Slot Car Tour At Track Level
Posted by Ross Rosenberg
When I was young, my brother and I had a cheap, very basic slot car set — either Hot Wheels or Matchbox branded I think, although I can’t remember which — that we used incessantly. The visceral experience of making miniature cars hurtle at top speed around a plastic track without careening off into oblivion was almost overshadowed, however, by the act of populating the area surrounding the track with any manner of detritus — cardboard boxes, coffee cans, LEGO structures, Godzilla toys; meant to represent building, bridges, Godzilla, etc. — that characterized the vast metropolis that was the stage for our death-defying motorsport.
This came back to me while watching this video of a far more elaborate set-up being filmed mostly at track level with a camera mounted on one of the cars. The only thing that could make this better is if they had someone making the noise of the car’s engines with their voice instead of real car recordings. I wonder what that cardboard and plastic city would look like to me now.
Scalextric EXIN made in Spain [YouTube] : Cynical-C
Categories: Childhood, Toys, Clips
Posted at 9:32 am on May 8, 2008
5 Comments -
I too had slot cars as a child and built cities around the track… But my friends and I would find ways to make the cars fly off the track and crash into our metropolis. Now I’m feeling nostalgic.
Comment by Lys — May 8, 2008 @ 2:02 pm
if you had Matchbox or Hotwheels, you didn’t have slotcars. your basic, shitty slotcar set would have been Tyco or Aurora, probably. MB and HW were slotless, gravity and inertia cars. they were occasionally motorized, but not for a slotted track. and Hotwheels usually had a fancy plastic c-clamp for you to mount on a dresser or wainscotting and depend your track, and attach loop, jump and flag-gate.
oh, but the heated oil smell of the transformer after a few hot hours of running the slotcars around their oval, or figure 8, or off the ramp into the lego city. sweet memories.
Comment by Haux — May 8, 2008 @ 3:05 pm
Haux - It was Tyco! I’m not sure why I thought it was one of the other two (probably because I associate them with toy cars). Reading your comment I actually could smell the transformer.
Man, now I wonder if they are somewhere in my parents’s house.
Comment by Ross Rosenberg — May 8, 2008 @ 3:14 pm
Ross - certainly an easy memory lapse. the cars were all the same scale, which is the same as your standard electric train set, HO scale (the video here looks like it’s a much bigger gauge than that, and those cars look like they’re screwed to the track and cannot fly off - alas). there was a piece of crossover track that was slotcar in one direction and train tracks in the other (with separate electrical circuits, naturally). oh, the humanity!
how fast does a car need to go to derail a train?
Comment by Haux — May 8, 2008 @ 4:06 pm
I agree about the car sounds but it’s still a neat video. I just turned the volume down & listened to music from Time Bandits.
Comment by Evil Jim — May 15, 2008 @ 1:44 am