>>9657540>I can tell what >>9612601 meant by Roadster Bite looking a bland and unoriginalThat would be me, anon.
The main problem is we're at a point now that Hot Wheels have made so many designs over the years that it's hard to be original. You can introduce complexity, like in the case of the Steam Punk Truck, but then you wouldn't be able to mass-produce it. Car design itself has plateaued, so it's not really as though you could make fictional designs based on portmanteaus of the era like in the '00s, so what HW are doing now (and I'm glad they are) is making fictionalized retro designs like the Dimachinni Veloce, GT-Scorcher and Erikenstein Rod.
You mentioned the Ballistik in particular, and I find that interesting, because I find proto-Acceleracers designs like that and 16 Angels to be the beginning of the end for fictional HW car design. Ever since the Acceleracers, every second fictional design put out by HW has been some ultra-sleek, all-plastic curvy lump of aggressive nothingness, because they know it worked the first time.
I think the #1 car to be blamed (though the Power Pipes was introduced the same year), is pic related, the Power Pistons. Terry Choy, if you look at the rest of the work he did, was evidently a big fan of a certain superhero's personal transport and based its design off of it. That design (along with Power Pipes) became a massive success and set the blueprint for future fictional castings.
