This website banned!

They Wanted It Taken Down...

The Blue Real Riders® Club site began as a single Photoshopped image, intended to criticize the RLC® members who kept voting for the lesser, rubber-tire cars. As April Fool's Day was pending, I created more images and built the concept into a five-page spoof "website".

Red Line Club™ members are forbidden to post links to offsite URLs, but I requested and was given permission to link to it by a senior member of Mattel's Boys' New Media team, who said, "You won't get any interruption from me. If any of the mods or admins say anything to you, point them my direction and I'll chat with them."

Pointing them his direction didn't work. On April 1st I started a thread on the RLC™ exclusive forum with a simple link. Throughout the day, the HWC site admin kept strongly suggesting I pull the plug, claiming fear of his superiors and a humorless legal department. At the end of the day, after that message thread got sixty positive comments and my site got 1100 page loads, the thread was forcibly yanked.

They had closed the access road between my site and theirs, but the Information Superhighway remained open. So I created the photo above, and continued to build BlueRealRiders.com.

Explaining the Joke

In 2004, HotWheelsCollectors.com began manufacturing the RLC™ sELECTIONs™ series — cars that are ultimately created through the votes of Red Line Club™ members. Within the RLC™ Exclusive Forums, a series of polls are conducted four times each year. (In 2010, this was reduced to twice-yearly.) In each series, voters determine the model, color, and wheels of the next sELECTIONs™ car. When the final round of voting for each series of polls has been concluded, the winning car is offered only to RLC™ members, and manufactured in quantities to match the number of orders received.

There are many RLC™ members who honor the heritage of Mattel's "Neo-Classics" reproduction of the original redline wheel, complete with torsion-spring suspension. To their dismay, the majority of votes went to cheaper, straight-axled rubberlike Real Riders® wheels — the same wheels that are put on cars in Mattel's retail lines at a quarter of the cost. And more and more frequently, the color voted in was some form of blue.

In 2007, a tie in one of the polls resulted in five sELECTIONs™ cars being produced. Four out of the five were blue, and every one had Real Riders® wheels.

In 2008, after sELECTIONs™ voters created the eighth Real Riders® car in a row (and five of them blue), this site was created in response.

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