Child Of The 1980's

Toy cars have always been fun to play with, from the tiniest Micro Machine through Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars right up to much larger radio controlled affairs. Some cars you have to be content with just pushing along yourself, whilst others (particularly those dream filled supercars) are really intended to be ornaments rather than playthings. Others may be battery driven, or there’s always the good old friction driven pull-back-and-go ones.

Wrist Racers were a popular brand of toy car during the 1980’s, and as the name suggests the gimmick with these was that you wore them on your wrist. Doesn’t sound that much fun does it? Well, it was more fun than you might think.

The Wrist Racer car itself was about the size of the average Hot Wheels car, but where it differed was that it contained a little wind up motor. Once fully wound, the car was inserted into a holder (which you wore on your wrist like a gigantic watch), and could be covered with a transparent plastic lid to keep it safe.

When you felt the Need for Speed, so to speak, you flipped up the lid, pulled out a little ramp from the holder and placed your wrist down on your chosen racing surface. Pressing a button on the back of the holder released the little car down the ramp so it went zooming along at a fair old speed.

During the Eighties the range consisted of both fairly generic car designs and a number of licensed vehicles, including the pictured KITT from Knight Rider, the A Team’s black van, and the General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard, among others. These are now fairly rare, so if you have one lurking in the attic somewhere, lucky you.

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This entry is filed under Toys - Miscellaneous and was posted on November 6th, 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.