2014 Hot Wheels Red Line Club

Way back in January 2014, signups for the 2014 Red Line Club began with the membership car for the year being the Drag Dairy. After conversations with my "good mate from the capital city" it was decided that I would order the Chrome membership in order to get all four colours of the Drag Diary - my mate would get three colours and I would be left with the blue version to match my blue 2013 car.

After many delays and the announcement that the 2014 year would become the 2014/2015 year, the membership cars were finally sent out in late June 2015 and arrived at my USA storage address in early July. After sitting on the parcel waiting for some other items to arrive, the parcel was finally sent and arrived in late July, some 18 months after being ordered.

But yes -- the wait was worth it!

As mentioned above, only the blue Drag Dairy was staying with the rest of the colours heading away.

Misc Die Cast

Bored at work, I took a few minutes to check out Trademe (New Zealand's answer to eBay) to check out the relisting of an auction I had wanted for a while but had never purchased before. Looking through the sellers items, I spotted a few other interesting items so after asking a question (if the seller would add a buy price), I added everything to my wish list and waited.

With about an hour left to go, the seller had not answered my question so I set up some snipe bids and used the buy price on the original auction I was wanting in order to take a gamble - hoping I would win everything to save on postage but happy with just one if ended up that way.
Thankfully I did win everything I was after and after getting a postage cost, I had the items a few short days later.

First, a Greenlight Motor World Mini Cooper (the relisted item that started the purchase). For those unaware, Motor World items are metal body, plastic base Greenlights and for the last few series seem to have been stuck on releasing the same cars over and over and over and over again in different paint schemes. This release comes from an earlier time, when Greenlight had some different castings in the lineup and it is also nice to own a 1:64 scale version of the car that my father owns in real life.

Secondly, a pair of Muscle Machine Tuners. Sometime in 2014 I managed to purchase a loose Tuner from the USA and was very impressed with the detailing in the car and it was also fantastic to obtain some more Japanese cars in 1:64 scale to counter all the American cars in the collection. Hopefully some other New Zealand sellers offer more for sale, as importing from eBay is not cheap.

June Transformers From Japan - Part 2

Arriving late last week after a quick journey from Japan came the rest of the June Transformers, along with a die cast car that joined the journey.

The major arrival was the first release in the Japanese Unite Warriors line, Superion who has been given a small makeover by Takara Tomy to be more faithful to the Generation One version than the version released by Hasbro. Set in a fantastic box, it is going to be hard to open this set up!

For some reason, Japan is using the Transformers Adventure line as a 'catch all' line in order to release castings not previously released in the country, although for these two releases (along with last months Insecticon releases), it would seem more appropriate to release these in the Legends line considering it still has pending releases .. but I am not in charge of marketing.

Again both releases have very slight changes over the Hasbro releases, and with Cosmos you do miss out on getting the additional Targetmaster partner released with the Hasbro version.

Hot Wheels K Case

In my recent finds of J and M case cars, I was missing a number of models that first showed up in the K case. With the major retailer for Hot Wheels in New Zealand (The Warehouse) still stuck on F case and earlier, it was up to the smaller stores like Kmart and Toyworld to provide assistance.

And this week Toyworld came through - I received a call on Wednesday to let me know that they had received another case and because I had taught the employees how to read the case code, I was rather happy when I was told it was a K case.

During lunch I headed down and after a quick check of the case I had five out of the six cars I needed - there were no regular Lancer Evolutions available - but after a quick chat with one of the store employees who had put some cars aside for their son, I was able to walk away with everything I needed as she decided they didn't really need the Lancer Evolution.

My happiness at finding the new cars was slightly ruined the next morning when I received an email from the store advertising a buy one, get 50% off sale .. Oh well

Come on N case!

Matchbox Catch-Up

It has been a while since the local stores got in any new Matchbox after stocking up earlier in the year with older 2014 cases and a few 2015 B cases. So it came as a complete surprise when I rounded the corner at the larger Warehouse store and saw that the pegs had been refilled and one of the first cars I spotted was the Tesla Model S.

Quickly pulling out my phone to grab my wanted list, and proceeded to search the pegs looking for the cars I wanted. Needless to say, since it had been a while since my last purchase of Matchbox, I had a rather large haul and if there had of been a few more of some cars on the shelf then more would have come home.

Fingers crossed that more cases (E, F, G) arrive soon in stores, otherwise to eBay we go.

Greenlight Breaking Bad

Arriving with my recent Transformers order was a Greenlight item I had pre ordered back when it was first revealed - the Breaking Bad 86 Fleetwood Bounder. Since then the exchange rate has gone down, so the model wasn't as cheap if it had of come out when it was supposed to but at least postage was free because of its travelling companions.

Greenlight released two versions of this casting, the Breaking Bad version under the Hollywood subline and the regular version under the Route 66 subline. Both versions have small differences and the Breaking Bad versions main difference is the shirt hanging over the right wing mirror as per the shows first episode.

Enjoy the in package image and I look forward to opening this up.

Heritage Series

Taking over from past lines like Boulevard and Garage, this years "adult collectable" Hot Wheels series dubbed Heritage has finally been released in New Zealand. This line featuring a mix of realistic vehicles and Hot Wheels own creations will receive two assortments alternating between Real Rider (rubber) tyres and Red Line (plastic) tyres.

As seems to be the case with all releases of Hot Wheels in New Zealand, the first wave of Heritage was released at the end of the school holidays and showed up first at a local book store (of all places), and then later at Toyworld (at least in my local area)

With the local price well in excess of three times the USA retail price, I quickly decided not to get a couple of cars that I was on the fence about purchasing and decided to only get the two I really wanted - being the two Datsuns.

Now to see if New Zealand will get Wave 2 ... based on past experience, I think not!