Hot Wheels: Highway 35/Acceleracers (found work on animated film; early-mid 2000s)

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Acceleracers- Ignition cover art.jpeg

Acceleracers Ignition cover image.

Status: Found

Date found: 04 May 2020

Found by: Ferrashi

In 2003, Toy Maker Mattel celebrated the 35th anniversary of their world famed Hot Wheels toy line with the release of a 2 hour CGI movie entitled Hot Wheels Highway 35: World Race. It was released on DVD and was later aired on the Toonami Saturday Video Entertainment System programming bloc.k[1] The film, accompanying video game and toyline were a smash hit and ensured a sequel two years later in 2005, as a series of TV films aired on Toonami as Hot Wheels: Acceleracers,[2] which involves some returning characters and new characters fighting against the evil Robotic Racing Drones in mysterious alien worlds known as Racing Realms.

Despite Mattel's intentions of the line being apart of a "aging up initiative" for the Hot Wheels line, many older fans of Highway 35 and various casual viewers loathed it for the darker tone in the story, the convoluted broadcast time and feeling it lacked the heart of Highway 35 (including Toonami themselves, going as far to referring the show as "Mattel's Bionicle").[3] Along with poor toy-sales and Mainframe's budgetary problems that led to them shutting down and reform as Rainmaker Entertainment, the show ended on its 4th episode The Ultimate Race with a cliffhanger.

Acceleracers Season 2 Cancellation

Starting in 2005, as the third and fourth installments were airing, Hot Wheels had plans for a second season of Acceleracers. Concepts that Hot Wheels created for it included transforming vehicles, the return of character "Banjee Castillo", and more realms. The Hot Wheels design team designed and made prototypes of a few vehicles for a standard 1:64 vehicle line, as well as a larger scale toy line that featured action figures and transforming vehicles. Patents have surfaced of the transformable vehicles.[4] Images for the action figures have surfaced online,[5] as well as a prototype image of the unreleased vehicle "Titanium".[6] It has also been stated that Takara helped with the transforming designs. Due to a rotating marketing team at Mattel during the conception, the project was ultimately cancelled before any film was put into production by Mainframe Entertainment.[7]

Unresurfaced Highway 35 Extended Footage

In addition, episode 4 of Acceleracers prequel Highway 35 had a rare VCD release in Southeast Asia that contained extended and deleted scenes from the episode.[8] One scene is a short clip where a character named Dan Dresden says "Yeah, I'm willing to put aside competition...for now."

On May 4th, 2020. YouTube user Ferrashi posted the lost scenes of Episode 4 to YouTube in English nearly 17 years since it originally aired. The source of the scene is from a DVD release of Episode 4 bundled in with the Hot Wheels Hot Hits Volume 5 CD. The first volume of this CD series released in at least America and Australia in April 2003 with only the CD and a CD-ROM, with subsequent releases being available only in Australia. Volumes 2 to 5 contained Episodes 1 to 4 of the World Race on DVD.

Gallery

Unreleased footage from the episode "Frozen Fire".

Unreleased footage from the episode "Frozen Fire".

References