Bandai Chara Wheels / Hot Wheels Review (updated)

[Updated Images]

Going back to 2002, Bandai released a series of character hot wheels (Chara Wheels) that are die cast vehicles of your favorite anime or sci-fi characters. Aside from a few vehicle sets, most of individual vehicles costed 600 yen, they are nicely detailed, well crafted, and a lot of fun to zoom around.

Magna Beetle from Urashiman, the crime fighting machine of Ryu Urashima - The Future Police. The story started with him traveling through time to future tokyo and became a crime fighter. He is usually depicted as pretty clumsy and had lots of funny moments adapting to the future, but from time to time, he has his very cool super hero/super power moments that were very suggestive and kept you guessing if he indeed is the super hero that every other character in the show thinks he is, or that he is just plain lucky.

Asurada GSX from Cyber Formula, I kept hoping a Super Asurada will be produced...Now hopefully, Wave will make good on their promise and release a 1/43 scale version under their W.H.A.M. series (Although, I already owned the 1/24 Asurada from Atelier Sai, look for a separate review later).

A nice Delorean from Back to the Future. I believe a version for BTTF2 and BTTF3 were also produced...

Machine Hayabusa V1 and V3. This was probably the first racing anime that I loved. Don't remember the details, but I am pretty sure that there were 5 versions of Machine Hayabusa in the show, V1 has one booster, v2 has dual boosters...V5, you guessed it, with 5 boosters - just imagine V1 plus 4 smaller boosters around it. The cool thing is that the boosters can fire forward or backward, so when turning, different combinations help the car corner better.

Mach 5 needs no introduction.

Space Ironmen Kyodyn is the story about two super hero brothers that can transform into machines when fighting the evil doers. This vehicle is actually made up of the older brother who transformed into the red rocket, and the younger brother who transformed into the launcher. They also can transform into a fighter and a smart bomb respectively. Very groovy.