A Raw Greenlight Chase, ERROR Style!

Friday, December 16, 2016

A Raw Greenlight Chase, ERROR Style!

Most Greenlight chase pieces are green machines featuring green bodies or green bases/wheels. Once in awhile, Greenlight goes raw with their chase pieces. When they do, it's special because the raw chases are usually reserved for Greenlight's diorama sets. Plus, the zamac look is just cool. Raw chases tend to be rarer than your typical Green Machine also. Greenlight claims 2% of the run are chase pieces (my spidey senses tell me it's a little more than that), but Greenlight tends to release dioramas in batches of 2000 compared to 4-10k for the typical Muscle/BlackBandit/Country Roads release. That means instead of 80-200 chase pieces, there are only 40-50 of each raw diorama in existence.

Greenlight's raw dioramas don't draw the high prices that other rare pieces do, despite being exceedingly limited. Nonetheless, finding a raw diorama is a rare occurrence and makes you the owner of a very limited collectible. In the case of the recent 'Summer Festival' set, only 42 raw chase dioramas were made. Same goes for the recent 'Campsite Cruisers' diorama. Now imagine finding one of these raw chase sets with an error. Talk about a rare find.

Recently, I picked up a raw 'Campsite Cruisers' diorama at Toys R Us. Naturally, I was elated to find a raw chase set. However, when I got home and compared it to my non-chase set, I realized the two VW Type 2 Campmobiles looked different. Sure the chase version was raw, but the camper top opened the opposite way of the non-chase and the striping and details were missing. I went on eBay to see if the raw chases got a different design. Nope, mine was different from the ones on eBay. Then it struck me that maybe I'd got the raw chase campmobile that belonged in the 'Campsite Cruiser' diorama. The Campsite dioramas shipped at the same time and stores got both dioramas together. The switch seemed plausible.

So I did some digging. I contacted friends who'd found the same raw chase set, reviewed some eBay listings and went to the trusty old za3collectibles.com. Sure enough, I'd got the VW Campmobile from the 'Campsite Cruiser' diorama in the 'Summer Festival' diorama. Kpstoys hooked me up with another 'Summer Festival' raw chase set at a fair price so I could compare them. Check it out. I wonder if someone out there has a 'Campsite Cruiser' set with a 'Summer Festival' Campmobile...only time will tell. For now, check out the differences between these two sets. And go find the other 40 sets that are out there. Enjoy...