Re-Inventing Hotwheels

garzpacho writes "BusinessWeek has an interview with Gary Swisher, Mattel's Vice-President of Wheel Design, who talks about the challenges of designing new toys for today's tech-savvy kids. In addition to discussing 'the challenge of stewarding an old-school brand like HotWheels in our tech-driven age, the emerging technologies that will affect the toy industry, and Mattel's Web strategy,' he also talks about the effect that video games have had on toy design, and argues that exciting the imagination is the most important role that a toy can fill."

Comments

Why does everything need to be tech based?

[nachmore]

Just as long as they remember that you don't always need technology to excite the imagination we may actually see something new and innovative out there.

Lego bricks anyone?

Re:Why does everything need to be tech based?

[frosty_tsm]

Tell that to the children.

You know, the children who constantly play their gameboy wherever they go and possibly have lost the ability to enjoy the simplicity of non-technology based entertainment.

Re:Why does everything need to be tech based?

[Moofie]

And thus repeateth the cycle.

People have been saying "Eh! Kids these days! Never amount to anything!" for approximately 6000 years. They've pretty much always been wrong.

Re:Why does everything need to be tech based?

[pw700z]

Context: I was born in 1976. Does anyone else find the tech stuff a "turn off"? If I want to play with tech stuff, I will play with my computer. If I want to play with toy cars, I want to play with ... TOY CARS!! Why in the world can't I buy my 3 year old a decent quality hot wheels/matchbox sized Dump truck? Or bull dozer? Or car that actually looks like a car that actually exists on this planet? Why do they all have to be "pimped out"? Or have crazy high tech styling? I remember when GI JOE was pretty realistic looking, then they got all spacey, and suddently it seemed stupid to try and play around in my back yard with them... And at hotwheels.com, or matchbox.com, why can i find a listing of their products, such as which cars they sell? What's wrong with realistic?

Re:Why does everything need to be tech based?

[plover]

Why in the world can't I buy my 3 year old a decent quality hot wheels/matchbox sized Dump truck? Or bull dozer? Or car that actually looks like a car that actually exists on this planet? Why do they all have to be "pimped out"? Or have crazy high tech styling?

Context: I was born in 1962. (Yes, people really are that old.) When I was playing with Hot Wheels in the 1960s and 1970s, the cars were all "futuristic". Nobody wanted to play with a navy blue Chevy Impala when you could have a purple metallic-flake paint "Scorpion" or a "Stinger" with a plexiglas dome for the driver, looking more like a UFO than a car. Even the models of the current cars were "tricked out" with giant chrome air intakes poking out of the hood, and flame decals burning down the sides. They were indeed the "pimpmobiles" of their era. None of them looked like cars anybody I knew would ever own, or anything I'd seen anywhere but the Popular Mechanics photos of the Detroit Auto Show.

Matchbox, on the other hand, made the "realistic" vehicles. I had a dump truck that was obviously of British origin, which I always thought was kind of cool. And I played with those, too.

I suggest you get your kid some Hot Wheels anyway. When you sit down to play with him/her, the only person who cares if they're real or not will be you. You'll both be making "brrrm-brrm" noises soon enough, making little roads in the dirt, and the realism will not matter in the least.

Re:Why does everything need to be tech based?

[Mr_Tulip]

The reason kids these days are more into Gameboys and iPods than trucks and footballs is that many parents these days can't be bothered to actually play with their kids .

Gameboys can be played solo, and it is much easier, as a parent, to buy your kid a gameboy and tell them to go play with it than to spend time with them.

A toy truck is a pretty boring toy in itself, but if you have several toy trucks, a few kids of the right age, and one or more helpful parents, I guarantee that it's a lot more fun than playing a gameboy solo.

Re:Why does everything need to be tech based?

[Alex P Keaton in da]

"I think hot wheels has a strong but limited and temporary audience, they should understand that and focus on it." I actively "played" with Hot Wheels and Matchbox (and the occasional Johnny Lightening and Corgi) cars until I was 10-12. I had the playsets when I was younger, but as I got older we used to take those long strips of plastic track and run them down the stairs and make big jumps at the bottom.
I am almost 30, and when my kids (a boy and a girl, 3,5) want a hot wheels car I always give in. They are only a buck and are always at the register. It is one of the only toys my kids beg for that costs less than a cup of coffee, so I am happy about that.
As far as age goes- I know a lot of older guys that collect hot wheels. We dont zoom them around (not when other people can see) but they are fun and inexpensive (new- some of the vintage ones are expensive). My wife always puts a few in my Christmas stocking. I have a couple old camaros (1:1 scale...) so people always buy me Hot Wheels, Johnny Lightening etc. Camaros.
I don't think that hot wheels has a limited/temporary audience. Maybe for the playsets, but the cars are ageless. Also, I have seen the large scale super detailed hot wheels (the 1:24 scale). Those are for older "kids...)

Re:Why does everything need to be tech based?

[Red Flayer]

I'm not so sure of that. My parents rarely had time to play with the kids, and the same is true for previous generations, IMHO. We amused ourselves outside because that was our best option. We wanted to play with the newest and coolest toys -- we just didn't have them, so we made do with building forts in the woods, playing tag, playing catch, etc.

I think you hit the nail on the nead, though, when you mention "a few kids of the right age." Larger houses, smaller families, and fear of predators have led to kids playing inside by themselves, or maybe with a sibling or one friend. Gone are the days of all the neighborhood's kids playing outside, unsupervised, in the afternoon.

I guess my main point here is that it's not parents not playing with their kids that is the issue -- it's kids playing solo. It's not like parents 50 years ago magically had more time to play with the kids, or more of a drive to play with their kids.

Then again, my perceptions are skewed -- I grew up on a farm with six kids.

Re:Why does everything need to be tech based?

[digidave]

And *that* is the problem with modern Hot Wheels.

My six year old got lots of Hot Wheels three years ago for X-Mas. He's got roads and mountain passes and all the cool stuff. The problem is that none of the new cars will actually go over the hills because they don't have enough ground clearance. Some of them won't make it down the mountain race track because they have giant spoilers that get stuck in the tunnel. Some are too wide to fit on the roads. Only two or three will make it down the race track and do the loop.

Of course, I gave my son all my old Hot Wheels. All of them will work with his new race tracks, including the loops and hills. They have higher ground clearance and go a lot faster.

So maybe what's wrong with Hot Wheels is that they care more about what the cars look like than making a product that works well. If my beat up 20+ year old cars are faster than any of the new ones and the new ones don't work well with the playsets, no wonder kids don't play with them much anymore. Mattel should just try to make them fun again.

Glad to hear this:

[kassemi]

FTA: [On video games] They aren't the imaginative play that toys are. That's a sad thing for us.

Thank god someone making these toys sees that. Shoving loads of useless, yet focus-grabbing information in front of a kids face is going to destroy that child's ability to actually create. Imagination should be nurtured, and the only way to do that is to force these kids to find a way to pre-occupy their own minds. My hat's off to you, Mattel.

general-purpose sets

[bcrowell]

I had a general-purpose hotwheels set when I was a kid, and it was great. I still remember some of the stuff I did, like starting the track on a shelf way up high in the kitchen and running it down and all the way across the apartment, and taping fireworks to the back of the cars with my friend in second grade. I wanted to get hotwheels for my kids, but all they seem to sell these days is dopey little special-purpose sets that you can only do one thing with.

Exciting the imagination

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

What about providing scope to explore and develop new skills?

From kittens playing hide and seek, to puppies playing tug of war, to human kids playing house, play is how mammals learn. That's why they're programmed to dedicate such immense levels of energy to it.

Are any of the Mattel toys as good for a kid as Legos would be?

Technology COULD Limit Imagination

[walnutmon]

I think it is possible that all this technology is actually going to make toys shittier. What was great about being a kid is you could have something very simple and make it fun with your imagination... I remember when a towel was a cape, and a plastic sword made me HeMan "I HAVE THE POWER!".

The problem with technology is that it makes it easy to complicate things to a point where you can't take the toy in the direction your imagination wants to go. I used to love action figures that were plain, and could move in all directions, simply because I could use them to do anything... I even had GI Joe Football games.

Seems like technology should be used in CREATING toys, not actually in the toys themselves. I don't need action figures or wrestling buddies with voices and changing facial expressions, what if i want the toy doll to be my hated enemy who I must fight in a steel cage match? Nothing worse than dropping bows from the top rope only to hear some stupid voice say "I am hulk hogan, eat your vitamins!".

Of course kids are losing a lot of the fun toys because of the tendency to pull toys from the market that focus on violence. How else are kids going to get rid of the evil guys? Diplomacy? Bullshit, our government can't even get that to work.

Re:Technology COULD Limit Imagination

[Moofie]

And the generation before you didn't have a plastic sword, they had two pieces of wood nailed together. And the generation before that just had a stick.

Just because the toys have changed doesn't make the children less imaginative.

Re:Technology COULD Limit Imagination

[Eivind]

Thinking back, most of the things I played with as a kid was not toys at all. A tree is no toy. A stream, a lake, an empty barrel, 100 feet of rope, a saw, a bike, a fish, a path, a bunch of planks, a screwdriver, a stick. None of these objects are toys. Though all of them can be used for play.

I think it' silly how so many parents shut their kids away in their own separate universe with brigthly-coloured, but ultimately useless "toys", that ultimately acomplish nothing. Kids these days tend to have plastic saws, plastic screwdrivers, plastic hammers, plastic cooking-pans none of which actually do what these objects normally do.

Now I'm a parent myself, for a two year old son. And given the same choice, real or "toy" he'll go for real every time. "playing" kitchen cannot measure up to actually go in the kitchen and make a cake, or a bread, or dinner. The "toy" screwdriver is no fun, the real one is different, it *works*.

Thing is, real objects can frequently be dangerous, if used improperly. So they tend to require that you spend time with your child, that you have patience. That you accept needing to wipe the kitchen-floor again, for the third time today. The toy, on the other hand, you can generally relatively safely let your kid handle alone with minimal supervision.

Lots of "toys" seem to be made more for the parents than for the kids.

Bingo - that's it exactly

[Weaselmancer]

Back In The Day(tm) you bought Hot Wheels and it was up to you to determine what they did. Could you make a track that would make them do a loop? Make it all the way down into the basement without jumping the track? And along the way you learned a lot about how the world worked. Notice how the car can never get higher than its starting point without a push? When I read about potential and kinetic energy in high school first thing I thought was "Aha! The Hot Wheels problem! I've seen this before."

But nowadays (opposite of BITD, see above) the sets only do one thing. The idea is to maximize revenue. A kid gets hooked on Hot Wheels and they buy set A. They do everything set A can do, then they have to buy set B. And of course, sets A and B are not compatible.

And that's what is wrong with todays sets. No room to grow with them. Of course they get boring quick - that's part of the revenue model. They're designed not to hold your interest very long - you can only do one thing per set. Don't confuse poor toy design with ADHD or video game addiction. You are making a more boring product these days. Your revenue-maximizing model you've fallen in love with is the broken part. Go back to making general sets as well as your special kits and you'll see interest in Hot Wheels perk back up I'll bet.

When I was a kid videogames ruled my play

[rsilvergun]

since I was pretty poor, and getting 1 videogame, with all the characters, features and do-dads was like getting a whole box of toys.

You want to reinvent HotWheels? SIMULATOR!

[Rachel Lucid]

I want to see the insane tracks that make huge loops under and through your Mom's coffee table again! Bring me a way to do that, even if only with a computer, and you have your scheme right there.

What?!!

[StressGuy]

From the article:

=======
Where will HotWheels be in five years?

I see HotWheels going beyond the vehicle. We're just testing the waters now with toys like the Ray Gun. We also want to get kids outdoors.
========

As the father of a three year old boy and a 4 year old girl (who both play with Hot Wheels), my first thoght was, "I wonder where this puts the world in five years?"

Great, forget about buiding entire cities populated with Hot Wheels vehicles and "My Little Ponies" using Legos, Tinkertoys, and Connects to make buildings and structures for them to run through.., or figuring out how to make a track that goes through a loop, hit's one of the battery-powered car boosters (you know, with the spinning foam wheels) then circles around and jumps back through the loop eventually arriving back at the starting point so we can send it through again. No....it's much more creative to just go outside and pretend to shoot each other. ...any other Dad's out here shudder when they read that?

Ugh.. tech based toys

[Zerbey]

When my 3 year old threw a tantrum because the toy I bought him didn't make any noises I vowed to start buying him more "manual" toys. The big issue nowadays with kids toys is that the kid doesn't need to play with them. They press a button, it does something cool and they sit and watch it. Yuck.

When I was a kid, such toys where very expensive and a treat you only got at christmas (that Millenium Falcon ruled!. Of course, now you can pick them up at [something]-Mart for a couple of dollars.

Since encouraging my own children to play with more traditional toys (cars, lego, etc.) I've seen their imaginations improve and less cries of "I'm bored!".