Riveted

I always catch myself wondering about funny little things that don't matter.  Right now, I'm a little mystified as to why Hot wheels cars offered in McDonald's Happy Meals are so different from those sold in stores.  I only have one example, which is called Riveted that my friend gave to me nine years ago.  Riveted looks to be based off a 1969 Mustang fastback except the two inner grille headlights were moved out to the outer headlight buckets.  It also has gull wing doors, quad circle tail lights, and a spoiler that looks like it's been "riveted" on.  The valve covers of engine are reminiscent of the Boss 429 V8 which was also offered in 1969.

The orange one on the right was from McDonalds while the chrome plastic one on the left was bought earlier this year.  To begin, the orange one has super thick, slow, noisy axles and a type of wheel that is not seen on any Hot wheels main line car.  I'm thinking the only reason why the Happy Meal cars' axles are thicker is because they're probably all put in little bags and thrown into boxes of a hundred instead of packed into the usual individual blister pack.

The one from McDonald's also has stick-on paper decals that my friend apparently installed backwards (or on the wrong sides). I'm not sure why they didn't print the decals on like they usually do.  The orange car also lights up, which is a cool feature.  That is one difference that I don't wonder about.  After all these years, it still has power although the light goes dim after a minute now.  The wheels are translucent to help with the effect, but I still don't know why they had to use different style wheels since there are many normal Hot wheels cars with transparent wheels.

The body of the chrome one is plastic, but I've seen metal versions of the car being sold so that's not really a difference that I'm questioning.  I think the orange car comes from back when Hot wheels was making animated movies because the logo on the side belongs to the Metal Manics team that was part of the show.

Anyway, those are the musings that I decided to share for today.  There haven't been very many interesting things to talk about ever since I completed my bike, but I do have another big project that is nearing completion.