A Quick Recap Of The September K-Day Snoozefest

Hands up if you went to the K-Day this past Saturday and found nothing interesting!

Or how about, hands up if you did your research, looked through others' K-Day case finds, and chose to skip it! Or better yet, slept right through it! If so, you're much smarter than I am.

If you missed it, well, you didn't. It was that bad. I'm not talking about the event per se, but the assortment of cars in this particular case was atrocious. Perhaps the absolute worst since I started going to these events five, six, seven years ago. I like to rag on Hot Wheels a lot, and I'll do plenty of it here. Who is in charge of deciding which castings make it to production? Did we really need a dozen generic animal/creature/UFO castings? Who thought it was a good idea to make the regular Treasure Hunt AND the $uper Treasure Hunt both generics?

At my local K-mart, everyone gets a case to themselves on most occasions. I grabbed my handful of cars (plus a few extras for trade) and bounced. Didn't bother sticking around till the end. I'd be willing to be there were a bunch of leftovers. Poor K-mart. They have to go through the long and arduous process of selling off all of that junk. Might as well close shop now.

Amongst the pile of crap, I found two particularly noteworthy releases: the Bel Air Gasser (a First-To-Market) and the black Subaru WRX STi (a K-Day exclusive colorway), or 'Rex for short. I collect all the 'Rex hatchback releases - it's my favorite generation of the beloved rally-turned-pocket rocket that adolescents and teens fawn over. It looks OK, but not as nice as the red one released months prior. Flat black is poor taste in general, and this model is in need of front and rear detailing in place of those graphics. Overall, it's worth getting for the fanboys, and I certainly woke up early Saturday morning to get mine.

The real star of the show was the Gasser. I remember the first release of this casting, in flat light grey, was debuted at K-Day no less. I don't recall if it was an exclusive or a First-To-Market (pretty sure it was the latter), but I fondly recall not getting picked for a case that day and not having the chance to get one. They had all been picked through by the time we got to the free-for-all session. Needless to say, the hype was real back then, and it still is now.

This is my first of this casting. I've skipped them over in the past because I wasn't into American muscle then. Shame on me. These are fantastic.

Blown Away: The Hot Wheels K-Day Mail-In Blown Delivery

It's not often that I participate in the K-Day mail-in offers. Quite frankly, I've only done it once before, and I've attended more than a dozen K-Day's by now. It's not that the promotional cars are bad. In fact, they're awesome, every single one of them. You really can't mess up when you put Spectraflame paint on metal/metal castings and then throw some Real Riders on that sucker.

The real reason behind it is I can never find twenty models worth buying at K-Day. If I'm lucky, I'll walk out with six or seven cars; most of the time, I'm more than satisfied with just a handful. There just aren't enough realistic castings in each case to get me interested in buying twenty cars. Add to that the fact that I never bought duplicates and it becomes quite clear how difficult it is to mix and match twenty cars for the sake of one shiny, exclusive, promotional model.

Rules are meant to be broken.

And broke them, I did.

It goes without saying that this model is absolutely fantastic. The Blown Delivery is one of those castings that Hot Wheels saves for special releases, usually for its own RLC members. Not being an RLC member, this was a golden opportunity for me to acquire this beast of a casting. I ended up grabbing a bunch of duplicates to reach the 20-car mark. Maybe I'll trade away the duplicates. Maybe I'll sell them somewhere down the line. Either way, it was twenty dollars well spent, because this one is worth it all.

Not bad, Hot Wheels. Not bad. This is how you do a promotional model, to make collectors like myself go out there and buy more than we really should.

Revel in this beauty!