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The movie Cars was released in 2006... to say it was successful would be an understatement... toys from the movie sold in great numbers... and like many things, Disney/Pixar and Mattel wanted to take advantage of the success of Cars... a sequel would take a while to make... what could they do to take advantage of the popularity of Cars without having to wait so long? Short features... Mater's Tall Tales... other shorts... introducing Storytellers... The Disney Storyteller's Collection of books and toys... The Disney/Pixar's World of Cars deluxe storybook features 5 stories... the first one in the book is Hoodwinked.
Hoodwinked introduced several new characters and as a result, diecast Cars... we were introduced to Mater's cousins - Jud, Buford, and Cletus... and also Bubba - a big orange tow truck... a bully who picked on Mater and his cousins... bullies are not cool, but Bubba is... in this installment of Respect the Classics we'll look at Bubba.
The Storytellers product line was a US Target exclusive... some of the Cars were released as singles - we paid extra for the packaging... some were released in a multipack with usually 3 Cars... but Bubba, large enough to be a Deluxe Car, was in a multipack only with Brand New Mater... The multipacks carried a retail price of $14.99, and the ones containing new characters, were hard to find in stores... I never saw The Showstoppers or Mater's Cousins in stores, and while I have opened versions in display cases I don't have either one of them carded... I did see Bubba/Brand New Mater one time at one Target store - I found it in with towels, away from Toys... I wonder if someone had hidden it there.
As you can tell from the picture, while the packaging was nice the corners tended to become soft and develop creases:
The Storytellers were designed to look like a book:
Here's the back of the Bubba/Brand New Mater package:
Here's the inside of the front cover:
I never bought Luigi/Guido/Red - I already had them.
Here's the inside of the back cover:
I only had one Bubba/Brand New Mater - I never opened it... and it was going for a lot of money on eBay... I figured I probably would never open it.
A few weeks ago I learned one of my friends was selling some of his extra loose Cars... Bubba was one of them... I decided to use part of my birthday money to buy him... Bubba arrived this week... here are more pictures:
Production code: 2929 EAB - the same date as on the back of the packaged version:
While Brand New Mater has been released many times over the years, Bubba has only appeared in this Storytellers set.
Here are photos showing both Brand New Mater and Bubba:
You can see that Bubba is quite a bit larger than Brand New Mater.
The ISBN of the book is 978-142311926-5... the original retail price of the book was $16.99... I have it in hardback with a Target exclusive read-along CD... I highly recommend the book... there are other characters that appear in Hoodwinked and the other stories that have yet to be released and I think many of us would buy them if Mattel will make them and retailers will sell them.
If you want to add Bubba to your collection it is going to be expensive... eBay prices as of today (12/14/2013) show $120 plus shipping for a loose Bubba and the packaged version with Brand New Mater is listed for between $160 and $330... I see the book on eBay starting at $5.45 plus shipping.
Will Bubba and the other rare Storytellers Cars be re-released? We can hope.
Thanks for reading... or at least looking at the pictures... as always, I appreciate your comments.
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