Too Much Awesome

What did kids do before video games? We had model trains. Before technology took over Long before the wonderful world of Nintendo took over my childhood, my favorite method of wasting time was playing with my model train set. I got my first train set for my 6th birthday. It was your basic all-in-one train [...]

When I think back on all the toys I had growing up as a kid and even the toys I still have as an adult, many of them were little more than fads. They were hot and popular and every kid wanted them, but ultimately they didn’t hang around for long. Looking at the world [...]

Like many, I’ve been collecting Hot Wheels and Matchbox toy cars pretty much my entire life. My childhood cars were well loved, though I admit many fell victim to the cruel play of any 10-year-old boy, which often includes bricks, paint, mud, and a few explosives, just for good measure. It wasn’t until I started [...]

In 1946, a small Minnesota company sought to manufacture gardening tools under the name Mound Metalcraft. This business model quickly evolved however, when their side project of crafting metal toys became a much more viable market. Business and life (and toys) can be unpredictable, and sometimes our crazy side projects take on a life of [...]

Hot Wheels is one of the most affordable toys to collect. Since most cars are only a dollar, it means anyone with a pocket or a purse can cobble together enough spare change to buy a few toy cars. Most people might think Hot Wheels starts with kids scooting them across the kitchen floor and [...]

Everybody is going green these days. It’s rather trendy to say the least, so it’s no surprise that toys are following the trend and selling big when it comes to eco-friendly categories. If you’d very much like to give your kids something fun to play with that they’re guaranteed to enjoy plus is quite possibly [...]

I wrote an article last week about Hot Wheels cars, but upon posting it something started gnawing at me. While talking about Hot Wheels, I had completely neglected to mention Matchbox, the opposing brand. What makes this worse is that as a kid, I couldn’t distinguish between the two as both brands made little toy [...]

I was insanely jealous of anyone who had a Power Wheels as a kid. Sure, I was fairly content with my Hot Wheels, but how was I supposed to compete with those kids that could ride around in their toy and laugh at me? I couldn’t, that’s how. And why? Because Power Wheels were beyond [...]

Little known fact about me: I grew up as a little boy. What this generally meant is that Barbies weren’t typically in my play-cycle and Hot Wheels dominated most of my free time in between Ninja Turtles. I’m happy to say that even though I’ve taken a long hiatus from the small die-cast cars of [...]

I’m taking another day off video games to go into one of my favorite things from my childhood: Die-cast cars. The term can be applied to a lot of things, such as Hot Wheels and the like, but I actually won’t be bringing Hot Wheels into this since, well, that makes for an article in [...]