“Crash, bang, smash them up again, it’s smash-up time my
friend” – the theme song pretty much said it all. The Smash-Up Derby Cars were
precision-guided to satisfy our childhood love of destruction. The cars were ingeniously
powered by the ‘SSP’ system, which had you insert a toothed strip of plastic
through the car, and then yank it out to power the car up. SSP stood for ‘Super-Sonic Power’, which it
wasn’t quite, although it was still pretty good. The cars went fast, and when
you got them to hit each other head-on they pretty much exploded, with their
doors, wheels, hoods, etc. all popping off in different directions. The set came with a couple of ramps, and the
best collisions occurred if you could get the cars to intersect in mid-air –
which was not easy to manage. These violent little beauties were the perfect
reflection of the golden age of the television car chase.
As I remember, our parents really didn’t like them. The
first reason for this was probably the lower class implications of the junkyard
derby theme (note how the trash-Nashville the music in the ad is). The second
reason was more pragmatic –and more podiatric – namely, the prospect of a toy
actually designed to spray small,
sharp plastic pieces all over the floor, where they could be stepped on by the
unwary and barefoot parent.
