Pimp My Batmobile!

Posts Tagged ‘1/43 batmobile’

The new 1/43 Hot Wheels Batmobile is not slated to be available for the mass market until February. But PMB! has received our samples in from China and shown you it here FIRST ON THE WEB. And because we are tireless (like a golem or Larry King) in our pledge to improve wherever Mattel drops the ball, we already have our first set of upgrades ready for preorder!

Tim at TPM Customs, (the master of teensy figures) has developed a set exclusively for PMB! that includes:

• A nice replacement siren in clear red
• 2 replacement antlers
• A set of figures that sit right in the car very nicely (see the prototypes below)

We are making these available for pre-order only, and only a limited run of them for a very short time. They will be available as a painted set or unpainted if you want to save a few dollars. But don’t look for them to be around or available for very long. Note: the photo here just shows the figures, not the new siren or antlers. We will have these sets ready for pre-order as soon as the beacons and antlers are ready for photographing. This is a great scale model that Mattel did a nice job with. It really appeals to those of us who love our old 1966 Corgi Batmobiles. Everything else on this 1/43 scale car is either easily fixable by a modeler or livable with. But the beacon, antlers and lack of figures are must-fixes, in our opinion.

Well I got mine in today from China. Very nice, even with all the mistakes. Here are some comparison shots with the 1966 Corgi car.

HINT: Rhymes with “Cat Tray Snipes”.

Yep, hats off to Mattel again for skipping the extended Batray striping on another otherwise pretty nice model. Thanks to PMB! friend John Lemay for sending us these shots of his freshly-delivered-from-China 1/43 Batmobile. According to John, the bat-radar and antenna were shipped separately bagged from the car. Chances are that won’t be the case with the final packaged production model. Hey maybe check that baggie for the missing bat-ray stripes too! Ah well. Still a very nice looking 1/43 model. Looks just like a shrunk down 1:18 standard which is uh, good I guess. Though I am getting a bit sick of that juvenile-looking undercarriage. Now if we can just shrink Doug from Insane Detailing down, we can offer replacement parts for this scale too.

A bunch of these have been seen on the bay and elsewhere recently being offered from China. Could it be some early factory sneaks? Looks pretty good. Not perfect, and certainly not “elite” but a bit better than the 1:50 for sure. Looks like a small version of the 1:18 complete with all its errors. And hey – still missing the upper bat-ray stripes!  So the questions are – is this really a production Mattel 1/43? Or another odd Asian resin knock-off  like the GADM/Corgi  hybrid that’s been out for a while?  I have one coming in shortly so I’ll let you know when I get it.