>>9597176Typically, yeah. In fact even now you can still see it to an extent - the last few runs of the Deora II prior to its retooling looked especially rough. The front window frame deformed to the point it seems the original window piece no longer fits in it, so they made a new piece that goes inside.
The Good Humor Truck for instance was supposed to be retired in 2005 but they backed out. It's 3 years between its 2004 and 2007 appearances, during which time they must have retooled it.
Hot Wheels runs on a principal of "make cars until the tooling breaks". The Hot Bird vanished for 8 years, its role taken up by Vetuskey's (inferior IMHO) 1977 Firebird, before reappearing in the 2021 Muscle Mania lineup. The tooling probably broke in 2013 and they've only just recommissioned it.
In response to what I believe was an earlier post you made, it seems the design/release process for HW is completely different to how it used to be, and you can see this in Ryu Asada's posthumous castings. There's no way he was designing cars when his illness dragged him down - his last cars were probably designed in the Autumn/Winter of 2020, maybe January 2021 at a push. Cancer is a horrific disease and the pancreas is the worst place to get it. It's the one part of the body they can't do anything with. I think he knew he was dying for about 2 - 3 years prior, his output was insane from the late '10s - regularly got 25+ castings out the gate each year. His 2022 releases must be about 15 - 18 months old by now. If there's anything they've held back to 2023, it means they sit on castings for as much as 2 years.
>>9597233Hot Wheels introduced a lot of cool wheel types during the 1990s, most of which are unfortunately gone. Several of them disappeared with the Speed Racer series in 2008/9, like the RT10-style 3 spoke wheels and the 7-spokes. Those wheels, the Saw Blade Wheel (SBW) ceased usage in 2004 but reappeared one time only on the 2007 Track T casting.
