In 2011, Hot Wheels started a line that’s heavily licensed. No, I’m not talking about the Nostalgic Brands line, I’m talking about what I call the “Hot Wheels Characters” line. Its a line composed of licensed characters from several brands such as DC Comics, Sponge Bob & The Muppets. All the vehicles in this line were created with the thought process of, “what if this particular character WAS a Hot Wheels vehicle?” & “what would they look like?”.
The Hot Wheels Character line started in late 2011 with the DC Comics characters of Batman, Superman & The Joker. While they were cool cars, they had a $3 price point and that first wave of 3 castings sat for months at retailers. There were few collectors that liked this line that was designed solely for kids.
Well into 2012, this line picked up, and now well into 2013 we may finally see this line start to blossom. The Spongebob “Spongebob” casting and the Muppets “Animal” casting have given collectors a second look at this line.
There was one, not-so-popular casting that caught my eye in 2012. It was the DC Comics “Mr. Freeze” casting shown above. I really liked the detail in this casting. Even though it has a plastic body, the casting has two giant metal turbines on the back of it complete with 3 long hoses going down both sides. It has harpoons on the sides and a bubbled cockpit that you could totally see Mr. Freeze in. To round it out, the casting itself is fairly heavy and not bad on the downhill track.
While the Hot Wheels Characters line is somewhat of an enigma in the sense that nobody knows how long it’ll last at this point, we have been introduced to quite a few interesting castings that may show up in other lines. This collector hopes we see “Mr. Freeze” again.
Wheel Close 