>>9612639Honestly, we're in a very weird era of Hot Wheels in general. We're up to a point where even if you subtract bargain bin bait like the Disney character cars and the Starships range, there's still 100 new castings being introduced every single year. When that first happened in 2004, it seemed unthinkable. And that year alone nearly tanked the company with the godawful Fatbax and Hardnoze ranges. Now it's a normal occurrence.
And since there's only a finite number of slots every single year, some castings are inevitably gonna get the chop, but ever since they stopped doing Final Run, any casting could suddenly come back from the dead. Like the Hot Bird for instance, which hadn't been seen since 2013.
In regards to designers, I think it's inspiration that drives a designer above all else over current car trends.
Gary Saffer for instance (barring some earlier work) was only at Hot Wheels from 1998 until his retirement in 2001 (final car coming out in '02) and yet most of his work is well-known to this day. The '32 Ford, Tail Dragger, Phaeton, So Fine, Shoe Box, Hooligan and Midnight Otto were all his designs, and they were all '30s - '50s hot rod designs at a time when tuners were in vogue.
Whenever Asada wasn't doing stupid castings, he had a general focus of 1980 - 2000 JDM with some Euro cars sprinkled in, and he almost always hit the mark.
Aside from the Cockney Cab II, Fraser Campbell didn't put out a single good design after 2004 (and even that was so-so). Creatively, he was spent. Then he found his niche making GT cars in the early '10s, especially older ones, and he would have made more had Felix Holst not convinced him to up and leave.
