(This picture is of the Hot Wheels Retro Entertainment Goldfinger Aston Martin DB5, used for illustration purposes only.)
I was at my local Walmart (Baseline Road, Nepean, Ontario) and there wasn’t anything new on the pegs. What caught my attention, though, was a few empty pegs that had just been labelled. One was for the Hot Wheels Porsche special edition series, which I’ve already seen at another Walmart. (I passed on buying them; I collect Porsche but they’re priced a little too steep for cars with plastic chassis.)
However, there was another peg or two marked something like “James Bond Series” at a price point similar to other comic book/movie tie-in Hot Wheels cars like Avengers: Age of Ultron, Fast and Furious, and the Batman cars. As far as I know, and I’ve checked Hot Wheels blogs and eBay, there is no specific James Bond 007 Hot Wheels Special Edition series in the works; licensed James Bond cars are being released both as normal Hot Wheels mainlines and as premium Hot Wheels Retro Entertainment cars. The price point was about $3 Canadian, which is roughly halfway between what Walmart stores in the Ottawa area price mainlines and what they price Retro Entertainment cars.
I’m guessing somebody at my local Walmart made an error when printing the peg labels and it will be corrected next time I visit. But I’m a little curious as to how that SKU label got in the Walmart’s computer system in the first place. I don’t want to start any rumours and I am merely reporting what I observed, but it would not take too much imagination to suspect that Mattel might release a line of “barely better than mainline but with cool movie-inspired backcards” James Bond cars that would hit pegs a month or so before SPECTRE, the latest James Bond movie, arrives in theatres this November, and it would also not surprise me if an official announcement of such a Hot Wheels line would occur at an event like San Diego Comic Con.
But that’s idle speculation from a guy whose predictions are often wrong. For now, I’m just assuming my local Walmart just printed an SKU label for a product that doesn’t exist, not a product that will exist in a few months.
