Burnin’ Key Cars

While driving home I ended up in a brief call with Matt Doughty of Onell Design and, as always happens when chatting with Matt, we started talking about toys. This time around we talked about old cars of our childhood and eventually the conversation turned to Key Cars.

What are Key Cars? To make the description as simple to understand as possible let me just show you this commercial from the eighties:

And there were tons of these things, including some licensed cars like the A-Team van. I’m not sure how many different cars were produced but the best thing I remember about these was that they were fairly inexpensive and actually worked very well.

Poking around the web — but not too deeply — I uncovered a couple of blog posts spread across a few sites.

• The Retroist
  
• Toy Bender (unfortunately, the site is no longer being updated, but the old posts are still online)
  
• And even the old reliable Virtual Toy Chest has a page on these toy cars.

Man, I love these calls with Matt. He always helps me remember the goofiest things from my childhood. I wonder what these go for on eBay these days. MOC only, of course.