Hot Wheels Cars.(and 'Retro Rods')

In Hot Wheels Cars, we learn the die-cast car toy companies operate much like the real car industry, with joint ventures, buyouts, and even designers hired away from the Big Three automakers. We also now know that as an American company, Hot Wheels used American cars to challenge and break the British stronghold in die-casts, led by Matchbox, which offered few U.S models.

Author Mac Ragan, a collector of vintage and toy cars and a close-up photographer, chronicles, year by year, the history and evolution of Hot Wheels, in their many forms and configurations.

Ragan's color photography reveals the cars' refinement and details, which played a major role in Hot Wheels' success just as they do in real cars. He notes that many of his photos show the cars ``as children see them-up close and at eye level, as big as real cars.'' Cool features catch your eye: candy-colored metal flake paint, doors and trunks that open, hood scoops, exposed exhaust pipes, and red-stripe tires that were popular on hot cars of the late '60s and the '70s.

Hot Wheels revolutionized the industry by offering fast-rolling die-casts of the muscle cars and dragsters that were reaching new heights of popularity at the time. It sponsored drag racers Tom ``The Mongoose'' McEwen and Don ``The Snake'' Prudhomme, and created die-cast versions of their cars. These had to be purchased together, to encourage side-by-side racing on orange plastic tracks.

Those die-cast dragsters illustrate Hot Wheels' details, as the wheelie wheels in back allow the cars to raise their fronts like their real-life counterparts. We forgot how interactive these cars are. And how humorous they can be: Witness the Ed ``Big Daddy'' Roth-styled Beatnik Bandit or hotshot designer Larry Wood's Mutt Mobile, a sleek, massive-engined dog catcher's truck sporting a swing-out rear door and two plastic dogs. We also learned the company's tricks to make its cars quicker. One method was developing a torsion-beam suspension to allow thinner axles than Matchbox's, for less rolling resistance.

This book will appeal more to the collector than someone who merely played with the cars as a child. For serious collectors the book is an invaluable tool because it notes new castings, model introductions, paint schemes and wheel combinations by year. It highlights rare cars and limited runs and offers a price guide of the cars pictured. Some of the 600-plus castings since the original 16 Hot Wheels debuted in 1967 (led by the Camaro) are now worth more than $500.

Anecdotes are scarce, and the writing is a bit too dry. We didn't feel like a Hot Wheels insider back in the '60s and '70s, for example.