The Little World

Just back it right in to my brain and unload. l’ll put the memories away as you bring them out. Do I have to sign a receipt?

” Back in the day ” is a favourite expression of Phil Flory – the English modeller who runs the famous video site. He’s referring to his childhood, but back in his day, his childhood was my young adulthood. And so on back to the first kid who built a model cave-mammoth.

Our nostalgic builds are always better or worse than we remember – frequently both at the same time. If we are fortunate, the moulds that made them have not been lost. They can be sold on as the older firms in expensive countries go broke and newer ones in the cheap areas of the world can use them to go broke with. In the interval between the bailiffs we get some nice re-issues of older kits.

Once in our hands we can experience the sort of nostalgia that you just can’t get any more;

a. The kits are smaller than we remember. Our child’s hands were not swollen and callused from years of toil – that came later as we worked in offices for 50 years. The size of the toy has not changed – the size of the child has.

b. The plastic is either brittler or softer than we remember. But this may well be the new moulding firm using whatever they can get. In some cases it is a distinct improvement over the older version.

c. The box is different. Unless the new firm is being really cheap or really honest, they will re-box and change the front art. They may have better artists now than were available then, and you might think you are getting a wonderful new version of the kit. News for ya, Sunshine…

d. The decals are different…but only in that they are newly printed. They may, indeed, be the old pattern. This is a blessing or a curse depending upon what your intentions are with the kit. If it is just to remember Christmas 1959 you will welcome that simple old design. Open the box, put a boiled sweet in your mouth, smear your fingers with glue, and start to make a mess.

If you want a more accurate model from a basic beginning, hope for a new set of decals and an accurate colour call-out.

e. They did make mistakes then. And you followed right along and made models of those mistakes. I remember a number of Aurora Famous Fighters whose shape bore no resemblance to reality but were glued faithfully. I found the real things, when seen, an offence to the eye. Did the Air Force not know…?

Britmodeller and IPMS probably did not exist back in the day, and errors flew past without comment. Indeed that’s the only reason that Farnborough Air Show was able to go ahead in the late 40’s and 50’s. There were fewer anoraks to tell the RAF crews that their paint colour was wrong…

f. You needn’t glue or paint to get full value from a classic kit. You can have all the fun you need just clipping the parts from the sprue trees and dry fitting them together. Hard-core nostalgists don’t even cut – they twist ’em off.