Pimp My Batmobile!

Introducing the new Gen 2 Crimefighter Figure Sets. If you have these on order, the unfinished ones are in and starting to ship now. We just got word that the painted/finished ones are in the U.S. at customs right now, due here any day. If you have them on order - look for them later this week. We just need to get them in, packed and out. If you haven’t ordered them - We expect to be sold out before Christmas so plan accordingly.

Pictured is our prototype set. They’re a little beat up from traveling to Tiki Con and we made a couple little tweaks to the final ones based on a few comments people made at Tiki. I know everyone says this but honestly - pictures don’t do these justice.  They are really, really cool in person. See our upcoming youtube commercial to see them in video.

Info on the figures:

• Produced in Asia by a professional toy design company
• Multiple articulation points at wrists & shoulders (or can be glued)
• Unfinished sets - No clean-up needed, and they are pre-assembled
• Pressure pot cast in clean lightweight urethane
• Sidekick’s hand can be made to hold the PMB! Batphone

How are those for improvements?

So, does he FIT? The Caped Crusader will not simply ‘pop-in’ behind the wheel, now that he has legs. Sorry. Blame Hot Wheels and their interesting take on the interior space. If you don’t do anything to the wheel - yes, you can squeeze him in there, but it will be a super tight fit and he won’t be coming in and out much. But wait - you have options

Here’s the skinny on the fit. The sad news for anyone standing outside at the Dead show in Syracuse, waving their Hot Wheels Batmobile in the air and chanting “I need a miracle” is that there are no miracles in sight that will thwart physics*. The physics of the thing are such that Hot Wheels simply didn’t give us enough space to achieve natural looking, seated figures that would fit under that steering wheel in its current configuration. Sorry. Ain’t gonna happen. Believe me we tried. The figures just didn’t end up looking right.

BUT Happily - we’ve developed several workarounds to this problem going from the very, very easy to the more involved. There are some easily achievable quick-modifications that will allow much more leeway to the fit. Some involve the wheel, some involve the figures, some involve the seats. We’ve been working for a couple weeks and have been happily surprised at how easy it was to work with these figures.

We’ll go into these methods in a future post. They’ll be available as downloadable guides on the products page for customers.

[Well actually, my uncle is a quantum physics scientist and has a colleague who has tentatively cracked the time travel thing. But only if you’re as small as a quark and even then - it’s still not definite whether you’d survive the process. But I digress.]

Hot Wheels Fire Extinguisher on the left.
Pimp My Batmobile custom Fire Extinguisher on the right.
You decide.

(See the message board for recipe)

How about individual Dash Indicators with real metal bases?

Sorting, sorting, sorting…

Teasers teasers everywhere… Now please don’t expect these in stock yet. We are working as fast as we can but we thought you’d like to see some progress.

New Parachute Packs (didn’t put the Diest logos on yet)

New Antlers and Antler Lenses (by Falcon Designs)

New Beacon (this is our beacon but chromed and then hollowed out by Andy G.) That’s the HW red insert stuck in there just for the photo. It sticks up too tall. Our beacon will not.

And a quick look at the prototype new seated (and fully legged) Figure Sets.

Well, kind of…

Peter Smith from Screaming Tiki Con just announced that Mattel/Hot Wheels are going to be at Tiki Con next week (wow, next week) and as you may already know - PMB! is going to be there too.  So maybe we’ll get to ask them some questions about some of their batmobile decisions… Hmm.  We don;t know what they’ll be doing there but we heard they might be selling Batgirl Cycle 3-packs.  Our educated guess is that since Yvonne is going to be there - they’ll have some signed boxed sets for sale.

Anyway - just a reminder that we will be there as well. Tim Meyer from “TPM Customs” and Tara Taylor from “T-Wear”  and I will be at the show. And we expect to have some surprises (hopefully) but I want to dispel any rumors here and now:

1. We will not be showing/selling the completed new upgrade parts sets. We will be showing some of the new parts, but we are waiting for some parts to come in from a few more vendors still.

2.  We probably won’t have a complete fully-modded Batmobile on hand. Sorry. We’ve been too busy lately.

Hopefully the stuff we DO bring will suffice for a little while. Oh did I mention we’ll be giving away some cool stuff each day of the show?

Hope to see you there. Niles Ohio, October 17/18/19 Click on the sidebar image to find out more about the con.

-S

  Well we had to do it. What started out as a quick, minimal disassembly of an Elite Batmobile to grab the batphone for molding for the upgrade kits turned into a full exploratory session. And we uncovered some interesting finds in the process.

First off -   All the sonic welds are MUCH easier to rip through for parts removal than on the Standards I’ve tried. All these parts popped out with some simple scraping of their weld divots.(note the detect-a-scope inner round screen remains as part of the dash and the housing around it pops off. Good to know for our new scope upgrade)

Next, as you can see in the upper left corner of the photo below - the turbine engine is part of the front wheel assembly. Easy to remove but interesting physics going on there. I know it’s a fictional engine but  - yeesh. The sooner I get a Ford 390 in there the better.

Next, we had heard this but hadn’t experienced it until now - the Elite seat-tops are rubber and removable. And the silver trim bottoms come off easily as well. All the better to try some of Futurabat’s new seat designs out on them.

After removing several of the soft rubber pieces, we find that many items are much different than the ones on the Standard. Here you can see the subtle differences between the Elite center console and the one we cut out of the Standard. (you can see evidence of the trouble the older phone gave me)

Probably the most interesting thing we discovered was that the 2-piece chrome dash pops right off. This will make installing the photo-etched dash panels that much easier.

I’ve got to say - I’ve ragged on Mattel a bit but they really optimized this model for upgrades! They should put all the parts in a box and call it the “Custom Batmobile” edition.

No offense to the memory of General Eisenhower, but we’re not a fan of the Ike.

The other day we inadvertently left a window open in the PMB! offices and just like we were Tina Turner, Ike smacked us down. Now, being this far inland and away from the Gulf, we didn’t get much more than big winds and rain (and power out for 7 hours) But we got rain all over a few folders of artwork and - yup  - Batmobile decal sheets.

We are all out riht now. The remaining sheets all got ruined. We have put out an emergency call to our decal guru and are hoping for a quick fix but please - if you’ve placed orders - either ask for a refund or hang tight. We’re working on it.

 Saw some preliminary shots of the new figures which look great.

Working with a new vendor on lighting kits (and more)

Got some great stuff coming in soon from Falcon Designs and Futurabat etc. so we’re trying not to let our serotonin levels get too affected by some silly rain.

Okay.

We waited for the Elite.
Then we waited for the Super Elite.

Clown time is over.

People have been asking about the new upgrade parts and when were we going to show any of these parts/tips in action for months. We were waiting to see if maybe,  juuuust maybe Hot Wheels would pull an eleventh hour sneak, surprising all of us and defying all of their past performance. And we now know that was crazy nutty dream thinking. Like planning to win the lottery with your new “system” that uses a laser, a clothespin and tidal schedules.

But we now know better.

Now we dig in. Look for our upcoming new parts and tutorial videos and posts effective immediately.

Gentlemen - start your engines.

(wait, I think there’s a few more cliches I didn’t tap into, how about “Let’s Do This Thing” or “It’s On”…)

It’s fair to say that I think Joe kelly Jr.’s The Car Room Magazine and Playing With Cars website are the best diecast car resources in the world by a longshot. I think Joe’s delivery style and attitude are a breath of fresh air, and as far as his videos go  - I’d like to be him when I grow up.  After reviewing the Hot Wheels Elite Batmobile 2 months ago, he’s back with another video review for the Super Elite Batmobile. Joe and I agree almost 100% about the value of this car. He also points out one aspect that I forgot to mention: the PE grillwork under the hood nose pierced vents. Take a look:

Last year, this ad appeared in some trade magazines showing the then prototype Hot Wheels 1:18 Batmobile:

Since then, we waited patiently as the Standard, Elite and Super Elite editions have been issued. It might be interesting now to take a look at things that changed (other than the previously well-discussed rollbar/canopy revisions) as the production cars came out. (This topic was sparked by Tim, thanks)

1. Bat Ray Trim Striping
Well this is one aspect of the prototype that we all naturally expected to get carried through to production but for whatever reasons - it wasn’t. What first seemed like an error of omission has since bloomed into an obviously economics-based intentional gaffe. They had too long to fix the paint apps and too many people have been complaining for 6 months for this to be acccidental.

2. Barris & Ford Badges
When HW laser-scanned the car, they brought along many placards and badges. These seem to indicate that both the Barris shield and the Ford oval badge that lingered on the #1 car as a reminder of Barris’ Ford sponsorship was intended to be part of the final product at one time. Maybe HW was trying to get Ford to pay for some of the tool-ups and the deal never got inked. Either way - they are both gone by the time we got the toys. It has been indicated elsewhere that Barris was only paid a consulting fee for this project. Maybe they tried to sell him ad space as well. 

3. Bat Radar  This just looks like a proto-mockup that they would eventually replace with either the plastic piece on the Standard or the photoetch piece on the Elites.

4. Rear Antenna Not a big thing but the prototype’s was taller and more accurate looking than any version that we got. Amazing because a guitar string looks better than any of their versions.

5. Non-Rader Wheel Rims This is pretty interesting because it shows that originally the rims were much closer to the ones on Barris’ car NOW (which are not Raders). One of the few times they seemed to skew toward 1966 versus the current condition of the car. (Though the new ones seem to be tri-ridge as opposed to just center ridge)

Are there more differences that we can’t see from this shot? Are there ones that YOU see and we missed? Let us know.