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.

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.

So aside from shooting the video and posting pics of the new Super Elite many people have been asking me for my actual opinions about it. My feelings. Give us the buzz, El Scootero - Is it worth the money? Is it nice? etc. So here we go:

1. Which upgrades are cool? The rocket tubes being now hollow and metal and sporting Corgi-esque missiles are pretty cool. The chrome flange/trim rings are nice, even if they’re not ‘66 accurate. The chrome metal exhaust ring trim is nice. The photo etched metal running boards are nice. The painted dash details are okay. The aluminum display base is sleek and well-executed.

2. Which upgrades are bogus? The pleather (or leather, who cares) parachute packs while sounding like a neat idea if they could be carried off successfully, sadly weren’t. they’re puffy and cartoonish and inaccurate to boot. The braided turbine engine hosing is way out of scale, if there’s such a thing for a fictitious engine. Though they seem to have channeled the Chrysler turbine engine a bit so you never know. But the chrome plating and blue/red couplings just look kind of dumb. The metal beacon cage would have been nice but even if you forgive them for it being the current incarnation of the beacon, they left off the ribbing that was present on the earlier editions and so they lost any points they might have had. The metal rear antenna and plastic base are ludicrous.

3. So is it any good? Sure it is. It’s beautiful. If this were the only release HW had given us and charged us this amount for it we’d be pretty happy. Even though it’s expensive, we’ve all paid big money for resin versions and GADM replicas before so we’re used to high-ticket batmobiles. The problem comes in when they show us what they can do for $39 and then offer THIS for $279.00. There’s just not enough upgrade. The lack of lights, sound, or what would have made everyone happier - ACCURATE 1966 DETAILING, gives us nothing to justify the upcharge. If you take the Elite version’s pricing at $79 which didn’t seem too bad for all the upgrades it offered, then lets add $25 (to be generous) for the aluminum base, and roughly $25 (again being generous) for the metal upgrades and $6 for the soft goods (parachutes) then we’re looking at roughly a $139 collectible that’s being retailed at $279. That’s just outright offensive.

Not to mention that you could make the argument that the few upgrades I mentioned as being cool above should have and certainly could have showed up on the Elite version for an extra $12 and made everyone happier then.

Credit where it’s due - Hot Wheels pulled off what nobody else has been able to do (well, actually, DC just did too)  Let’s face it - HW did a pretty good job of capturing the car in its current state. It’s not their fault that none of us wanted those details. Or IS it?

2. Yes it is, sadly. Hot Wheels is a mega corporation and it’s negligent at best to not have done the bare minimum amount of market research required to fully optimize a major licensing expenditure such as this. There is more information about getting this model correct available online at a click of a mouse than just about any car in history. Not putting Andy Garringer, John Haig, Eric Seltzer, Mike Stutelberg, or Jim Apitz (or any combination of them) on as executive consultants on this project was misguided. My guess is that they would have done it for free. Instead they went with the king of the bullshitters who either sold them that this was the way the car was in 1966 (which means they’re idiots) or convinced them that the model should reflect the current condition of the car. Either answer is patently unforgivable, just from a marketing standpoint alone.

They all but ignored fan input all along. They kept pre-release info to themselves, showed no specs or catalog detailing at any point and didn’t exhibit any of what has become Retail 101 for the web 2.0 world - Transparency. User driven interaction gains you market share. Look at what the Star Trek or Irwin Allen communities have done for their collectibles market just by embracing the huge droves of geeks that actually shell out the cash to buy this stuff. (not dissing your target base - who’da thunk it?) Mattel’s old school cloak and dagger ”if you make it, they will come” smirking attitude may work on their 50+ year old 1:64 scale scalpers that scour the world for “accidental” blister card variations - but it ain’t playing in Gotham City!

So if I tell everyone to stick with the $39 Standard and spend the rest of your money here at PMB! buying parts to trick it out it will seem self-serving. And not everyone is a modeler or has any interest in tricking out a diecast car. So instead let me offer what I am planning to do. For completists or HW Super Elite collectors or speculators or aluminum display base fans - knock yourself out with the Super Elite. For my money, I’m sticking with the Elite model because I like the opening hood and trunk (even though I hate the engine) and as-is, it’s the best value for the money. I’ll most likely trick one out completely 1st season and keep one in the box because it’s cool.

Hope that covers my opinions on the 3 versions. Please send any questions or comments here or the message board.

-Scooter