Ad: Catch up on Star Wars Hot Wheels Elite Series with X-Wing and TIE Fighters Entertainment Earth! Items are in stock and being received now!

If you  have the 99 Cents Only store chain in your area, take a look inside.  Hasbro's dumping the The Force Awakens MicroMachines head playsets there for $4.99, and Hot Wheels Carships and Character Cars are there for 99 cents - I've seen Royal Guards, the Ghost, Poe's X-Wing, and others I haven't previously seen in circulation at the big box stores much/at all.  Good hunting!

Hot Wheels! Walmart in the USA has a new exclusive assortment of cars for $0.97 a pop.  This batch is based on planets.   It’s the third “$1″ car batch, the previous two focused on episodes and factions.

These are quite nice - while Rogue One iconography is nowhere to be seen, you’ll see some retro graphics on the side with touristy vistas, Tusken Raiders, AT-ATs, lightsaber duels, Cloud City, and more.   You’ll even notice Rey on her speeder on the Jakku one.  If you ever bought the old Burger King glasses, the art style is similar to those.

So far Walmart’s have been the only Hot Wheels sets I’ve been all-in on, thanks to the lower price point and the creative designs.    As a bonus, they all have distinctive card art.   Get ‘em if you can find them!  Designs include Kamino, Mustafar, Tatooine, Hoth, Dagobah, Bespin, Endor, and Jakku - and are numbered sequentially in order of appearance in the saga.   At this time I know of no Rogue One tie-in assortment, but we've still got a few more months.

While Hasbro remains silent on their plans for the big show, Mattel rolled out a classic with this one.   A Death Star Trench Race set has 3 TIE Fighters and an X-Wing, but in car form with enhanced deco and electronics.  $50 for four cars in a fancy box - if you can swing it. 

More photos have been added to our SDCC 2015 Image Bank featuring Sideshow, eFX Collectibles, LEGO, Acme Archives, Jakks, Hot Wheels, the Lucasfilm Pavilion, and more photos from the Convention floor.

EW, girl, EW.   Over at Entertainment Weekly, you can read the descriptively titled article Check out an exclusive look at the first toys from Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  It gives you a look at the $25 Black Series debut Stormtrooper as well as Mattel's Hot Wheels car and a LEGO buildable figure.

In quite possibly the worst time of year for a new exclusive to hit, Walmart's exclusive 8 Star Wars Hot Wheels cars are in stores now.  If you're lucky.  There's one for each movie and the most recent two TV series, and they're a few pennies below a dollar each.  Look for an in-store blue display with other Hot Wheels products, as one side of it is packed with tracks and cars.   In other words - the whole set should set you back eight bucks.

Each car is based on an existing release, but with nifty Star Wars deco.  I saw fewer of the Clone Wars and Return of the Jedi cars, both of which are quite excellent.  The Clone Wars car has an Anakin Jedi Starfighter motif, while Return of the Jedi looks like a TIE Fighter.

If you missed it - and you probably did - HotWheelsCollectors.com will put the Hot Wheels Star Wars Darth Vader Vehicle up at 9:00 AM Pacific for $39.99, plus a few other items.  This is similar to the one for $3.49 at Target, Toys R Us, and Walmart but has slightly different deco and swell packaging based on the lightsaber hilt from the movies along with electronic lights and sounds.  Click here for the full story.

Walmart just got new big bins of Fast & Furious and Batman assortments this week for 86 cents a pop.  It's a good deal.  Later this year, they'll get Star Wars Hot Wheels based on the 6 movies and the 2 most recent TV shows - 8 in all.   Hot Wheels Collectors.com has the scoop.

Ad: Entertainment Earth has listed several new Hot Wheels Star Wars assortments with partial breakdowns - new character cars for Rebels and more are listed.  Want to know more? Click through and see what's up for grabs!

Toys R Us' new Star Wars resets are giving both sides of an aisle over to the space opera, providing close to Episode I-levels of real estate devoted to our favorite toy line during a period where, frankly, that's just confusing.   But the advantage here is there's a lot of room to fill and the Star Wars Hot Wheels Death Star Battle Blast is in stores now.  It's $14.99, has an X-Wing car, and... that's about it, really.  See the image I took with a Nintendo 2DS, after the jump.

After making its star debut at SDCC, the Hot Wheels Life Sized Darth Vader Car is now featured in a commercial sporting all its dark side prowess. Check it out after the jump and view our Hot Wheels SDCC Image Bank here.

In the never-ending arms race between Mattel and Hasbro for coolest collector exclusive at Comic-Con, one thing Mattel tends to really nail well is packaging.  How can you take a $1-$4 die-cast metal car and make it $40?  Easy - make a nice box, like this Darth Vader Die-Cast Metal Car revealed at the USA Today today.

Check out this article:  Epic News from SDCC: The Force is with Hot Wheels.  Matty Collector's post teases a box with something in it.  But what?  That, I don't know.