I saw this ad today and got all nostalgic. This set was positively primitive compared to the ones my kids got this past Christmas, but I think I must have played with my Supercharger racetrack for days on end!

I had the Hot Wheels racetrack made of orange tracks that you snapped together with flat purple dowels into various track shapes.

Making the cars perform the loop-de-loop depended on gravity ... how high one had elevated the starting block.

I loved that track.

I saw it again on an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond... it really brought back memories.

I always had problems with the tracks trying to put them together so there weren't any bumps. Otherwise the cars would get thrown off the track if the pieces didn't line up just right.

The toy I loved as a kid was my Evel Knievel cycle. I caught a Christmas episode of That 70s Show a few weeks ago where Red was playing with Eric's.

I had the Evel Knievel stunt-cycle too ( for Christmas ). The next Christmas I got a TTP ( Turbo Tower of Power ) motorcyle set with two little guys on much smaller motorcycles.

TTP was a lot more fun ... but during summer a friend and I decided to turn the ramp upright. The motorcycle and rider shattered when they hit the ground.

It was so cool...

Oh, yeah! The Evel Knievel Stunt cycle was a very cool toy! My brother and I each had one. We must have used every thing imaginable to create ramps and death-defying jumps.

Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle - with the rubber Evel Kneivel doll (action figure!).... dang, I can "hear" that sucker now. I really abused mine... my Evel was a definite daredevil! Down staircases, out windows, the works!

And the orange Hot Wheel tracks! Yeah baby! When my son was growing up and "into" Hot Wheels, I looked all over the place trying to find those tracks. I think I found some at Toys R Us, but they were (if I recall) blue. Just wasn't the same. (he left all of his cars "parked" on the electric baseboard heater in his mom's apartment one winter... poor kid cried for hours cuz all his cars had flat tires.)

Oh man. I wanted one of those so bad when I was a kid that I may now have to retroactively hate you for your past good fortune.

Go right ahead. You won't hurt my feelings.

That's sort of what the That 70s Show episode was about. Funny how life imitates art.

I still pick up Hot Wheels.

Mostly, they are for my nieces and nephews, so they have something to play with when they drop by (and so they leave all the action figures alone )

Of course, it is also partly because they are still cool. These three hang out around my computer:

I've got a Hot Wheels Corvette I picked up from an IBM booth at some trade show sitting on top of my monitor at work.

I had the Robby Kneivel figure with the wind-up funnycar, and my big brother Frank had the Evel figure with the wind-up Snake River Canyon X-2 skycycle.





They rocked.

We had the standard loop-de-loop track with the starting gate that clamped to the kitchen table, but the piece de resistance was around '82 or '83 when they introduced Hot Wheels SCORCHERS! that were pull-back spring-loaded. I got the TRIPLE! loop-de-loop set.

At New Years, my buddy's son was showing me his new Hot Wheels Cyborg track and I told him about how when I was his age we'd put together the old orange tracks and see how far we could get a car to stay on it.

Hot Wheels - bringing generations together.

I could never quite figure out why the action figure came with a "swagger stick" cane. I don't remember Evel having one before any of his televised jumps, but I didn't really pay a lot of attention to his entrance theatrics.

After all of the above, I got an electric race car set that had two special race cars. Each had glow-in-the-dark decals and each had working headlights.

The idea was to race them with the lights off. Which was kind of fun.

It was more fun to set my dog by the track. He'd growl and would swat the cars off the track as they started up.

Can you tell I'm going through my mid-70s comics today?

I was way into Hot Wheels. Not as obsessed as some kids (I knew one that bought every single model as they were released).

One of my best Christmas presents ever was the original '68 Stunt Action Set. My aunt gave my cousin and I each a set of our own. The best part was that the car included in my set was the car that I wanted the most, the purple Custom Eldorado.

The original Hot Wheels line-up:

Loved Hot Wheels.

In my world, that was the correct generic name, not Matchbox Cars.

Apparently as collectors get older, the cars get more realistic!