The Little World

Tell us now – we’ve got kits that we’ve been saving for just such an occasion…

As a kid, I saw kits in shops that I knew were a mistake. The shop might have been a hardware store in a Canadian bush town, a news agency in an Australian country town, or the leftovers in an Utah drug store…but as soon as you saw them you knew what had happened: someone had thrown them into the delivery with the rest of the month’s orders in an effort to get them out of the warehouse. And this was a month in a year very long ago…

The dust on the kit boxes could have warranted carbon dating.

The kits were mostly untouched. Unopened from the time they left the factory gate. This was sensible – anyone who is familiar with the Pandora myth would recognize the scenario. Slit that cello tape on the side and the world suffers…

I did buy some. I admit it. I confess it. I regret it. Oh Dear God. I bought a Jo-Han Dodge sedan. I pray daily for absolution.

They were at the end-point of a distribution system that tried to get back something from nothing. The wholesalers found themselves with unsaleable dreck and tried to footle the public into accepting it. The urban public scorned them, but the rural buyers had no choice. We bought Jo-Han cars and Pyro ships and just ignored our own misgivings. And sometimes we scored a moral victory in doing so – we built kits that have become crass legends and we built them with clean hearts. We were not taking the piss.

I scored a Pyro ROBERT E LEE and several Monogram rubber-powered balsa fighter plane kits that validate my position as an Olde-Tyme modeller. Plus some 50¢ balsa flyers that really flew. I am not ashamed – I did it when it was real and I succeeded.

No-one ask me about the Jetex incident…