Hot Wheels Then and Now
Redlines 1968-1977Coolest of the Cool! These are the spectra flame cars that started it all with the redline stripes on the tires, which was a passing fad in the mid sixties on real cars. Mattel discontinued the use of redline tires in mainstream cars in the middle of 1997. They have brought them back sporadically since the mid nineties, so this is not an easy way to identify an original, so beware!
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Basic Wheels 1977-1995After the demise of the redline tires, the basic wheel (BW) era ran until 1995, with the wheels pictured here along with a couple other styles, Hot Ones and Ultra Hots. In 1995, Mattel introduced many more wheel styles, so 1995 is a convenient spot to end the "BW" era, plus Mattel changed the way they grouped cars starting in 1995.
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Treasure Hunt Era 1995-presentIn 1995, Mattel introduced short run cars called Treasure Hunts and decided to make small mini themed series of cars that were organized by year. Also in 1995, they introduced more wheels styles, which began an explosion of variations and colors. They also started producing many more styles per year with the use of color changes, tampo variations, and wheel changes.
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Premium, short run and special cars.These are the cars that you don't find in the normal .99 packages. This includes multipack cars, Redline Club cars (online only), store exclusive short series, and cars that came in track sets. The Corvette pictured at the left, as an example, was available only in a special christmas box set at Target in 1996 with an auto carrier and a Semi truck.
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Packaged CarsAs a collector, I have had to limit myself as to what to collect. I tend to go for realistic cars, so I do not have everything from each different subset. In this section, I have divided up the collection based on subset first, such as this Cool Classics line which ran in 2014 and 2015. There are tens of thousands of variations, so I hope you see things here you like.!
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