On Wednesday, February 8, 2017 at 7:53:42 PM UTC-7,
banzait...@gmail.com wrote:
> Curious what drove you to collect Cars toys?
What "drove" me? Ha ha! A vehicular pun.
I think you've asked me about this before. I know a few people here consider them to be geared towards younger kids. It's funny how we as adult collectors distinguish between toys meant for four-year-old boys and toys meant for eight-year-old boys...
When they first came out in 2006, I didn't really know what they were (I hadn't seen the movie yet), but there were only about 12 of them so they were a fun novelty. They reminded me a lot of the characters from the Tex Avery cartoon "One Cab's Family" from 1952, which I've always loved. Cars with faces means that they're self-motivating vehicles, which makes them robots, after a fashion. Living machines. For me, that was the draw.
Then I saw the movie and got to know the characters and I really liked the world that they inhabited. It's a Pixar masterpiece with tons of heart and humor and easter eggs, and I find it eminently rewatchable. As the years passed and my collection grew, the character selection became more and more diverse, to the point where unnamed background cars with no dialogue were getting toys. It was like Star Wars, where I could buy the action figure and then go and check the film to play Spot the Obscure Background Character.
Even variations of Lightning McQueen were interesting to me, because there was seemingly no limit to the different versions of him they could sell... mud on his bumpers, Dinoco dream sequence with missile launchers, bugs in his teeth, etc. It was also not unlike Star Wars where seemingly minor variations in costume warranted an all-new action figure.
As an aside, there are lots of adults who collect Hot Wheels, but I'm largely uninterested in them unless it's a car based on a media vehicle like the Mystery Machine or George Jetson's bubble car or somesuch. I will buy a car if I can repaint it into a Transformer, but I don't "collect" them in the traditional sense. I just can't get too excited about machines that aren't alive (not a Gundam fan, not a Voltron fan).
So, my interest began to wane considerably with Cars 2, which was (let's face it) a terrible movie that almost seemed to be introducing characters just for the sake of feeding Mattel's merchandising machine (witness the eleven different iterations of Mater in the space of a few seconds). My collection was running on its own momentum for a while until I realized I just wasn't enjoying it the way I had been for the previous six years or so. And don't get me started on Planes.
Zob (I look back now and it does seem kind of silly in retrospect, but I am certainly no stranger to buying toys that I later questioned why in the world I own them)