Two Designers Walk Into a Bar · Evergreen Podcasts

Trailblazing Toys - Hot Wheels Cars and Mego Action Figures

·51 min·5 clips

Hot Wheels co-creator Jack Ryan was a Yale-educated rocket scientist who designed missile defense systems and held over a thousand patents.

The attic is basically the portal. After a chopped-up intro with mock corrections and different-mom logistics, Elliot and Todd land on childhood collectibles as pop culture small enough to fit in one hand. Hot Wheels go first, and color does most of the damage. Antifreeze, hot pink, and magenta get picked apart, especially the funny turn where a shade once treated as too Barbie-coded becomes the prize collectors chase. That joke has a price tag. Hot pink original Hot Wheels cars are framed as rare enough that finding one can push the usual collecting price by about ten times. The math keeps getting funnier from there. Mattel estimates that 41 million kids grew up playing with Hot Wheels, while the average adult collector has more than 1,550 cars. Todd guesses low, then high, and suddenly the bit is about storage. A 1,550-car garage sounds less like nostalgia and more like a household issue. Kids, thankfully, come off saner. Between ages 5 and 15, the typical count sits around 41 cars, which lets the hosts place their own 20-or-30-car childhood piles comfortably inside the normal lane. Then the shelf changes. Mego action figures move the conversation from die-cast cars to superhero bodies, collectible windows, and the practical advice to grab figures from 71 to 82 if you see them. The Gorn gets a proper little spotlight. Todd does not have one, but he does have Batman-universe figures, all villains, which says plenty about how personal these collections get. The ending stays loose: a possible drink called the Gorn turns into a tab joke, cash disappears, and the show leaves the same way it came in, with the banter driving. Beneath the goofing, the episode keeps returning to one idea: mass-market toys can become design objects, and the details kids barely noticed are often what adults hunt later.

As heard by us

Hot Wheels, Mego superheroes, and collector scarcity turn nostalgia into a sharp talk about value.

This piece traces a clear line from Hot Wheels cars to Mego superhero figures, keeping its attention on collectibles that carry more than nostalgia.

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Why you'd press play

Toy nostalgia, collector math, and barroom banter.

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