With all of the fuss over the RLC limited editions and the latest first editions and treasure hunts, I have sit back and reflected on what direction I’m going in the die cast world. And things they are a changing for me.

 It seems funny to me that people will pay a ton of money for something that will be in the stores in a few weeks or was just released online. In a way, I am glad that so many people are making a fuss over the latest, greatest stuff. I’ll still continue to find what I can and if I don’t, I’ll wait it out. Today’s hard to find FE is tomorrow’s peg warmers. I’ll find them eventually. While there are many variations every year, it seems that only a very few are truly hard to find or command high dollars. Even those can sometimes be found at affordable prices.

 So with all of this going on, I have decided to start focusing my collection more on some of the items from my childhood, black walls or basic wheel cars. Something about them for me just says Hot Wheels. Those of you who grew up in the redline era know that feeling I’m talking about. I really didn’t start playing with Hot Wheels until after they had went away from the redline wheel, so in essence, the black walls are my redlines. And there are so many cool castings from 1976-1984 that we just don’t see anymore: GMC Motor Home, Jaguar XJS, Rock Buster, Good Ole Pick’em Up Truck, Neat Streeter, Minitrek, Aries Wagon, Poison Pinto, Old Number 5 and the list goes on. These cars from “my generation” would be so cool if they were re-released. But nothing can take away from the past castings. Even if I didn’t have them, one of my friends probably did. I had the orange GMC Motor Home, a friend had the green one. Another friend had a green ’31 Doozie, I had the orange one. One friend had both the Super Chromes and the Golden Chrome 6 packs. And we played with each others cars-out in the yard, through the dirt and grass, down the driveway, everywhere. So now is the time for me to start filling in the cars that I have missed out on and bring back the childhood memories that got me started collecting in the first place. It’s time to go back to the basics.

 -stomp2k1