Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To

Tag: hot wheels

Rejected Grateful Dead Hot Wheels Toys

  • Pig’s 1968 Ford Cortina.
  • The hearse the drummers stole after seeing Ghostbusters.
  • Creepy Ernie’s van.
  • Garcia’s 7-series land yacht.
  • Three semi-trucks with a build-a-figure Wall of Sound in the trailers.
  • Mickey’s sports racer Porsche 911* with authentic tour-cancellin’ crash damage.
  • Phil’s Lotus with lifelike electrical problems and sporadically functioning pop-up headlights.
  • The ice cream trucks that Wake of the Flood was supposed to be sold from.
  • The Bolo bus, which has a john and seats that face front. (With removable Pig in the back seat.)
  • The Bozo bus, which has a refrgierator and some of the seats installed facing back to accomodate four tables.
  • Parish’s Trans-Am.
  • One of those thunderously armored military mineclearing vehicles with the chain flails on the front.
  • This thing:
  • [PDF] Made in India military
  • But with Dead bullshit all over it.
  • Tom Constanten’s Geo Metro.
  • The Fast Motherfucker, an experimental rocket car that Alembic took to the Bonneville Salt Flats and then for some reason let Mickey drive.
  • The Earthroamer.
  • Pig’s Triumph motorcycle.
  • Big-Dicked Sheila’s Miata.
  • The Econoline van that took the band from the venue to the hotel, complete with individualized snacks and beverages.
  • A glazier’s truck, but the windowpanes are, like, windowpanes.
  • Maaaaan.
  • Whatever the fuck this thing is:
  • beetle camper
  • That sucker would drive itself to a Dead show.
  • You could just want to go to the store, but if there were a Dead show going on, then that was where you were going.
  • The doors would lock you in, gears would shift themselves.
  • Keith and Mrs. Donna Jean’s BMWs that you could crash into each other in the Front Street Parking Lot Playset. (Sold separately.)
  • Sewage truck hauling away doody from Watkins Glen.
  • Lillian Monster’s Tesla racecar.
  • Ned Lagin’s Saab.

*Lost Live Dead and Hooterollin’ Around‘s Corry provides this link with additional information and an utterly ridiculous quote from Mickey.

Hot Wheels Are Turning And They Can’t Slow Down

IMG_3794

From the Bottomless Pit of Grateful Dead Merch That Doesn’t Quite Make Sense comes this: Hot Wheels. (Bottomless Pit of Merch is cousins with Garcia’s Briefcase; they do not speak.) This isn’t a custom job with a Photoshopped card, either: Hot Wheels made a whole set of these in 2014 and I wouldn’t be averse to putting them on my shelf.

hot wheels set

As far as acceptable iconography, the set is five for six: much heavier on the skeletons than those fucking bears, and that is a good thing. The vehicle choices, though, are either obvious or perplexing.

[PDF] Hot Wheels Grateful Dead

The Baja Buggy is a winner down to the summer day-paint scheme and shark-fin intake nozzle. And you would feel cheated if there weren’t at least one VW Microbus; the one on the right is a “dragster” which is actually a thing, except it’s more of welding a ‘bus onto the front of a drag car than it is a “Microbus dragster. Here:

[PDF] VW Bus Dragster - VW

God bless America?

Then there are the other three toys, which confuse me.

hot wheels trucks

The brown thing is a “dairy delivery” truck, and you do not want to drink that milk. Either there is acid in it or there is Billy in it. Do not tolerate lactose from the Grateful Dead milkman. The green nightmare is some bullshit Hot Wheels dreamed up that’s not based on a real car, so what the fuck?

The emergency truck, on the other hand, is loosely based on the fire crew that services the Haight, Station 12, though they haven’t taken the branding quite so far:

haight firetruck stealie
That’s okay: a tribute to the neighborhood’s heritage; it’s tasteful and playful. Still a trustworthy truck.

On the other hand–

[PDF] Rescue Ranger - Hot Wheels

–if this truck shows up after you are in a terrible accident, you should wait for the next one. The first reponders assigned to this truck have used all the narcotics they were issued.