Redartz: Back in our collective youth, we had many ways to occupy our free time. Reading, watching television, listening to music, engaging in outside activities, and so on. One activity that engaged both the mind and the hands was model building.
As with comics, it was a friend who introduced me to the pleasures of modelling (and no, I don't mean posing for artists and photographers, although I did do some of that as an art teacher; but that's another story). This friend had a box full of leftover parts from numerous car models he had built, and invited me over to 'codge together' a couple of imaginative vehicles. We put together two pretty hodgepodge, clunky 'objects', not much to look at but it sparked my interest.
Soon I was picking up model kits from the local store; seeking out cool looking kits such as Monogram (Mattel's model division) was producing at the time. My first 'solo attempt' was Monogram's "Cherry Bomb"; a sharp red speedster with an odd little trailer. I loved the 'lift open' top.
Shortly thereafter I tackled another Monogram kit with cool gimmickry: the "Ice-T". Even had ice blocks in the back. And speaking of the "Ice-T", it represents another aspect of models that intrigued me. Soon after that model was released, Mattel's "Hot Wheels" car line released a redline version of the Ice-T. Obviously I had to pick that up. That was but one of many vehicles that became available as both a model kit and a Hot Wheel. I added the "Paddy Wagon" and the "S'Cool Bus", displaying the model and the Hot Wheel side-by-side on my shelf.
Oh, and the "S'Cool Bus" was amazing. The model kit had acetate windows printed with cartoon kids doing all manner of goofy things; upon finding the Hot Wheels version I was disappointed to discover that it had no such feature. Ah well.
Over the next few years I assembled numerous more models. My parents often gifted me with kits; a battleship and plane from Revell (another big model maker), more cars, and then a new twist arose. About the time I started into comics, Aurora released the "Comic Scenes" series. Aurora had long been a big producer of great kits depicting movie monsters, superheros, tv shows, and so on. Well, upon finding that Spider-Man kit, it was imperative that it be added to my model shelf.
Sadly, this is where it turns dark. Not long after that my interest in comics totally eclipsed the models, and so they all met a deadly fate. A couple friends and I lined them all up in the backyard one day and shot them all to pieces with bb guns. It was fun at the time, yes. But years later, with those vintage models bringing sky high prices- I wasn't laughing anymore.
But, the tale has a happier ending. A few years ago, at a flea market, I came across one of those Aurora Spider-Man kits. It was unassembled, and even still contained the instruction sheet/comic illustrated by Jazzy John Romita! The price was 30 dollars, which I gladly paid. Took it home, and over the next week assembled and painted it. I think my adult version turned out better than my youthful one.
So here's a few more kits you may remember, from several of the manufacturers discussed above. Any of these sit upon your shelves? Share your thoughts and memories of model building. Oh, and pass the Testor's cement, please...
17 comments:
Oh, GREAT topic, Red-! Albeit one I'll likely have to return to later in (no-doubt tedious) depth-- gotta busy start to the day ahead--
A preview:
-My Dad was a prolific model-builder, and had a very nice facility for good, clean work.
-I inherited the enjoyment. . . and almost none of the skill. Which I happily didn't really care about as a tyke. Dozens and dozens of punch-line-bad level of assemblies throughout my childhood.
-I don't know anyone who DIDN'T blow them up or otherwise wreck them somehow at around the age of 14 or so. What's up with that??
HB
Here in the UK the most well-known model-kit manufacturer was called Airfix. I made numerous models of planes and ships (but no cars) and I also had a model of the Viking Lander which...er, landed...on Mars in 1976. And I made models of R2D2 and a TIE fighter and X-wing fighter from Star Wars. The easiest model I ever made was a Tyrannosaurus Rex which was just two halves which required sticking together - of course, that was a T-Rex circa 1978 so it looked nothing like the more accurate T-Rex revealed by modern paleontology.
Great topic! Growing up in the '60s and '70s, I loved assembling and, especially, painting some great kits. My favorites were the snap-it MPC kits based on scenes and characters from Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion Disneyland rides. They were rubber band powered for motion action with the press of a button. There have recently been remakes of these exact molds, but without the Disney name. They're still great and I've had fun revisiting them.
Another group of favorites were the Snoopy battery powered kits. Joe Cool surfing or driving his motorcycle with Woodstock in the sidecar and another as the WWI Flying Ace flying his Sopwith Camel doghouse.
The Big Daddy Roth car kits were wacky and great, too. I loved the Rat Fink model kit on his suped-up hog of a motorcycle!
I enjoyed all the comics themed model kits, including Spidey, Cap, Hulk, Batman, Robin, Superboy, and Superman.
The one that I never could find was the Lost in Space scene of the Robinsons battling the giant cyclops. A recreation of this kit has recently been produced, so I may finally get to put this one together 55 years later!
Of course, growing up in the '60s was all about monsters, so I had my Aurora Mummy and the Forgotten Prison with glow-in-the-dark features.
The bronze age was a great time to be a kid!
I was really into models when I was a kid, too. I had the Ice-T kit, and at least one other Tom Daniel / Monogram kit — maybe the Tijuana Taxi? I always wanted the Red Baron kit, but never got one, for some reason. DID have the Hot Wheels redline tho! And the Paddy Wagon (I don’t think Daniel actually designed that one, but it did look like his work). My younger brother had the Rommel’s Rod kit.
I had a bunch of the Revell ‘Deal’s Wheels’ kits — ‘57 cHEVY, Bug Bomb, ZZZZZ-28, etc.
Also had most of the Aurora Monsters (of course). I even had MPC’s Barnabas Collins kit, with the supposedly bendable arms (they didn’t work well AT ALL). One cool thing about it was that the ‘Glow’ parts glowed blue-violet instead of the usual greenish yellow.
In the early 90s, lots of these kits were re-issued from various companies and it triggered a Nostalgic Model Kit spree — I bought and built most of the Aurora monsters and Superheroes, most of the Big Daddy Roth kits, assorted Weird-oh’s, Deal’s Wheels, etc.
b.t.
Dudes!
I had The Snake, my brother The Mongoose! We were inspired in part b/c we lived near "Smoking US 30 Drag Strip. Where the great onnnnnnnnnesssssss... run! run! run! run! run...."
Some of you "Chicago radio" guys must have heard that jingle on radio?
The link below has that crazy jingle and shows local guys racing.
Eventually you'd have Big Daddy Don Garlitz, the Snake, the Mongoose, Big Don McEwan racing funny cars and dragsters at US 30, all of whom had their dragsters and funny cars on the shelves as models!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLGc-kP1xng
And yep, I built the obligatory battleships and destroyers and cruisers and eventually set them on mud puddles and stuff for target practice with the BB guns. Good times!
As with Colin, most of my models were from Airfix, though I had one or two by the likes of Revell.
These are all the model kits I remember owning:
The HMS Hood.
A Churchill Tank.
A WWII armoured car.
A Lancaster Bomber.
The same kind of biplane that was used in The People that Time Forgot.
A Lightning fighter jet.
A Space:1999 Eagle.
A triceratops.
A caveman, with a club, squaring up to a T-Rex.
A scene from D-Day.
A scene from the battle of El Alamein.
A Polaris nuclear submarine that had one side of it missing, so you could see all the inner workings and crew. Building that was a major undertaking.
Tragically, I never had any of the Marvel super-hero kits, nor ever saw any for sale until the early 1990s.
HB- you may be onto a good subject for a survey; how many of us demolished our models? Perhaps the better question is whether anyone actually kept any intact over the years...
Colin- speaking of T-Rex models, have you seen any of the dinosaur skeleton models available? I've never picked one up; the concern being how challenging the assembly would be. "Ankle bone connected to the leg bone..."
Disneymarvel- those moving models must have been quite cool. I recall seeing the Snoopy on his doghouse Sopwith Camel. Being a big "Peanuts" fan , it's surprising I never got one.
And yes , Big Daddy Roth was a Big figure in models back then! Every kid in school seemed to love those things.
b.t.- That Barnabas Collins model would be worth the investment just to see that blue violet glow! When you think of 'glow in the dark', you always envision that eerie greenish hue emanating from ....whatever it was that was glowing. Wonder if it was difficult to make other colors to glow. Can't recall ever seeing a 'glow in the dark' red, for instance.
Charlie- The "Snake" and "Mongoose"; two paragons of Bronze age modellers (and more so, Hot Wheels collectors). Loved to pit those two cars against each other on the redline Drag Strip track. Ah, the memories. Do you recall when they made a blue Mongoose and White Snake (or was it the reverse?)?
Steve DC- Quite the array of military models you name. Did you have a particular interest in that area? I had a friend who was HUGELY into WWII models. His room looked like a museum.
Red, I didn't really have any interest in military matters at all. It's just that 99% of Airfix model kits were military-based. I don't think I even knew what the Battle of El Alamein was when I was happily assembling its recreation.
I've just remembered I also had a 12" tall model kit of a human skeleton. That was more my style.
Steve, I had a model biplane too!
Red, I didn't even know dinosaur skeleton models existed!
As for demolishing models - I can't remember what happened to any of mine but I'm pretty sure I didn't deliberately destroy any of my models.
I got that T-Rex model for Christmas 1978 but no paint was provided so after assembling my T-Rex I painted it with the only paint we had in the house - which was yellow. Of course, we don't know what colour a T-Rex actually was but I think it was shown as a sort of greenish-brown reptilian colour on the box. Anyway, for some reason I was happy enough with my T-Rex being yellow and that's the way he stayed. Nowadays we know that a T-Rex was covered in feathers so a yellow feathered T-Rex might have existed!
Red! I vaguely do recall the change of Snake, Mongoose colors for Hot Wheels (I think, lol) b/c I seem to recall having a white Snake hotwheel and pondering the color difference from my model!
I had the yellow Snake Funny Car model. IIRD, my brother had a Mongoose that was red (?)
But that crazy jingle I pasted above is remembered by all who grew and listened to WLS radio out of Chicago (the "50,000 watt monkey" as it was called.)
Maybe HR recalls it?
CH47--
I definitely remember those US 30 Drag Strip promos-- though I wasn't clocking 'em until about 5 to 8 years later than this particular one. But, ha, the format was IDENTICAL. Two guys using a hyper-excited "growl-shout" voice, jumping the ends of each others lines. And that echoing "SUNDAY (Sunday-Sunday-Sunday)" hook-- that made it into our own set of catch-phrases in my crowd. Mind you-- we had NO idea where this place was or any sense at all of what the event would look like. We weren't drag-racing enthusiasts whatsoever-- the level of hype itself was the entertainment factor for us.
So, my Dad was building plastic model kit airplanes-- mostly WW2 planes-- since before I was born. And he was quite good at it-- finding ways to hang them up with thread in our pseudo-family-room area in our (unfinished) basement. I have no idea at all when, where, or how these were ultimately lost or disposed of. I happily picked it up when I was very little. . . and clearly did not have the fine-motor skills (or patience with slow-drying airplane glue) to ever be good at it. BUT-- I really did enjoy the directions-following process, and being able to see the fruits of one's labors as I went along. I don't think I ever left one unfinished. . . but lordy, in retrospect there were some hilariously awful-looking assemblies. To my family's credit, I never heard any negative feedback whatsoever-- at worst there might be a sense of praise being faintly strained. . .
LOTS of memories of specific kits being revived here--- The Pirates of the Caribbean dioramas; The Spidey & Hulk kits (somehow lost over time, though I still have the mini-comics. . . !). Snoopy & Woodstock kits. I didn't do very many car kits, though my pals did. I did LOTS of fighter planes. And I had most of the Aurora monster kits-- painted atrociously-- and I tended to use a lot of the glow-in-the-dark pieces. . . which was an aesthetic disaster when it wasn't in fact dark. Probably my favorite acquisition one Christmas was the ENTIRE catalog of Aurora's tank model kits-- that was a terrific series, and I had a hoot of a time assembling them. The added bonus was that my Dad showed me how to heat up a jack-knife and use it to do some scarring on the tanks to make them look battle-worn. Which, of course, I proceeded to do to an absurd degree (being, like, 11 years old)-- but it provided a ton of enjoyment, which is the whole point, y'know?
Gone, gone-- they're all gone. And, tbh, where would we keep things like that as adults? Unless you're a model-assembling artisan, they're really still someone else's work that you're kinda putting back together-- a puzzle that's fun to solve. And good NIGHT do they take up a lot of space. . .
Sure I get a nostalgic pang once in awhile-- but I don't mind having let (most of) them go in the long run. . .
HB
The Neanderthal Man is being menaced by a dinosaur which is obviously historically inaccurate so was the dinosaur merely on the box for dramatic effect or did the assembled scene actually portray a Neanderthal Man vs. a dinosaur?
Colin- yes, a yellow T-Rex is most certainly a possibility! Who would've thought...
And yes, the dinosaur on the caveman model was questionalbe (to me, anyway; even as a kid I knew that was incorrect).
Charlie- although that specific radio jingle wasn't heard in my environs, we had some quite similar. With that "Sunday, Sunday, Sundaaaaaaaay" a big part of 'em.
HB- love your tale about your Dad and his models. I'm visualizing your basement ceiling swarming with low-hanging planes. And wondering how his models avoided being frequently sent crashing to the floor...
It's certainly a tangent, but I've got to affirm my childhood distaste too for seeing cavemen and dinosaurs depicted as existing at the same time. Like a zillion other little boys, by the time I was about 7 years old, I was a HUGE dinosaur fanatic, and there was no lack of picture books on them targeted at us even in the mid/late 60's. Pretty much lesson #1 was that humans didn't exist during the Age of Reptiles.
Armchair Paleontology clearly never made it through the skulls of yer average cartoon/television/movie/comic writer, though, eh? Well, or parents or any adults from that era, for that matter. If ever there were a real-life example of the old trope of the Little Kids being more informed than their Dismissive Parents and Other Adults, it would have to be this one- !
HB (Who STILL cringes at the dinosaurs in IT'S ABOUT TIME. . . --well, and at every other aspect of that scary-bad old sitcom---)
HB, the Creationist Museum in Kentucky insists that dinosaurs and humans once co-existed - and not that long ago because the Earth is only 6,000 years old of course. The lack of any dinosaurs today is because they all drowned in Noah's flood I think. I must admit that I'd love to visit the Creationist Museum - it would be a real hoot :D
Colin J--
I must confess, I would have a tough time keeping a civil tongue in my head, me.
We do have a similar HUGE new(ish) museum (non-Smithsonian affiliated, of course) here in DC: the sorta-infamous Museum of the Bible. This is the enterprise created by the Hobby Lobby gazillionaires-- the folks whose vaaaast collection of biblically-significant artifacts contained multiple-thousands of items that had been obtained illegally from their places of origin. And then there was the scandal of them displaying forged Dead Sea Scrolls.
They employed many of my tech theater cohorts getting the displays up and running, as well as some actor peers to add to their costumed-character element. They go through that type of staff very quickly-- I've not heard any positive reports on the experience. . .
I played Henry Drummond (the Clarence Darrow figure) in INHERIT THE WIND about 3 years ago-- based on the Scopes "Monkey" Trial from the 1920's-- and what was both surprising and dismaying is that the Creationist argument isn't a shred deeper or stronger now than it was then, nearly a hundred years ago. There's been zero growth in that position, even in the face of inarguable fact and evidence. Lordy, it makes me crazy. . . !
HB
Oh! Totally forgot to mention the several Marvel super-hero models that ToyBiz came out with in...the late 90's, maybe? Early aughts? Picked up several of those w/ my young son at the time, and they were not a bad little diversion-- although we didn't finish all of them before he lost interest. His gift for fine-painting is, if anything, even worse than mine--- so the finished ones remain viewable for immediate family only. (Plus, he liked to use totally different colors for the costumes sometimes-- and I figured, enh, sure-- why not?)
HB
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