One of the strangest subjects for the ongoing Character Cars, the Hello Kitty or Sanrio intellectual property has been around for a few months now but seems to have fallen a bit below the radar. I picked mine up quite some time ago, and it looks like they were released in the usual 8-piece cases alongside re-released of SpongeBob, Patrick, and Sandy Cheeks from the eponymous series as well as Robin and Beast Boy from the distant Teen Titans Go! series.
Now I know absolutely nothing about Hello Kitty or Sanrio or why the two terms seem to be synonymous. I remember a few girls being kinda into Hello Kitty around the end of middle school and early high school but that’s about the extent of my contact. I guess there are other characters involved at some point, because the series consists of:
- Hello Kitty
- Keroppi
- Gudetama
Hello Kitty obviously resembles a cartoon kitten and the well-known logo accompanying the brand. The dark eyes are mapped to the headlights and whiskers are featured on the fenders. The bow is the most recognizable aspect that makes i but overall I think the car leans too much towards red and not enough towards pink…I dunno, maybe this was a change made to make the cars more marketable to boys.
The green one, Keroppi, appears to be the frog of the group. It’s a diminutive vehicle, like an amalgamation of a circus car and some kind of near-feature shuttle. The pod-like seats resemble the bulbous eyes of a frog, and apparently Keroppi wears some kind of red and white striped garment, represented on the back half of the car. What appear to be feet comprise some kind of spoiler…you can kind of stand the car up on the back end to get an impression of an armless Keroppi. It is a bit weird, but it’s also kinda cute and fairly unique.
For the most part, I’d gather that our childhood brains have no trouble imagining a kitten and a frog as friends, but this!? Gudetama is, as far as I can tell, an egg yolk. Or maybe the whole damn raw egg, I… don’t… know. It’s like half-asleep…or sad maybe…or like angry…? The freakin’ thing is unnerving to say the least. However, if you wanted to turn an egg (more importantly, the inside of an egg) into a character and then turn that into a car, well, mission accomplished. The cabin is a single seat completely encased in a transparent yellow dome. And it’s not just meh, yellow, it’s that deep, gooey, slightly orange yellow that we’d all expect from an egg yolk. The frame and wheels are white because, well, that’s how a cracked egg is colored, I can’t really account for the black line between the “yolk” and “white,” though I’ll chalk it up to artistic interpretation in an attempt to make the light colors “pop” a little more by adding an outline.
I actually think Gudetama is pretty cool albeit supremely weird. Maybe knowing the real character would change my perception, but knows. For now though, just check out the back of the yellow dome – Hot Wheels has worked a frickin’ butt into a character car based off an egg. This is some Twilight Zone level shit.
So there we go, another somewhat random set of Character Cars. It feels like a weird choice to me though, especially since Hot Wheels are generally associated with boys and Hello Kitty with girls…not that I think toys need to be gender-specific, I’m just thinking of it from a sales perspective. I just don’t see boys perusing the Hot Wheels and going, “oh shit, they made the Hello Kitty critters into cars!” or the girls stumbling across the cars and going, “I love having Hello Kitty characters as vehicles!” Why not give us Krang, Bebop, and Rocksteady instead? Or Splinter, April, and Casey Jones? Or got back to MOTU and give us Evil-Lyn, She-Ra, Triklops!? Yeah ok. “Sanrio” it is.
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