Hot Wheels '71 Dodge Demon

The Dodge Demon was the short-lived Dodge variant of the Plymouth Duster, made only from 1970 to 1972. Marketed as part of the Dodge Dart family, it replaced the Dart Swinger as the high-performance Dart, but was renamed the Dart Sport in 1973 after religious groups put pressure on Chrysler to drop the name "Demon" and the stylized cartoon demon character that was used on the car.

The Hot Wheels Demon is a new tooling for 2009 and one of several classic muscle cars newly-created for the Main Line. It's great to see the Demon modelled as the Demon and Duster are both very attractive cars, and haven't been modelled very much at all, Yatming's Duster being the only contemporary 1/64 model I can think of.

The HW Demon looks good in purple, with tampo'd sidestripes and logos and blacked-out hood stripes and some of the detailling on the casting, like the rear lights, looks great. The overall body shape, with the large rear overhang has been captured well too. However, there are a couple of areas where the model does fall a little short. Firstly, the front grille looks too shallow and small: the Demon grille is fairly "blocky" and this doesn't come across when looking at the car.

The second problem is the wheels and wheelarches. Both the front and rear wheelarches are too big, extending too high up on the fenders. Now, this is far from being the only model in the range which does this - many 1/64 scale cars in this price range take similar liberties, and most HW muscle cars are models of "resto-rods" with lowered front suspension, jacked up rears, etc, but for some reason, on this one it's particularly noticable. Possibly, it's because in HW tradition, they've also put bigger rear wheels on the car than fronts and if we assume that the front wheels are "stock", and these are already in slightly-too-big wheelarches, then the rear ones look out-of-scale too-big and the overall effect makes it look as if the car should have been made on a fractionally larger scale (which might have helped the grille issue too). The only other nitpick I've got is that the purple paint (while a correct Mopar colour) does make it a little hard to see the nice black tampo stripes. Hopefully the second issue will be in a lighter shade.