Big Wheel
The low-slung plastic trike with the giant front wheel — pedal like mad down the driveway, yank the handlebars, and skid out in a glorious clattering spin. It was loud, it was indestructible, and every kid on the block knew exactly whose was whose.
The Big Wheel came out of Louis Marx and Company in 1969, rotomolded in Girard, Pennsylvania out of bright red, blue, and yellow plastic: a tricycle rebuilt from scratch with a huge front wheel, a seat inches off the pavement, and no metal to rust or dent. It became a 1970s phenomenon — cheap enough for almost any family, and even endorsed by consumer groups as a safer alternative to the traditional trike, since the low center of gravity made tip-overs rare and falls short. Kids cared about none of that. What mattered was the sound — that hollow plastic growl on concrete — and the discovery that jamming the pedals or hauling the handlebars mid-speed would break the back wheels loose into a skid.
By the time 90s kids got theirs, the Big Wheel was a rite of childhood so established that the name had gone generic: Marx itself hit bankruptcy in the early 80s, and the brand and molds passed to Empire Plastics, which kept low-riding plastic trikes rolling out of toy aisles — Big Wheels, Power Cycles, and a parking lot's worth of imitators that everybody called Big Wheels anyway. The ritual stayed exactly the same: wear the front tread bald over one summer, leave it out in the yard through ten rainstorms, hand it down the sibling chain until the seat cracked.
The brand itself has died and come back more than once — Empire went bankrupt in 2001, the trike was reintroduced in 2003, and the Schylling toy company picked up the line in 2021 — while the original earned its place in the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2009. The Hall's class of inductees is full of elegant classics; the Big Wheel got in for the opposite reason. It was gloriously inelegant — a machine for going too fast, too low, and sideways, and for announcing to the whole neighborhood that you were coming.
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