It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

With a heritage rooted within the James Bond lore, the Aston Martin DBS is one sexy car.

It's a good thing that the Hot Wheels' version lives up to the old inverse adage that art imitates life. With no fuss, no weird nor unnecessary additions, this casting is purely faithful which probably made the British company's designers shriek in school girl delight when they saw the first prototype from Mattel... although I could be wrong.

Why the title? Well, its color reminds me of the shiny blue balls hanging on Christmas trees during the Yuletide season, which incidentally, starts oh so very early in my part of the woods.

The view from the side is this model's most photogenic, in my opinion. Just look at those curves! Have I mentioned that this car is sexy?

Of course a few licks of paint was needed to bring out the details that Hot Wheels is famously notorious for omitting, like tampos for the window trim, tail lamps, side garnishes, and rear emblems to name a few, but such a process is just a minor setback (two hours, tops) in order to make the casting look good when photographed.

Click on the thumbnails below to see more images in Flickr.

The devil is in the details

Never underestimate the power of detailing, however simple. I'll let the pictures do the talking.

Click on the thumbnails below to see more images in Flickr.

Genetics

This is the reason why the FC and the FD looks so good!

The following text was licked off JapaneseNostalgicCar.com:

As you can see, this is no ordinary SA22C, but one flared-out in the Hot Wheels spirit of “speed, power and performance” with an aero kit inspired by the IMSA GTU RX-7 race cars. And of course, we are thrilled to see once again the JNC inkan on it, this time in gold on the B-pillar! To coincide with the release of this car a couple months from now, we will be releasing a limited edition gold version of our classic JNC inkan decal. Once again, we have to give a huge domo arigato to Hot Wheels designer Jun Imai for this incredible casting. He is really our advocate at Mattel, pushing for the inclusion of old school Japanese cars in the Hot Wheels lineup. The name on the car, B. Ozaki, belongs to Brandon Ozaki, who works in Mattel’s painting group and owns a widebody RX-7 himself. His son’s initials are also B. Ozaki and was born on the 20th, hence the #20 on the door.

Jun Imai really knows how to design 'em Hot Wheels castings.

This Kroger Stores exclusive is the third Mazda RX-7 variant from Hot Wheels. The others being the black and the blue which basically share the same tampos with this one.

The first two variants for the Mazda RX-7

Now I'm on the lookout for the fourth variant — the gray Treasure Hunt released in the latter cases for this year, and sports different tampos from the others:

Pic from LamleyDLM

Have a great weekend ahead, everyone!

Green cutie

If this thing doesn't strike you as cute, I don't know what will. Chubby new-born pandas perhaps? Maybe these?

This year Hot Wheels came out with a 'tooned version of the Volkswagen Kombi. Man, is it cute. Not Care Bears nor Rainbow Brite-cute, but manly, surfer-dude-cute.

I'm a sucker for VWs — Beetles, Karmann Ghias, Transporters or Kombis (or microbusses), Golf GTIs, and the venerable Type 181. Why not? Volkswagen has Porsche lineage, for which I'm also drawn to like a bug (puns are fun) to black light.

Anyway, it's super-deformed (pardon the Gundam allusion, I still can't quite get over them), it's got tampos of waves on the sides, and it's metallic green! 3 levels of Kool! Note the surfboards at the back and you've got 4. Wheelie bars just push the casting off the edge and into über-coolness. If the Kool Kombi was real and tested by BBC's Top Gear trio, it would be placed on the Sub Zero side of the Cool Wall.

I, however, really don't care for the lame orange colorway which was the second variant, but I got one anyway. I'm pretty sure I can bastardize it so that it'll come out more decent. The third release for 2013, the white one, rocks so much that it can take away a bride and her groom from their dream Malibu beach wedding to their honeymoon hotel. I can't wait to get my hands on that one.

And so, the blabbering stops.

Click on the thumnails below to see more images on Flickr.

What the f**k have I been up to?

It's been more than a year. Priorities have changed and my taste in collections has changed. A bit.

So, what has kept me busy during the past 18 months? These

It all started with trying to get Matchbox and Hot Wheels versions of the Volkswagen I'm most crazy for -- the VW Type 181. Call it the Kurierwagen, the Trekker, the Safari, or the Thing. Back during my high school days, I was lucky enough to have driven one that was owned by a very good friend. May God bless your soul, Beng.

The want to get them all turned into an urge. The urge turned into an obsession. So I turned to the toy stores.

The Hot Wheels (and some Matchbox) versions were easy to acquire off the pegs.

Getting two variants made by Matchbox was a bit more challenging. Luckily, I found the zebra and red (Lesney) editions being sold by a nice chap from one of the local die-cast forums.

The pearl-white variant from the 2011 Matchbox VW Classics 5-pack was a given due to it's recent release:

So was the HW Boulevard Series release (shown below with a Johnny Lightning one), since it was just released last year:

I got so into it that I grabbed another Johnny Lightning Thing.

That's not all. I'm still in the process of finalizing a sale and getting Jada V-Dub 1/64 versions.

However, until now, I'm still looking for the one significant variant that's missing from my MBX/HW collection -- the green Matchbox VW Thing from the 2008 10-pack. I let one being offered in eBay slip by a few months ago, and I still can't forgive myself for doing so. If you've got one, and are willing to part with it, kindly drop me a message (arnelmanlises @ yahoo . com) and I'd be more than willing to work things out.

Here's a pic of the Thing (excuse the pun) I'm desperately looking for:

Pic borrowed from http://www.freewebs.com/71westfalia/vwmatchboxthingghia.htm

Maybe you're wondering how come it took me 1.5 years to snag the 8 variants from Matchbox and 6 from Hot Wheels. Well, here's the great part -- it wasn't only VW Type 181s that I went after. But that's for another blog post. :D

See you all next year! ^_^

Brings out the kid in everybody.

Matchbox toys. Hot Wheels. Tomica. Everyone loves 'em minature diecast model cars — at least boys and men do.

I do, and I have started getting them off the racks just to satisfy my insatiable hunger for toys. Pretty heavy word huh. Insatiable.

Well Matchbox, Hot Wheels and Tomica diecast model cars are relatively cheap and easy to get, so who am I to argue? Besides, they bring out the kid in me more than any other toy could. I could stay on the Toys R Us section of these brands for hours just trying to look for a new release... and another hour just choosing which toy has the least imperfections from the others.

Here's one I picked up recently.

Aston Martin V8 Vantage by Hot Wheels

By the way, I found another brand which makes better diecast models than the three mentioned above — Greenlight... and its price tag shows it.