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Mister Blister(card): My checkered history in the world of diecast-car packaging

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Auto World Hemmings diecasts

The Hemmings-title diecasts produced for Auto World. Photography by the author.

Scratch a fan of real cars, and you’re bound to find someone who’s also into collectibles and ephemera–even if it’s only related to their own car, and even if it’s only a little bit. The recent release of the AutoWorld diecast-car series with cars featured on covers of various Hemmings publications caused me to reflect: I have been lucky enough to be involved in making toy cars, to varying degrees, since 1998.

The vast majority of my work has been on 1/64-scale (or 3-inch, or S-gauge) cars. The first cars I spec’d out were for Hot Wheels–the bonus sweepstakes models (a purple 1970 ‘Cuda convertible and a gold 1967 Pontiac GTO, for what it’s worth) that were available through HOT ROD magazine at the time, but they came in clear baggies and so had no packaging to write up. (And for a while, they were worth rather a lot on the secondary market, I’m pleased to say).

Hot Wheels

The first opportunity to write on cardboard came through Richard Adkins of Adkins Collectibles of Wisconsin–who, at the very end of the 20th century, was surely the top independent Hot Wheels seller/distributor out there. Adkins spearheaded a series of four 100-percent Hot Wheels castings. Someone else (maybe Rich did, I don’t recall anymore) chose the cars, renowned automotive artist Kenny Youngblood did the interlocking blistercard artwork, and I had to come up with a couple of pithy lines to describe the cars replicated in the package. Though I’d been in magazines for more than half a dozen years at that point, and seeing my name in print had not yet gotten old-hat, the idea that I’d contributed to a diecast car (however tangentially, however anonymously) tickled me. A second series with muscle cars (I recall a mustard Boss Mustang and a red Olds 442) came not long after. Both series had the HOT ROD logo on the blister.

Another surprise came with another Hot Wheels release, with a premium-line magazine-related series. In the series was a 5.0 Mustang-magazine-badged silver and purple ’99 coupe, and the package featured a red five-liter Fox-bodied Mustang LX hatch on the cover. This was a surprise on top of a surprise: I shot that car for HOT ROD in the late ‘90s, where it ran; the editor of 5.0 (himself a former HOT ROD staffer) purloined it for his own book, blew it across the cover and a centerfold spread, and the next thing I know it ended up on the Hot Wheels package. Somewhere, in a closet, I have one still.

Johnny Lightning diecasts

A crisis in confidence saw a change in careers, from writing about cars to making miniature replicas of them, and for two years I was working at Playing Mantis in Mishawaka, Indiana, home of Johnny Lightning diecast cars. There, I was responsible for myriad duties, including packaging text and sourcing all of the photos that ended up as a packaging “premium” with the car. Partly, the photos were there to make the blistercard look richer than it actually was, but part of it was to show the model’s fidelity to the real thing. (Whether it passed or not, we shall leave to the collecting population at large to determine.) This was in the days before heavy internet usage–we were rocking dial-up modems in those days–so actual photography was badly needed. I traveled to Pontiac shows, VW shows, PT Cruiser events, local car dealers, and even raided media press kits for appropriate images. This took up an inordinate amount of time.

And so I pushed for (and was allowed to do) a program at JL called Your Car is the Star (YCITS). The idea was this: if we have a casting of your car, send us a nice photo. If we use it, then you get your car replicated, your name and photo on the package, and a case of that very car to call your own. This would get around us buying expensive photography of nice cars from professional shooters, for a start, and would make the company appear to be reactive to its fan base. The follow-up, which was supposed to happen but never did, was someone was supposed to contact the home-town newspapers of the people whose cars were featured, pitch the idea of a softball local-owner-makes-good story (ie, can you believe someone from our little town got their car made into a toy that will be sold at toy stores nationwide!?) to those media outlets, and get a little press for both the car owner and the company. You know, generate a little buzz on our product line. YCITS received hundreds of photo submissions, and a few dozen of those cars ended up getting made, scattered throughout various series over time, but there was never any media follow-up. It was also a logistical nightmare, as it turned out; I put up with it and pushed for it because it was my idea, but I was not surprised that my successor killed it dead after I left JL in 2003.

Greenlight diecast

Fast-forward to 2011. I’m out of the toy biz for more than half a dozen years, happily toiling away in Hemmings Motor News’ employ. Greenlight Collectibles, another Indiana-based diecast-car company, got the license to do Primedia and/or Source Interlink magazine titles, including HOT ROD (Petersen ceased its name on the masthead in late 2001). They stuck to the conventional “magazine cover car” formula. Now, they only did a handful of HOT ROD magazines in the short-lived series, and I only shot two covers in my 4 1/2 years there. (This one was done in the rain outside a quarry somewhere north of Las Vegas early one morning.) So what are the odds that Greenlight would choose one of those covers, and a car I shot to replicate in small scale? I wasn’t even working for the company–and I’d shot the photo about a decade earlier–and yet there it was. My third. I bought it retail.

Which leads me to the fourth, and the latest. AutoWorld diecast cars, a company started by the minds and money behind Playing Mantis’ revival of Johnny Lightning two decades ago (and my ex-bosses from the Playing Mantis days), went with another magazine-themed diecast-car lineup. But this time, they contacted … you guessed it, the Hemmings Hobbit Hole in Bennington, VT. This was, again, a complete surprise: I had no contact with anyone from AutoWorld OR HMN about any of this. So when they showed up on my friendly neighborhood diecast distributors’ website, I was quite surprised, and not a little pleased.

Auto World Hemmings diecast

There are six cars in AutoWorld’s Licensed lineup (two each from Hemmings Motor News, Hemmings Classic Car and Hemmings Muscle Machines). And wouldn’t you know, three of the six were photos I took: the mustard Dodge Dart from Sept ’10 HCC, a red ’66 Chevelle from April ’13 HMN, and a purple ’70 Hemi Challenger from July ’11 HMM. (To be fair, the HMN Chevelle ran in Muscle first, but HMN had the temerity to put it on their cover.) There are three others in the set, which look just as good, but selfishly I only grabbed my own.

The irony of all of this is that, when it comes to toy cars, I’m an opener–I want to be able to roll my cars, free of their plastic packaging, and display how I choose, rather than keep them in the packaging. (The toy nerds call it “DLM”–the Diecast Liberation Movement.) I’m one of those people who makes everyone else’s collections worth more: 99 and 44/100 percent of my toy cars are loose and available to grab and roll at a moment’s notice. But these, the ones I had a hand in creating? Oh no. These are part of my .56 percent that are staying in their little plastic tombs forever. For me, for once, it’s the packaging that matters.

 

 

 

 


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