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Text of article on Aurora kits in the Boston Herald, Oct. 28, 98
"by Christopher Cox"
"She threw out your baseball cards, which would now be worth a small
fortune. Ditto for your comic books. Now there's even more guilt to lay
on Mom: Those dusty old models she tossed when you went off to college
are now valuable collectibles.
Something to think about in the outer limits of Hobby World, a place
inhabited by middle-aged guys who think nothing of shelling out hundreds
of dollars for plastic or resin figures of monsters, rock stars, even
porn starlets.
"It's an addiction," said Jeff Ottaviano, 36, who has 300 kits,
including an 8-foot long, $1,200 Godzilla model, in his Danvers
residence. "All our girlfriends are waiting to kill us. My house is no
longer my home; it's just a storage area for my kits."
Unlike most modelers, who are Car People, Plane People or Boat People,
Ottaviano specializes in human and inhuman characters. It was a craze
sparked by the Aurora model company in the early 1960s with the release
of some 50 monster kits, many inspired by Universal Pictures horror
films. If you were a young boy then, chances are your shelves held a
Mummy, WolfMan, or Salem Witch.
The fad faded as Aurora's core clientele grew up and discovered girls,
muscle cars and acid rock. The company went out of business in the early
1970s; most people believed its monster models were dead and buried,
too.
But in the late 1980s, figure models began popping up in hobby shops
and sci-fi conventions. This time around, they were "garage kits":
homemade, unlicensed designs that were cast and sold in limited
quantities. About the same time a Japanese company, Bilikin, began
producing licensed horror characters as well as the leads in such
destined-for-Mystery Science Theater 3000 flicks as "War of the Colossal
Beast."
"It was all we could get," said Paul Antonelli, 39, of Reading, who
has run The Character Shop, a store specializing in figure kits, for 10
years. "You have to fill the void somehow."
The monsters, albeit knockoffs and imports, clicked with baby boomers
searching for some glue-scented vestige of childhood. Guys who had taken
a break from the hobby - such as Charlie Kuphal, 44, of Lawrence -
realized Frankenstein still cast a long shadow over their lives.
"I jumped right back in," said Kuphal, who somehow assembled and
painted a Bilikin model with Japanese-only instructions. "I haven't
grown out of it yet."
Still, admitted Kuphal, he doesn't really talk about his kid-stuff
hobby. Only a trusted few friends are allowed into the room where he
keeps his models. The price of his kits is also a tightly held secret;
he tells his wife they all cost $30 apiece.
Kuphal usually pays four or five times that amount but raves about the
quality of the new stuff. The new Frankensteins, he said, aren't "just a
guy with a flat head."
"The sculptors are comparable or better than what you see in museums,"
Kuphal added. "They capture likenesses amazingly."
Take the likeness of porn actress Ashlyn Gere, the first release in a
new "Legends of Erotica" series by artist Jim Danforth, who established
his rep with dinosaurs. The rave review in Amazing Fig-
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MONSTER MODELS CRAWL BACK FROM DEAD
ure Modeler magazine: "Exceptionally well done...especially on the hair
and G-string underwear."
We're not in the Valley of Gwangi anymore.
The Ashlyn model ($150, plus $15 shipping) is licensed, but anyone
with artistic talent, a tub of Super Sculpy clay and a stack of
body-building magazines can fashion a garage kit.
The shelves of The Character Shop are packed with the stuff. Devilman,
a Japanese sci-fi hero, Travis Bickle, the psychopath played by Robert
DeNiro in "Taxi Driver." A werewolf Michael Jackson from his
"Thriller"
video.
In a niche market where garage kits cost at least $100 it was only a
matter of time before some genius brought back the old Aurora kits. That
entrepreneur was Thomas E. Lowe, 39, president of Playing Mantis, a
nostalgia-oriented South Bend, Ind., toy company.
The Aurora reissue was difficult; many of the original molds have
disappeared. So Lowe searched nationwide for MIB (mint, in-the-box) kits
that he could use to make new molds. It was a costly process: In the pre
speculation '60s, most kids actually built their models. For one rare
kit, an "odd rod" called Godzilla's G0-Kart, Lowe paid $2,000 for a
"built-up" - an already-assembled model. Quite a mark up over the
original kit, which cost 98 cents.
Lowe reissued several dozen Aurora classics, including the Addams
Family Haunted House, Bride of Frankenstein and Creature from the Black
Lagoon. His customers are the same guys who hung out at the
five-and-dime 30 years ago. Now, however, they pay an average of $20 for
an Aurora kit.
"I'm sure that 85 percent, minimum, of the people buying these are the
same people that had them when they were kids," said Antonelli. "That's
why they want them now...just to relive the time and have them on the
shelf like they used to."
But this time around, however, Mom has been warned.
From: "S.M.Clark"
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