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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."
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?
Lead paint makes small die cast toys taste good and that will be good for business.
I still remember being a kid and setting up huge tracks that went all the way from the 2nd floor to the basement. I had a ton of track :) Good times.
K Man
They don't need to reinvent themselves because they are perfect as they are.
My youngest is a clutcher and takes a car with him to school every day.
Most days he doesn't come back with one, or if he does still have one, you can bet it wasn't the one he took.
liqbase
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.
What the hell's a "gewie?"
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.
Find free books.
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?
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.
You take it, I don't want it...
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.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
with negroponte's laptop freebie-thing, the kids of the future will hopefully be programming infrastructures and desiging better networks. networked digital interaction is the (near)infinite playground, it is play on a level completely different from physical play.
Lego is a great example of adapting to the changing world. For example, a few years back when they were all the rage, my son had upwards of 20 bionicle Lego sets. These are the kits that let you build robot-like guys with ball-and-socket joints and interchangeable arms/legs/heads/weapons.
These are a long ways from the red and blue square blocks that Lego made when I was a kid, yet the idea was the same: give a kid a kit that they can primarily build the picture on the box with, but the ability to adapt a few kits into something all together different. My son built everything from hover-crafts to star-wars droids to ultra-mega-bionicle-man.
Not to crack on Mattel, but the core hotwheels concept is die-cast metal cars that resemble the real things. The only "innovation" that I see them coming up with is the new H3 with pimp spinners, a lift kit, and gold trim. Unless they come up with something like Lego has with the shift away from their legacy product and into a new Internet age toy, Mattel will be doomed to a niche of kids who really dig cars (arguably a shrinking demographic...)
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
Those uf us who have sampled the intellectual delights of high tech can no longer be fascina...oooh...SHINY..
Reinventing Hot Wheels(tm):
....
1: Buy a petrol company.
2: Invent Hot Wheels(tm) that run on tiny gasoline engines...
3:
4: PROFIT!!!
wait.. That one might actually work.. I guess it can't be a true 'PROFIT!!!' joke..
My rantings, only longer and with better spelling..
You never grow out of toys. They just get more expensive as you get older.
Life is not for the lazy.
Want to keep today's kids hooked on your retro toys ? Lace em with crack.
:P How hard can it be to put a Sausage McMuffin and two hash browns in a farking bag ? Kids these days.. The only reason they're still alive is because it's illegal to run them over with my car.
I think today's kids needs toys that slap them in the face with a wet noodle and yell "You're a stupid disrespectful worthless excuse for a human being. Cut your hair, go to school, get a job, pay your taxes, go get real friends, quit screwing up my goddamned Drive-thru order."
Back in my day, we had parents to do that. Where did humankind go wrong ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
...to do to reel in some insane profits for the 2006 holiday season is to make these following models:
1) Red sports car that looks like kinda like a curvy blend of a Corvette, a GT-40, and a Viper.
2) Blue Porsche 911.
3) Blue Hudson Hornet.
4) Rusty old, hoodless 1955 Chevy tow truck.
5) Blue Roadrunner SuperBird.
6) Green Buick Regal.
And an assortment of other vehicles from you-know-what-movie.
Better put eyes on their windshields too.
From the article:
...any other Dad's out here shudder when they read that?
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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.
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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.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
You know, if you take the shoulder blade from a medium badger at attach it to his femur, it makes a heck of a device for flinging buffalo do-doo. We used to trap our own badgers, but sadly, the white-man killed almost all the buffalo so that's hard to find nowadays. I'm thinking about just getting my kids a large dog - for the do-doo that is, not the bones. Once you harvest the bones the animal is pretty much useless....kinda like harvesting apples by cutting down the tree if you know what I mean.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
that's going to become much less endearing in 10 years or so when he's driving your car.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
Oh boy. You guys waxing nastalgic about the good ol' days back in 1972. Well, I was born back in the early pleolithic around 1958.
Even back then, old people were whining about the toys being so high tech (like requiring batteries), and how kids were no longer able to use their imaginations. Hot Wheels when they first came out were a perfect example of what was wrong with toys! You built a track, and raced them.
"When I was a kid", as people complained back then, "We had big toy trunks that you could actually play with! Not these little tiny cars. Back then, you *pretended* to race them, and that built imagination!" Then, they would go on with some story about walking 9 miles in the snow in uphill both directions every day to school, and having to work in some salt mine and how that built character. In the meantime, I went back playing with my hightech Hotwheels.
Somehow, despite all the high tech toys I played with, I have managed to somehow grow up, avoid becoming a delinquent, and make some contribution to society. However, I worry about my kids. They sit around all day and play with their dang hightech toys. Not like I did in my day. If I wanted a my toys to beep or buzz, I had to do it myself. These kids, they have no imagination.
And, TV only had four channels, and one of those was PBS. And, when we wanted to change channels, we had to get up off the couch, walk all the way to the TV set, and turn a dang knob.
And, we liked it!
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!".
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."
Damn! If he just says "synergy" I have buzzword bingo.
I loved HotWheels as a kid, but now that I have kids, I am so disappointed with all the crappy and expensive fluff. We don't need a fire spitting demon track, battery powered launchers, or hundreds of crappy and brittle little plastic pieces to put together for the "sets". Too many themes, with large towers and crap that snaps and breaks easily, or pieces that get lost and ruin the set. I was shocked at the stupid and needless themes, and poor quality. None of the sets were usable beyond the first setup of them. My son has more fun with my old track, curve, loop sets, with a bit of gravity to launch some stunts. If a pieces gets lost, no biggie, they're all basic and rugged units, not specialized and poorly built theme sets.
I searched high and low last Christmas, and couldn't find a basic set with some track, a few curves and maybe a loop, and some cars. (I ended up buying some bulk track, couldn't find any curves; and a few cars. Not as much fun as when I was a kid.) Please, HotWheels, get back to the basics, with some well built, simple, and fun, sets. I think you'd be surprised at how much appeal (and profits) it would find.
I see it a bit like Scrabble, one of my favorite games. There have been attempted variations of it, most of which sucked. But they have come out with deluxe versions of the old game (fancier tiles, rotatable board, electronic versions, etc.); that's useful and classy enhancement of a sure-fire formula. But changing the fundamentals usually blew the formula. Same thing with chintzy and expensive theme sets from HotWheels, IMO.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.