. Yeah, and I think they're made with less metal than they used to be. But 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 $1. Oh, really? Yeah, I was on the Hot Wheels collector site today, and they kept making reference to about $1. So just what's called the main line.

Yeah. The ones that they make en masse. The citation. Exactly. I'll bet if you got your hands on that 1983 citation, it'd be worth a few bucks. You're right. But they kept referring to the mainline stuff, so about $1.

Well, they 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 40th anniversary, which we'll talk about in a minute, but the most valuable regular Hot Wheel is the 68 Beach Bomb, which was a VW bus and Hot Pink that

had real surfboards to get out of the back of it. Yeah, originally, they only released, I think, 25 of them like that. There were a couple of problems. It was difficult to manufacture them with the surfboards sticking out of the back, even though it was more realistic. Sure. And it also was terrible on a loop-de-loop track,

because I guess the surfboards would either weigh 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 Hot Wheels ever was a pink one. They made even fewer of those, because apparently a lot of boys were like, I'm not playing with some pink van, even if it does have cool surfboards sticking out of the back.

So the thing sold for, I think, $75,000 in 2000. And it has since sold again. In 2011, I saw in LA Magazine for $125,000. 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 $10,000,

and stuff like, I think, one of those $442,000 originals is like $10,000. Yeah, I guess like 1970 Mongoose or Cobra are worth about $10,000 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 going to be worth a lot more. If there is something where they adjusted the design.

Like, for example, the Python was originally called the Cheetah. And then they found out that a real life executive with real life lawyers at GM owned the name Cheetah. Because apparently, GM executives just own names for cars that could potentially be used. Like every fast animal name. Right, exactly. So they changed it to the Python.

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 worth $10,000. Yeah, it's funny to think about. It's the same with Star Wars. Sometimes the mistake ones are the ones that are super valuable. Because there was some recall. But they're like, oh, but you want that one.

Because the Boba Fett's rocket really shot out before kids started choking on them. Right, or pissing on fire. Yeah, and that's the one you want. But like you said, it's all about scarcity and supply and demand. Dude, this whole thing has reminded me of a really great gallery I put together about hilarious knockoff toys. Oh, that's a good one.

Yeah, go to stuffyshino.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 this skirt trademark law, maybe, or something. Or else they just fully don't understand the toy and what it's allure 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. OK. And then I did mention the diamond-studded one. I always think these things are just ridiculous. But to take any of the diamond-studded bras

was worth a million bucks. I just always think it's kind of dumb. But they did make a 40th anniversary edition in 2008 with 2,700 little diamonds and rubies for taillights and black diamonds for the tires and all that stuff, 18 karat white gold body. But that's worth $140,000 to put together. I'm sure you know.

It's gaudy. It's a gaudy Hot Wheels. Yeah. The car's cool. It looks like Mad Max's car. Oh, is that a picture of it? Yeah. I don't think I saw that.

Can you identify that car? Well, what is that? It looks familiar. It does look familiar to me, too. It looks sort of like a DeLorean, but I don't think it is. I don't think so, either. No. Man, that new Mad Max looks good, though.

Are they remaking 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 Bane? Oh, yeah. Tom, what's his face?

Huddleston? No, not Tom Huddleston. But it's the same director. Tom Hardy? Yeah, Tom Hardy. But it's the same director from all the Mad Max series. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's supposed to be just one long, intense chase battle. Yeah. Sounds a lot like a Mad Max movie. Yep, that's 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 one long car chase from, I think, Colorado to California. Yeah, I remember that. That's a good one, from the 70s. Yeah, two-lane blacktop, too. Challenger? That's another classic car movie.

I think it was a challenger, the car. Yeah. I haven't seen that one. Yeah, that's a good one. That one weirdly had James Taylor in it when he was young and on drugs and cool. Were they apologizing to France? No, I don't know what the deal was.

Did you hear about that? No. So that whole Charlie Hebdo Solidarity March, the US sent, I think, the assistant deputy in charge of the USDA or something like that. So to apologize, John Kerry had James Taylor go to France to perform You've Got a Friend for the French government. Yeah, just talk about making.

I know, isn't it? Send guns and roses or something, at least. Well, send guns and roses from 1988. I'd go for any guns and 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 1987 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? 87. Oh, yeah? Yeah.

I can't believe we sent James Taylor. I'm still just like, I can't focus on anything. Well, if you want to know more about James Taylor or Hot Wheels or just about anything there is in the universe, you can type it into the search bar at housestuffworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this minimum wage argument. Not argument.

Proposal. Listen to how homelessness works from quite a few years ago. And you guys commented that part of the problem was that low minimum wage in comparison to cost of renting a two bedroom apartment, you'd have to work something like 87 per hour, 87 hours per week to afford it. With 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 simple misunderstanding. On the raised side, people believe this wage should be set at a level that would allow someone to raise a few children and live a modest but reasonably comfortable level or at least a safe level.

On the don't raise it side, people believe minimum wage is just a starting point for working, like for teenagers that their summer job or after school. This side believes workers were never intended to and should not expect to be able to support a family that pays minimum wage. So here's my solution.

Since we're a democracy here, let's just decide what it is supposed to accomplish and then set it at the appropriate level to do that. If we decide as a nation that someone should be able to raise a family, rent a two bedroom apartment while earning a wage, minimum wage, let's just figure out what that would cost and set the wage there, figure in rent, clothing, food,

utilities, transportation, et cetera. Let's say it's 27 grand per year, then set it at that rate. On the other hand, if we as a nation decide that minimum wage is just a starting point and not meant to support a family, it's intended for people with no work history or experience and low to no marketable skills

and we need to set minimum wage at a relatively low level and let the market, the free market, will ultimately determine the wage for entry level workers and workers historically have been able to increase compensation by gaining skills and good work history. With this settled, any argument about setting minimum wage at a living wage would be mistaken because we all just decided that people are not meant

to live on minimum wage and certainly not meant to support a family. That is from Joe Prohaska in Reno, Nevada. And interesting, I look forward to seeing the rebuttal emails. Yeah, 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 out of date 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 gonna be working these jobs.

It's not just gonna 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. Right. At the very least to get everybody talking. Yeah, because should some teenager at his first job make like 14 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. 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. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can post it on facebook.com slash stuff you should know.

You can put it in an email at stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and just for kicks, you can hang around our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

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