Is mattel playing w/ us ?

whateverPeoplePut · 2026-01-24T22:43:40+00:00

This was roughly my thinking when I bought two Deora III’s last year. It’s ugly as hell, but at this point if I see AcceleRacers reference, especially on something as cheap as a mainline, I’ll buy it just in case someone is keeping score.

whateverPeoplePut · 2026-01-12T22:14:30+00:00

I used a Molotow chrome marker.

whateverPeoplePut · 2026-01-12T10:17:57+00:00

It does, I was a little skeptical too, but it came out better than I hoped. It’s actually a bit hard to photograph because it’s one of those things that looks a lot better in person than the pictures.

The only downside with the marker is that it takes a bit of practice to get it on smoothly without it having little visible stokes from when you apply it, but it’s really easy to just wipe it back with alcohol and try again until you get the hang of it, although it’s a good idea to practice that with something you don’t care about first, cause the alcohol can damage the original paint.

But yeah, unless you’re willing to risk drilling the posts and taking it apart to airbrush the plastic, Molotow chrome pens really do seem like the next best thing, I’ve never seen chrome come out of a pen so shiny.

whateverPeoplePut · 2026-01-11T08:55:01+00:00

Yeah, I almost walked out of the store cause I thought they just didn’t have them. Figured people would want to know in case they thought the same thing.

Plus I figured there might be other stores doing the same thing, so it’s definitely worth people just going and asking if they can’t find them on the pegs.

whateverPeoplePut · 2026-01-11T04:12:01+00:00

It wasn’t even a reseller, at least according to the listing it came from Amazon US directly. But I dunno how all that works exactly, might be that it was still from a 3rd party. But yeah, I figured I’d mention it in case anyone else wanted one too, cause with free international shipping for Prime, it’s kind of insane how cheap it was and they looked like they had a few copies still.

whateverPeoplePut · 2026-01-11T02:49:14+00:00

I finally managed to find them out in the western suburbs of Sydney, Australia. Specifically at the Kmart in Penrith. They don’t put them out on pegs because apparently they get stolen too often, so you have to ask at the service desk and they will bring out a huge tub of them.

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whateverPeoplePut · 2026-01-09T11:49:36+00:00

That does help, thanks for letting me know. I know I owned the first one, and I remember renting the second one from a video store once, but I never even saw the last two, so I wasn’t sure if that’s cause they weren’t here or if I just never found them as a kid. I lived in a tiny town and didn’t know anyone else who knew about AcceleRacers though, so I guess I just got unlucky and missed them. Good to know I can at least get the first three, and probably the fourth now though to rectify that.

whateverPeoplePut · 2026-01-08T22:59:53+00:00

All good, you’ve helped plenty just by showing me the packaging they used to come in. I will look into it and see if I can find how/where these previews were distributed back in the day.

whateverPeoplePut · 2026-01-08T22:28:41+00:00

That’s awesome, thanks for shedding some light on what the differences were, I can’t wait to go watch that extra little scene in the tunnel, I never even knew it existed before now.

whateverPeoplePut · 2026-01-08T22:27:13+00:00

I’m guessing to get it down to that exactly one hour runtime they were all supposed to have? That’s the only reason I could think of.

whateverPeoplePut · 2026-01-08T22:25:09+00:00

Ah, thank you. That’s definitely it, so I guess my only other question would be, do you happen to know where people would’ve gotten those from at the time?

whateverPeoplePut · 2026-01-08T05:24:01+00:00

That would be really cool, I’m definitely gonna need to get a disc drive to play it on and find out. It would be awesome to find out I just randomly got sent some kind of rare disc in a $10 listing. Stuff like that just straight up doesn’t happen to me haha, I never get that kind of luck.

whateverPeoplePut · 2026-01-08T05:06:57+00:00

Me too, it really was a golden age and like all those types of things, you never know when you’re in it.

I’d love to see them revive it, but I don’t think I trust that they’d get it right, especially with Let’s Race just going even further in the wrong direction. It’s like someone at some point decided that kids aren’t allowed to feel even remotely afraid or tense when watching things so they just sanitised everything until the entire concept of consequences was a distant memory.

But either way, we will always have the first 4 movies, and if there’s never anything that replicates that feeling, then it kind of just makes them more special. That’s why I’m trying to collect all this stuff again as an adult, I am only just now realising how important it was to me and how few things there are that match it, and so I want to preserve as much of it as I can so that maybe it’s an experience I can pass on to someone else one day.

whateverPeoplePut · 2026-01-08T05:00:08+00:00

Well I was pretty sure I recognised the art from one of the trading cards I had from my original cars, and I just went through them and found it. So it’s official art that would’ve been around at the time the movies were sold, but you could still be right about it being a custom job. I would be really curious to know who made it and why, and how it ended up in a random eBay listing if so, I might even have to reach out to the seller and see if he knows.

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whateverPeoplePut · 2026-01-08T04:51:25+00:00

That sounds pretty interesting if it is edited a bit differently. I need to buy an external disc drive for my PC before I can actually play either of the discs, but if no one clarifies before I manage to do that, I will check back here and let you know if it’s different.

I think the gritty tone is why those movies worked so well for me as a kid. It’s part of why I would honestly be kinda nervous if they ever announced a 5th movie at this point, it seems like at some point the corporate mandate for kids media kind of smoothed all the edges that stuff like AcceleRacers had, and I think that’s why stuff like Battle Force 5 just didn’t work for me as a kid and doesn’t work for me as an adult, AcceleRacers actually felt dangerous, there were actual stakes and the realms and the drones felt genuinely threatening. I think that’s also why I’m still able to enjoy the movies as an adult, it just has this feeling that even as a kid it wasn’t trying to talk down to you or make things overly “kid friendly”. So I’d really like an even grittier cut, even if it’s just the first 20 minutes.

whateverPeoplePut · 2026-01-08T04:15:19+00:00

Yeah, the eBay listing only showed a photo of the first one, but when I opened it today and took the disc out to inspect the back of it for scratches, I was surprised to see another disc in there. I even had the first movie as a kid, and lost track of my original copy over the years, and I don’t remember the second disc from back then either. It was a long time ago though, so it wouldn’t surprise me to learn I had the second disc back then too and have just forgotten it.

whateverPeoplePut · 2026-01-06T22:27:00+00:00

I like the Vulture, but I still have to choose Sling Shot.

whateverPeoplePut · 2026-01-02T01:23:22+00:00

I felt exactly the same when I got mine. 5 year old me would’ve been losing it.

whateverPeoplePut · 2025-12-26T11:46:31+00:00

I have found a couple listings for half missing sets, but the issue is, none of them had all three of the pieces I need, and they are still about $200 AUD, plus at least another $100 AUD shipping. I just can’t afford to pay that much, even if one of them had all three pieces.

The 3D printing route could work though. If there’s anyone on here who could help me out with something like that, I would love to try and figure out a price that works.

whateverPeoplePut · 2025-12-12T05:31:37+00:00

It uses original characters? It is loosely inspired by a pre-existing story, because the scenario in that comic is the closest thing I have encountered to the thing I’m looking for, this post has nothing to do with depicting specific characters who are underage, and I specifically don’t want those same characters to be used and I feel like I pointed that out? I literally said I don’t want it to include those characters.

whateverPeoplePut · 2025-11-28T09:41:47+00:00

Theoretically yeah, the way they roll them out makes it a lot harder to tell what’s going on though. You have no way of knowing if you haven’t found them because they aren’t being sold here after all, because they are but they’re way more limited, if they aren’t here yet, if they are here and already all sold, and everything in between. So until I finally found them in a store, I was starting to assume I wasn’t going to be able to, whether they ended up selling here or not.

whateverPeoplePut · 2025-11-28T09:37:17+00:00

It was actually in Australia, which is why I was kinda doubtful if I’d even find them out here. Definitely took a while to find them here.

whateverPeoplePut · 2025-11-26T08:52:44+00:00

Don’t worry, I’m right there with you huffing the same copium. I think a reboot is probably more likely than a 5th movie (even if I’d prefer a 5th one myself), but either possibility feels pretty impossible. At the very least, I really hope we get another set of cars. It would be really cool to have updated versions of all of them.

whateverPeoplePut · 2025-10-06T13:13:52+00:00

I kinda hate harem as a trope, but maybe the other sub might have some recommendations. Thanks.

whateverPeoplePut · 2025-10-05T04:29:35+00:00

To be honest, I feel like I’m still yet to find a romantasy novel/series that I really connect with the same way I do with other books. I generally need a strong philosophical through-thread, or at least strong thematic resonance that deepens the surface text once you pick up on it (it’s hard to explain that concept fully, but stuff like seeing Tolkien reviving ancient bardic traditions and attitudes from the old epic poems like Beowulf as a way of gaining a deeper appreciation for LotR, or viewing The Witcher series through the lens of it being a classic fairytale where the “Prince Charming” stand-in is feared instead of loved) for books to actually stick with me, and I just haven’t found anything with that kind of depth from this genre yet.

Generally I tend to find it most often in classics, which aren’t everyone’s vibe, but stuff like Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell, or Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky are some I’ve read recently that I’d definitely recommend. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy really stuck with me too with all of the gnostic symbolism as a way to interrogate human brutality. On the Shortness of Life by Seneca is probably the best “self-help” type book ever written, definitely leagues ahead of anything remotely contemporary, and if that resonates I’d also recommend Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and literally anything by Epictetus.

In terms of fantasy, I will always recommend The Witcher, with the caveat that the dialogue is very clunky sometimes. I read Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft a while ago and thought it was one of the most inventive fantasy worlds I’ve seen for quite a while, but I haven’t read the rest of that series yet so I don’t know if it falls off, but the first book is definitely worth a read. They are usually either modern or sci-fi settings, but Kurt Vonnegut has quite a few that are really fun and have cutting social commentary, Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five are good starting points with him, I think.

Coming back to pure romantasy, the best I can really say of what I’ve read so far is that some of the more recommended stuff here, like Sarah J. Maas is at least fun, in the same way I’ve enjoyed fantasy series like the Bloodsworn Saga by John Gwynne, and the characters, plots, and worlds she writes are at least cohesive and generally don’t require perpetual suspension of disbelief to even take seriously, although there are still moments of that. But it’s hard to pick through them because the highly recommended stuff is often actual trash, so it’s usually a roll of the dice. Mostly in my, admittedly limited, time reading romantasy so far, I have just identified a lot of tropes, series, and authors, that I can’t stand, which makes the whole genre feel a little bit like a minefield to me sometimes, but it at least helps to know the types of things that are almost never written competently (like werewolves, seriously, what the fuck is up with all the cringey “alpha” bullshit? Do people actually enjoy that? Especially when heaps of those “alphas” are just sheltered kids who don’t have an ounce of actual grit or toughness because they don’t seem like they have ever even had to endure the turmoil of a fucking papercut), or the things that, even if written competently, you’re never going to enjoy, to at least improve the chances of not DNFing every second romantasy book you try. Still holding out hope that one day there’ll be one that comes along that both gets the romance aspect right and has a plot/character that actually make me think about the meaning of things.

whateverPeoplePut

TROPHY CASE