The Little World

If you are a collector of mid-century modern furniture, or fashions, or cars you can pay a small fortune for junk. It’ll be up to you to repair and maintain it, and make yourself think you’re doing a good thing.

For the scale model builder, we can do the same thing, but with a bit of luck we don’t have to pay near as much and there is no maintenance – just building.

The 50’s plastic kit was a marvel of the time – the staple of many a happy childhood and youth, and a solid money earner for the toy industry. But most of the goods produced then were products of cruder technology and laxer standards than today. Our memories make them seem far better than we could have made them out of the box then.

If you want examples of this you can buy older kits on eBay or at swap meets. If you’re unsure of what you have, Scalemates will give you the rundown on the history. What you pay and what you get can be up to you, and what you do with it is another vexed question. Do you build a historical investment or do you preserve it in gobbling delight – banking on a big rise in the price.

You can also have the experience by Scalemating beforehand and selecting a kit from a modern eastern European maker who has bought very old moulds from dead factories. The box art may be new, the decals may be fresh, but the basic form of the goods may be 1957’s finest crude shape and fit. Revell are also known for re-popping and re-boxing kits that are creakingly ancient.

The most fun for retro is to just loosen your mental buttons and go out of your normal genre and scale. A lot of kits were moulded to ” box scales ” to get sales – and do not match anything else at all. If they are re-issued by some small factory they may be as rancid as they were when Eisenhower was president…or they may be just as good. The thing is don’t to be taken for a ride with a very costly re-issue.

Pay peanuts and feed your inner monkey. Sometimes you can score a real win – at least for nostalgia.

Note: Older kits can be painted with modern paints but as the club anorak will tell you, it will always be the wrong shade of green…