I was today days old when I learned that my cousin just bought the classic Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle — the wind-up motorcycle-and-launcher toy from the ’70s — and that it wasn’t just a fun little toy that year. It was, by dollar figure, the single best-selling toy the Ideal Toy Company ever made. That sent me down a much bigger rabbit hole than I expected, because the toy was never really the point. The point was the man it was modeled on, and he turns out to be one of the strangest, most genuinely broken (literally) figures in American pop history — who now, this week, has a brand-new museum sitting in downtown Las Vegas.
The Toy That Took Over Christmas 1973
Ideal debuted Evel Knievel action figures in 1972, then followed up in 1973 with the Stunt Cycle — and it became THE must-have toy of that year’s Christmas season. The mechanism was simple and genuinely clever: you clicked the toy motorcycle into a gyroscopic launcher, cranked a ripcord-style handle to spin up an internal flywheel, then let go. The Evel figure rocketed forward and up, sailing over whatever ramp setup a kid had cobbled together in the driveway or living room. No batteries, no motor — just stored energy in a spinning flywheel, released all at once.
It went on to become Ideal’s best-selling toy ever, full stop — the company sold more than $125 million worth of Knievel-branded toys across the whole product line. Sources: Vintage Toy Emporium and Core77.
The Jump That Made Him Famous — Caesars Palace, New Year’s Eve 1967
The toy existed because the man was already a household name, and the reason for that traces back to one specific jump. On December 31, 1967, Knievel attempted to clear the fountains outside Caesars Palace in Las Vegas — a 141-foot jump, the longest of his career up to that point. His Triumph Bonneville T120 lost power on the takeoff ramp. He cleared the fountains anyway, but landed awkwardly on the safety ramp beyond them.
The injury list from that single landing: a crushed pelvis, a crushed femur, a fractured hip, a fractured wrist, fractures in both ankles, and a concussion. He was hospitalized for 29 days. Footage of the crash aired on ABC’s Wide World of Sports and made him internationally famous almost overnight — the jump that nearly killed him is the same jump that built the legend. Sources: Casino.org and Smithsonian Magazine.
The Even Bigger, Weirder One — Snake River Canyon, 1974
Seven years later, on September 8, 1974, Knievel tried something far stranger: crossing the Snake River Canyon near Twin Falls, Idaho, not on a motorcycle but in a steam-powered rocket he called the Skycycle X-2, built by aerospace engineer Robert Truax. A design flaw in the parachute retention mechanism caused the drogue parachute to deploy prematurely, right as the Skycycle left the launch rail. Aerial photos actually show the X-2 clearing the canyon — but prevailing winds blew it back, and it landed just a few feet from the river at the bottom, on the same side it launched from.
Knievel survived with only minor injuries. He later said that if he’d landed in the water instead, a harness malfunction would have drowned him. Sources: Wikipedia, Skycycle X-2 and Hagerty.
The Toll — a Guinness World Record for Broken Bones
All of this added up. By the end of 1975, Knievel had suffered 433 bone fractures over the course of his career — enough to earn him the Guinness World Record for most bones broken in a lifetime. Source: Guinness World Records.
The New Museum — Open Right Now in Las Vegas
Here’s the part that made this worth writing about today instead of just reminiscing: the Evel Knievel Experience opened June 27, 2026 — about 10 days ago — at 1001 S. First Street in the Las Vegas Arts District, after relocating from its original home, the Evel Knievel Museum in Topeka, Kansas (which opened in 2017 and has now closed).
It’s a fully interactive museum, not a static display case. Inside: his real jumpsuits (red, white, and blue), his actual motorcycles, the real Snake River Canyon Skycycle X-2, the helmet from the Caesars Palace jump, a fully restored “Big Red” Mack truck and trailer (the centerpiece of his touring operation), a “Bad to the Bones” exhibit covering his crashes and injuries in detail, and a 4D VR jump simulation where you sit on a rumbling motorcycle and experience a 16-car jump firsthand. Open daily 10am–8pm, general admission $35. Sources: Las Vegas Sun and Las Vegas Review-Journal.
So the toy my cousin just bought — the little wind-up rocket-launch motorcycle — has a real-world counterpart sitting behind glass a few miles off the Strip right now, next to the real jumpsuits, the real crash helmet, and the actual Skycycle that never quite made it across that canyon. If you’re in Vegas this week, it’s an easy detour.