Walking to work this morning, I passed a flatbed tow truck loading up a white Lamborghini Countach on the corner of W. 58th St. and 11th Ave., which is the middle of nowhere, Manhattan-wise, but a good place for hotroddin’, considering the unusually smooth roads, relative lack of traffic and favorable stoplights. I hadn’t realized how small those cars are, nor was I aware anyone still drove them. But I was pleased to see, judging by the leather-jacketed man scowling at the tow truck from the sidewalk, that the drivers of Lamborghinis still seem to be insufferable jerks.
Anyway, the car reminded me of one of my favorite toys as a lad: Sideswipe, which was one of the good-guy Transformers. It was a fire-engine red Lamborghini Countach that transformed into a good guy Autobot robot. As a “warrior class” ‘bot, he came with a trusty clip-on rocket-launcher accessory that fired a missile with the push of a tiny button, good for both robot mode (smacking down evil Deceptacons) and car mode (rush-hour road rage). That whole line of toys was awesome, not just because they transformed from motor vehicles and other objects into robots, but they were very well made. (The Transformers TV cartoon, which served nicely as a half-hour ad for the toys, was a whole other story.)
Sideswipe was mostly plastic (like the real Lamborghini), but had real rubber tires that you could remove from the rims. You could roll and race these toys on flat surfaces, just like Matchbox cars, only with better traction. Another Transformer I owned around the same time, Hound, which was a military-grade Jeep, was made mostly of die-cast metal. Sturdy stuff, except after repeated “transformings,” at which point they would develop poor posture in robot form. Good attention to detail, too. You could fold the tiny little seats in the Jeep up and down, and open and close the doors.
It’s also interesting, at least according to several internet fan sites, that these toys were never reissued in the U.S. Sideswipe and Hound in particular were only made during 1984 and 1985 and never again. I suppose these toys are my generation’s baseball cards, except instead of horror stories involving Mickey Mantle rookie cards whisked into the garbage by an unwitting parent, our stories involve a grab bag of extra-loose Transformers, a jumble of He-Men and G.I. Joe guys, 101 mismatched “action accessories,” and, for good measure, a Rubik’s cube, some random Happy Meal toys and a few stray Lego bricks that someone spilled orange Faygo on, all bagged up and sold at a garage sale for $5 (or best offer).