There is nothing sexier than a hot hot model 4 4

[greggy]

@BlowUpTheMoon

[Hepcat]

On 3/22/2024 at 6:42 PM, Phicks said:

Wow!  I was about to ask why you didn’t have Galileo and K7 kits, but they were just vacationing in another cabinet.   Love those old AMT Star Trek models!  They were the gift of choice whenever my childhood friends had birthdays in the late 70s.

Here then are some close-up shots of my Star Trek model kits:

Plus this one which I bought just recently at my local hobby shop, Wheels and Wings:

I'm such a big fan of the Romulans that I couldn't resist the above re-issue in a tin even though I already have the original in my model kit collection.

I'm now going to start looking around for a kit of this later variant of a Romulan Warbird:

It's very well designed for confronting any marauding Federation or Bajoran imperialists.

[Jayman]

On 4/2/2024 at 1:12 PM, batman_fan said:

Completed my Forgotten Prisoner set, 98, 100, and Frightening Lightning

It’s nice that I understand these designations now, congrats! 

[Dick Pontoon]

I decided Ursus was done a few weeks ago.

[batman_fan]

On 4/11/2024 at 1:07 PM, dick pontoon said:

I decided Ursus was done a few weeks ago.

Turned out amazing 

[Hepcat]

The first model kit I built was one I received in 1961 or 1962 at the John Labatt Limited employees' kids Xmas party at the old London Arena (whose main use by then was for roller skating, roller derbies and NWA wrestling):

While we waited for Santa to make his appearance, we got cake, cookies and ice cream and were entertained by a wonderful magician. Every child's name was then called and we each received a wrapped present such as a model kit together with a boodle bag full of candy treats including a box of Cracker Jack and package of Mackintosh Toffee from Santa. It couldn't get any better than that for a kid at the time.

The kit I received was definitely an AMT 3-in-1 car model but I'm not sure exactly which. It may have been this Chevy Nova:

Or this Chevy II:

I got glue marks/stains over the body and it only looked good from a distance. A few months later I purchased a tiny Revell model kit of a warship for $0.29-$0.39 from my local Les' Variety store. The box graphics to a certain extent resembled those of this much bigger Revell battleship below:

But the model I bought came in a box that was only about six inches long and I think it was one of the British ships that fought in the Battle of the River Plate because I have a vague memory of reading about this battle on a model instruction sheet. I had bought it for the birthday party of Dave H. down the street but ended up building it myself when his party was cancelled. It was such a simple kit that I did a good job on it.

So emboldened was I by my success that I then stepped up to a model kit of an Aurora P-38 Lightning. Here's the one from my present day collection:

Mine may have been molded in a white, grey or cream coloured plastic though since Aurora Canada often cast kits in different coloured plastic than did Aurora in the States. Nevertheless I built it nicely but then painted the whole thing other than the canopy with blue Testors glossy enamel paint to better mimic the picture on the box. I did a wretched job on the paint though with very obvious brush marks all over the plane. One of my buddies, Paul S., even commented that it looked lousy which had me concluding that since I couldn't paint very well, I wouldn't paint any more kits. This was perhaps a premature assessment since I was only eleven or so years of age at the time.

Edited April 14 by Hepcat

[batman_fan]

On 4/13/2024 at 9:34 PM, Hepcat said:

The first model kit I built was one I received in 1961 or 1962 at the John Labatt Limited employees' kids Xmas party at the old London Arena (whose main use by then was for roller skating, roller derbies and NWA wrestling):

While we waited for Santa to make his appearance, we got cake, cookies and ice cream and were entertained by a wonderful magician. Every child's name was then called and we each received a wrapped present such as a model kit together with a boodle bag full of candy treats including a box of Cracker Jack and package of Mackintosh Toffee from Santa. It couldn't get any better than that for a kid at the time.

The kit I received was definitely an AMT 3-in-1 car model but I'm not sure exactly which. It may have been this Chevy Nova:

Or this Chevy II:

I got glue marks/stains over the body and it only looked good from a distance. A few months later I purchased a tiny Revell model kit of a warship for $0.29-$0.39 from my local Les' Variety store. The box graphics to a certain extent resembled those of this much bigger Revell battleship below:

But the model I bought came in a box that was only about six inches long and I think it was one of the British ships that fought in the Battle of the River Plate because I have a vague memory of reading about this battle on a model instruction sheet. I had bought it for the birthday party of Dave H. down the street but ended up building it myself when his party was cancelled. It was such a simple kit that I did a good job on it.

So emboldened was I by my success that I then stepped up to a model kit of an Aurora P-38 Lightning. Here's the one from my present day collection:

Mine may have been molded in a white, grey or cream coloured plastic though. Nonetheless I built it nicely but then painted the whole thing other than the canopy with blue Testors glossy enamel paint to better mimic the picture on the box. I did a wretched job on the paint though with very obvious brush marks all over the plane. One of my buddies, Paul S., even commented that it looked lousy which had me concluding that since I couldn't paint very well, I wouldn't paint any more kits. This was perhaps a premature assessment since I was only eleven or so years of age at the time.

Great story.  Definitely can see where your model kit passion comes from.

[Dick Pontoon]

On 4/11/2024 at 7:20 PM, batman_fan said:

Turned out amazing 

Thanks a lot! I still have a ways to go and lots to learn, but I can at least finish a kit feeling mostly satisfied.

[Hepcat]

It was the Aurora monster models that played a pivotal role in sparking what's ended up being a lifelong interest in model kits for me.

I would often accompany my mother to the Kresge store on Dundas Street in downtown London:

I didn't mind. While mom shopped for boring stuff, there were many other things to keep me occupied - goldfish, budgies, little turtles, bulk candies, cakes and of course the toy department! Then if I played my cards right my mother would treat me to an ice cream in one of those little metal serving bowls at the dinette counter. It must have been sometime in 1962 when I first saw the Aurora Wolf Man model kit. Here's the one from my present day collection:

I was captivated! When the Creature kit turned up with the others sometime in 1963, I was really knocked out:

But I couldn't imagine my mother buying me one of these kits so I didn't even ask. I rather suspected that I wasn't yet ready for kits as wild and complex as these anyway unlike the two very sophisticated slightly older boys down the street, Fred and Mike, whose Dracula build-up had left me in awe:

But DC then stoked my longing for these kits with these two ads on the back covers of their comics hitting the newsstands in September 1963 and January 1964 respectively:

As it turned out, before getting any of these kits I managed to score a super cool Creature-Wolf Man wallet by meeting my sales quota of fifteen Globe and Mail newspapers one Saturday morning in the spring of 1964:

 (Not mine.)

But a lot of the other successful paper boys wanted the wallet featuring the Mummy. This influenced me to make the Mummy the first Aurora monster model kit I bought at a hobby shop in Wells, Maine while I was attending boarding school in nearby Kennebunkport in 1965-66:

I even painted it, the first model kit I'd tried my hand at painting since the Aurora P-38 Lightning more than two years previously! I used a glossy Testors grey paint on the Mummy himself and metallic green on the snake. I endowed both with red eyes. It actually looked really cool!

At almost the same time as the Mummy kit I acquired the Bride of Frankenstein kit because the box art really beckoned me and I had the money that day to buy a kit:

The third in the late spring of 1966 was a Frankenstein's Flivver that I bought at Coles Books on Dundas Street a block or so east of the Kresge store in downtown London:

That served to put me off the Aurora monster model kits though since it was rather hokey and shoddy (with plastic as opposed to rubber tires!) compared to the other models I'd built. Moreover it was molded in black plastic which I found less amenable to painting and thus less interesting. Besides by this time in 1966 I was in high school and other pursuits were drawing my interest.

My best buddy Anthony L. though bought and built a Forgotten Prisoner of Castel-Maré kit in 1967:

With respect to painting he got as far as applying some Testors metallic gold enamel to the chains. Painting was a challenge to most of us monster kids back in the day. 

Here's a close-up from a few years ago of the Aurora portion of my main model kit cabinet:

Edited April 24 by Hepcat

[batman_fan]

When I started doing the monster kits you didn't see the long boxes very often.  I built the 1970s square box kits.  First kit I got was the Forgotten Prisoner.  My oldest brother helped me build it.  Back then if I had 2 different colors of tester paint I was doing good and my painting only lasted one day because I didn't have turpentine to clean the brush.

[Hepcat]

While I was strongly drawn to the Revell "Big Daddy" Roth custom car and fink kits right from the start,  I don't clearly remember when and where I first learned of these kits or "Big Daddy" Roth's existence. It was perhaps from an ad for one of his model kits in Boy's Life magazine in 1963 or so:

But I clearly remember looking at the Revell Beatnik Bandit model kit at the Tuckey Hardware store two blocks from my house sometime in early 1964:

A few months afterward I was completely knocked out when I saw the Revell Rat Fink model kit at the Coles bookstore on Dundas Street in downtown London. I bought it almost immediately, built it nicely but left it unpainted:

Later in perhaps early 1965 I bought this even wilder Revell Roth Mysterion kit that I'd been admiring for several months at Tuckey Hardware:

My desire for all things Roth was then further stoked by these ads:

Even though I saw such a Testor's paint display stand at the hobby shop above Cowan's Hardware in downtown London, I knew these paints were for more sophisticated cooler kids who could actually paint. And who could of course afford relatively more expensive spray paint cans!

I also remember gazing with wonder at this ad which also appeared on the back cover of some DC comics as well as on the back cover of Big Daddy Roth 4:

Wow! Winning "Big Daddy" Roth's company as a house guest for a week! How cool would that be? A girl in her early teens from New Jersey actually won the contest with her "Scuz-Fink" submission.

What's certain is that this ad which appeared in issue #16 of Drag Cartoons that I bought in May 1965 sealed the deal in turning me into a "Big Daddy" Roth fanatic for life:

That issue proved key in shaping my interests since it also prompted me to send away to Millar Publications for every back issue of Drag Cartoons and Big Daddy Roth magazine I could get and also sparked an abiding interest in hot rods that's stayed with me to the present day.

I then bought a Revell Brother Rat Fink T-Shirt Iron-On Transfer at the Seven Mile Hobby Shop just west of the Southfield Expressway in Detroit in the early summer of 1965 and successfully applied it to one of my T-shirts:

 (Not mine.)

My very old-school father though took one look at it, confiscated it and used it for a rag in the garage. Very sad. The same fate befell the Rat Fink sweatshirt I ordered up and received from "Big Daddy" Roth's shop in the winter of 1965-66. 

I had also noticed an absolutely wild Angel Fink kit in the window of Steve's Variety & Gift Shop in Wortley Road Village just over a block from my house sometime after building the Rat Fink but I didn't buy it at the time: 

I did so in the fall of 1965 though at a hobby shop in Wells, Maine when I was attending a boarding school in Kennebunkport, Maine. It became the first non-Aurora model kit I painted and I actually did a pretty good job.

I also clearly remember being tempted by the Revell Surfink kit when I saw it at Coles Books later in 1966 but passed on buying it because I was in high school by then:

The Revell Surfink kit can be seen to have been closely based on this Roth T-shirt design executed in pen and ink by Wes Bennett (I think) which not surprisingly ranks among my very favourites:

Whenever that first exposure of mine to "Big Daddy" Roth's designs was, I was absolutely captivated just about from the get-go. This stuff I knew was absolutely outta sight wild cool (and something my parents just couldn't understand of course)! 

By 1983 I was buying up whatever MIB Revell Roth kits I could find. At the time they were surprisingly cheap in comparison to the Aurora monster model kits. I now have almost all the ones I really want with the exception of Scuz-Fink and Surfite (to what I'm sure would have been the absolute disgust of my father anyway):

I also have about 22 "Big Daddy" Roth T-shirts including these:

I ordered a whole bunch of these T-shirts through the Roth catalog circa 2000 and spent some time talking with Ed himself on the phone.

While I don't have a Brother Rat Fink T-Shirt Iron-On Transfer, I do have the Rat Fink one:

It's the other eleven Revell T-Shirt Iron-On Transfers I really need now!

I also have a couple of Roth store promo posters including this one for the Testor's paints:

There's also a Revell "Ransom a Rat Fink" poster that I'd really like to add to my collection.

So to this very day I remain a wild-eyed drooling fan of "Big Daddy" Roth and his custom rods and finks! Don't you just love those happy endings?

Edited April 25 by Hepcat

[Hepcat]

I was also well aware of the Hawk Weird-Ohs model kits as a kid. I don't remember how and where I first learned of them, but it would not have been long after Hawk first started releasing them in 1963 because they were very widely sold. Here's a picture of the poster that went out to retailers in conjunction with the release of the first three Weird-Ohs: 

And here's a poster from 1964 displaying them all:

I particularly remember gazing upon a Huey's Hut Rod kit in the downtown Coles bookstore. Here's the one from my present day collection:

I also admired an Endsville Eddie kit at Coles:

Moreover Steve's Variety & Gift Shop seemed to have one of the two smaller Weird-Oh kits that had a retail price of $0.50, Sling Rave Curvette or Wade A. Minut, on display in their front window for several years. These of course caught my eye every time I passed (as did the chocolate cream puffs priced at $0.15 in the window of the Bell Noll Bakery next door): 

I also still remember Mike M. just down the block from me proudly showing me the Francis the Foul kit he'd built but left unpainted:

For Mike and his older brother Fred to beat me to the punch when it came to getting things though was par for the course. They were a lot more sophisticated and cooler than I was since even Mike was a year older than me.

I never bought and built any of the Weird-Ohs though. Quite simply I didn't have the spending money to indulge my every whim and I could see that the Weird-Oh kits simply weren't as good as the Revell Roth finks or the Aurora Universal monsters when it came to quality. But I have them all in my present day collection because they're plenty cool enough for me these days! 

Here then are more shots from my present day collection:

Plus I have a bunch of ancillary Weird-Ohs items including a Fleer Weird-Ohs card set and wrapper from 1965:

A couple of Magic Slates:

And five sets of the decals (I sold one set) in the display box plus the shipping box which I bought at a vintage model shop over 35 years ago!

Edited April 29 by Hepcat

[Hepcat]

Even Lindberg released a line of figure kits in 1964:

I remember finding a Satan's Crate kit at my local Les' Variety store sometime in 1965:

I also recall seeing a Road Hog at Coles Books downtown some months later:

Despite the affordable price point, I passed on buying them. Quite simply I could see that as models they were even tackier/flimsier than the Hawk Sling Rave Curvette or Wade A. Minut kits. Moreover I just didn't find them nearly as charming as the Hawk Weird-Ohs. 

I actually find the Lindy Loonys somewhat repellant these days. Therefore acquiring any of the Lindy Loonys is a very low priority for me despite the fact that I clearly remember seeing two of them back in the day.

[Hepcat]

By the early spring of 1964 I had a morning Monday to Saturday paper route delivering the London Free Press from which I earned the princely sum of $2.76 per week. This left me sufficiently well off financially to actually buy some of the model kits that looked particularly tempting. The Aurora German "Wolfpack" U-Boat featuring Jo Kotula's box art which I'd been admiring at Tuckey Hardware a couple of blocks away from my house became the first of about a dozen military model kits. Here's a photo of the one from my present day collection:

Though I wasn't bold enough to try painting it at the time, I was very pleased with the way it turned out and thus encouraged to build more. I don't clearly remember but I may have built either a Graf Spee or Bismarck as well:

I'd been for some time admiring the warplane model kits above the pop cooler at Les' Variety a block down the street so I ended up buying and building them one at a time. From among the WWI planes, I'm pretty sure I built a Fokker Triplane plus a Tiger Moth or Sopwith Camel. Here's a photo of some of the ones I have in my collection today:

The WWII warplanes I bought included a Messerschmitt ME-109, Focke-Wulf 190, Hawker Hurricane plus two or three from among the following - Spitfire, P-51 Mustang, P-40 Warhawk and P-47 Thunderbolt. Here are a few pictures of the ones I have today:

The jets I built included an F-94 Starfire, F-104 Starfighter and perhaps an F-9F Panther or F-86 Sabre among others:

The artist responsible for the box art on most of the above plane model kits was Jo Kotula.

I bought most of the warplane kits at Les' Variety although I may also have bought a couple at Ken's Variety four blocks in the other direction on Wharncliffe Road. Ken's had even more model kits than did Les' but many of the ones at Ken's were AMT car model kits in which I had less interest at the time.  Overall though compared to other variety stores Ken's was even more of a treasure trove of kids' stuff including Pez dispensers, bobble-head dolls of CFL players, Krun-Chee Potato Chips which was a less common brand in London, Black Cat Bubble Gum, a neat plastic Bozo gumball machine and a tempting Silverwood's Ice Cream sign outside:

Most of the warplanes I built were by Aurora although a very few of them may have been by Hawk because the old hawk's head logo seems very familiar. Another possible reason for my clear remembrance of the hawk's head logo may be because a Hawk WWI plane was for a long time on display in the window of Steve's Variety & Gift Shop a half block up from Les'. It may have been a Nieuport or this Spad XIII but I never found it tempting enough to buy:

These days though I collect Hawk warplane kits with the hawk's head logo simply because of the strong memory the logo evokes.

Anyway I was keeping all these military kits I'd built on a little end table in my bedroom. But one day in late 1964 my older sister took it upon herself to vacuum them all which resulted in some of the tiny parts being sucked into the machine. This broke my heart and put an end to my building of warplane and ship models. 

 

Not that I was short of other interests at the time. My buddy Tony L. and I were engaged in collecting all bubble gum cards, e.g. baseball, hockey, football, non-sports, etc, my subscriptions to Aquaman and Fox and the Crow comics had not ended, my interest in Mad magazine was burgeoning and was quickly followed by my discovery of Drag Cartoons and Big Daddy Roth magazines, and I'd been knocked out by Creepy 1 which had hit newsstands in early December. So much cool stuff all of which I still hold dear of course!
 

Edited Monday at 09:29 PM by Hepcat

[Hepcat]

I was absolutely enthralled by this ad that ran in DC comic mags late in 1964:

The ad had the effect of leaving me a Mouse fan for life! Here are close-ups of the box art:

I didn't, however, chance upon any Monogram Fred Flypogger kits in my regular wanderings through my local haunts. 

Then within a year in September 1965 I was packed off to a boys' boarding school operated by Lithuanian Franciscan Fathers in Kennebunkport, Maine for ninth grade. On the Saturday before Thanksgiving we the students of St. Anthony's were released onto the streets of Portland, Maine for the day! We reached Portland in mid-morning and were to gather at the assembly point around 6:30 PM for the trip back to Kennebunkport. This was quite the treat since we were given $2 each (Wow!) to finance our meals and other activities. I believe this was done to give the couple who worked as cooks for the school the day off to spend with their families.

So there I was at the age of thirteen let loose on the streets of a big sophisticated American city! Well it had to be big, didn't it? There were warships in the harbour. Try to find those in Canada. (Actually my home town of London's population of 162,000 at the time was substantially larger than Portland's.) The first thing I did was track down a hobby shop. It was on the second or third floor of an old building and had an elevator with an honest-to-goodness elevator operator! The fellow made a snarky remark to me about hurrying up, as if he was pressed for time or something. Clearly he just hated his job especially when it came to kids. The hobby shop had the most impressive selection of model kits I'd ever seen to that point. This of course cemented my impression that this was a big sophisticated U.S. city. 

Despite their stock though, the store didn't have the Monogram Super Fuzz kit I was trying to find. In fact they'd never heard of it. And then I heard one of the employees asking where the "weird" kid was. I left the store without buying anything. (Don't you often wish you could go back now as an adult to royally chew out the adults who cavalierly disrespected you when you were a kid?) 

Leaving the hobby shop empty handed, I decided to get some lunch. Lo and behold I discovered a spanking new fast food pizza parlour that served not just individual sized pizzas but Pepsi. There was no pop sold at the St. Anthony's store and we got a bottle of Coke just once or twice a month with hamburgers on Sunday evenings after a supplemental rosary service or something in the chapel. (We always had some sort of fun meal on Sunday evenings.) I was a Pepsi loyalist at the time though so this pizza parlour was just the ticket. Now I think I'd only sampled pizza once or twice before in my life, probably just a mushroom slice for $0.20 at Cicero's Pizza stand at the Western Fair in London: 

I of course had never had enough money for pizzas in grade school and my traditional old-country parents would never have ordered out for such a thing. (By the time I was attending the University of Western Ontario of course my father would happily participate in any pizza I brought home.) In any event I bought an individual cheese pizza for something like $0.35-$0.40 that day and it was so good I bought another!

Another eventual happy ending to my tale though. I now have  M.I.B. specimens of all three kits in my collection:

[CitrusZ28]

On 5/15/2024 at 10:17 PM, Hepcat said:

By the early spring of 1964 I had a morning Monday to Saturday paper route delivering the London Free Press from which I earned the princely sum of $2.76 per week. This left me sufficiently well off financially to actually buy some of the model kits that looked particularly tempting. The Aurora "Wolfpack" U-Boat featuring Jo Kotula's box art which I'd been admiring at Tuckey Hardware a couple of blocks away from my house became the first of about a dozen military model kits. Here's a photo of the one from my present day collection:

 

Right when I saw this, I thought of this-