POP CULTURE

Hot Wheels car sets were the coolest.

Hot Wheels were cool.

One Christmas in the late ’60s, my brother and I got a Hot Wheels set from our parents, and it was all we’d hoped it would be. Of course we’d seen the TV commercials leading up to the holiday. They showed real dragsters and souped-up muscle cars in California interspersed with pictures of the tiny metal cars that sped incredibly fast down cheddar cheesecolored tracks. At the end of each ad, a gruff voice spoke the slogan “Go... with the winner!”

These were not the slow-moving Matchbox cars we were used to;

Hot Wheels were the real deal, with gleaming metal finishes and chrome mag wheels that spun effortlessly on pinlike axles. To say we were excited would be an understatement. We carefully opened the pop art packaging emblazoned with the flaming logo and assembled the track.

Growing up in the country, we were about as hip as saddle shoes. Our parents regularly had us get crew cuts, which really helped us stand out in the school yard.

But the toy car set gave us our own piece of trendy California, with a miniature racetrack, a speedometer and a stunt loop. I even had a sparkling race car called Beatnik Bandit. I had no idea what a beatnik was, but I knew it had to be cool.

As kids, we had been far from spoiled and our parents rarely bought us toys, so that Christmas we felt as if we’d won the lottery. We lost ourselves racing our cars, making our own revving engine sounds, and marveling at their speed as they whipped down the tracks, often flying right off. We were transported to an exotic place, the western desert flats, where cars just like ours raced in blazing heats and sometimes broke land-speed records.

I am guessing our dad had picked out the set, but I can guarantee that he had no idea how much his present meant to us. We would go on to get more racing sets and special-issue cars, slowly amassing a collection that became the toys we played with the most over the years.

Thanks, Mom and Dad, for such a wonderful gift that Christmas a long, long time ago.

POP CULTURE SPLITTIN’ IMAGE CARS, such as this one, joined the Hot Wheels model lineup in 1969. 16 million sets of Hot Wheels sold in 1968, the top-selling toy that year. Mattel co-founder Elliot Handler wanted Hot Wheels to look like custom hot...