SUNBURY — Elliot Handler started a small company in his Los Angeles garage with his wife, Ruth, and friend, Harold “Matt” Matson, in 1945.
Little did they know they’d be responsible for creating two of the most iconic toys in American pop culture: the Barbie Doll and Hot Wheels.
Handler, who created the Hot Wheels concept in 1968, died Thursday of undisclosed reasons, the Washington Post reported. He was 95.
“He had a profound effect on not just children, but adults as well as his invention became a collectible, not just a kid’s toy,” said Matt Delbaugh, of Kratzerville, who collects Hot Wheels.
Handler’s passing is, of course, sad, Delbaugh said.
But Delbaugh said Handler’s life is a testament to the American Dream: creating a company from scratch and seeing it become a success.
“He lived about as full of a life as possible,” said Delbaugh, who estimated he had about 3,000 Hot Wheels cars.
About 800 of the cars in Delbaugh’s collection are the so-called Red Lines — a feature unique to the toys created by Handler and his company between 1968 and 1977. They are rare and worth quite a lot.
It was Ruth Handler who created Barbie, the company’s biggest seller, in 1959. Ruth had been inspired by her daughter’s fascination with paper dolls and named Barbie after her, the Washington Post reported.
By 1965, sales topped $100 million and the company joined the Fortune 500, largely because of sales of Barbie. Today, Mattel is the world’s largest toymaker and is headquartered in El Segundo, Calif.
In response to the success of Barbie, Elliot Handler came up with Hot Wheels as a toy for boys in the mid-1960s.
The die-cast toys combined sleek and splashy styling with creative vehicle concepts born out of the muscle-car mania gripping the nation at the time.
The Handlers were forced out of the company in 1975, and the couple spent a lot of their time out of the lime light. Ruth died in 2002.
Delbaugh never had the chance to meet Handler, but he has been to many collectors’ shows. It was through those he met a man named Bruce Pascal, who not only has a huge Hot Wheels collection himself, but wrote a book about the toy.
Pascal interviewed Handler and attributed a lot of information in his book, “Hot Wheels Prototypes,” to Handler.
“It’s just great he was able to be around this long, to see the collectivity of what he invented,” Delbaugh said. “People were coming to him 40 years later, saying, ‘I wrote this book about something you invented.’”
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Related Photos
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Matt Delbaugh, of Kratzerville, shows some of the Hot Wheel cars he has collected over the years to the crowd at the Snyder County Historical Society in this file photo taken in May. Liz Rohde/The Daily Item
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Matt Delbaugh, of Kratzerville, has been collecting Hot Wheels since he was a child and searches the country for Redline cars from 1968 to 1977. Liz Rohde/The Daily Item
Discussion
Hot Wheels collector reacts to company founder's death
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