I had to take the kids to see Harry Potter on Friday and missed the meeting. How did it go?

I was at school myself. It would be interesting to know.

Ken and I were yabbering it up. I think there may have been some confusion about how to get into the armor room. I will try to clean up the intructions on that. Also the chat window needs to be bigger. Would have been hard to keep up with more than a few people sending messages.

Jim

It went good! Funny thing happens when you start talking models. I remembered a series of kits from back in the early seventies. A monster series with glow-in-the-dark pieces! Wolfman, Frankenstein...I'm trying to locate a picture or something from them. I think Aurora did them???

Ken,
I think those may have been re-released recently. Everything seems to be being re-released no matter how silly. I loved those kits. Do you remember the Giant Monsters too. I think one was a preying mantis (it was attacking a city street). I don't remember the others. Another series I loved was the Disney creatures from The Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean.

Jim

Polar Lights has reissued them in Aurora repro boxes. The molds are owned by Monogram (now Revell-Monogram) and were some of the molds that survived the great train wreck. They have reissued 3 of the superhero ones, as well as all of the monster ones (I have most of these reissues). Toys R Us sells a large 4 pack of all these monster kits for around $30.
http://www.playingmantis.com/pl/products_index.php

I can only hope that the 1/48 scale armor kits get rereleased again someday.

Holy smokes! Thats good news! I think I'll head on over there Monday and have a look see!
At the rate the companies are re-releasing models, I would imagine it wont be long before those 1/48th's are back in production!
Ahhh...the Wonderful World of Modeling!

The monster kits have been out for a while, they run from $4.90 to $24.99 depending on where you get them.
Monogram did release 2 of the armor kits, but it was over 20 yrs ago. It was the Panther and Sherman that came in a dio with a P-51D and FW-190 respectively.

Ahh....where did that 20 years go! grumble grumble....

While we are reminiscing about old kits. I am pretty sure I started building Monogram armor kits before upgrading to a hobby shop that carried Tamiya. I remember the first Tamiya kit I opened up. This was my reaction:

"My god...the figures aren't all one piece!"

hehe

And YES...I am finally an officer!

Jim

It's been longer than 20 yrs, I built those kits before I got into high school, and my 20 yr reunion is this summer. I do recall my first Tamiya kit, the M113A1 with the mounted troops. I built that after I had joined the National Guard and had actual vehicles as references. That'd be late 1983. Wow, almost 20 years since my first Tamiya kit!

I cut my armor teeth on the Aurora MBT70 and Monogram's M48 Patton. I still have remnants of the MBT70 (small kit stayed in a box badly built for 25+ yrs). Back when we rolled the kits on the rug making the tracks move and breaking roadwheels off, not that they turned with all that glue on them.

Ahhh, I remember my first. It was one of those "funny cars", or hot rods, some with a monster touch. My brothers and I built them. Mine was, as I recall, a car, whose body was a huge WWI German Army helmet. I think the box showed it as chrome. I painted mine black (probably because we didn't have silver) Another was a Hurst or something. My first Tamiya was the M3 Lee. I remember struggling with the sponson mounted cannon.

Somewhat OFF:OFF topic but I just remembered many of my early models met a fiery end. Went through somewhat of a pyromaniac phase when I discovered Testors plastic glue burns like napalm. Oh boy was my mom pissed at me. Black plastic ash everywhere.

Then there was the gasoline burning phase... ::sigh::

Jim

Sounds like most of our early model met the same fate. I remember building a few Italeri german models and a monogram Sherman. My nextdoor neighbor and I got a hold of some cherry bombs and had fun blowing them up. His family all shot skeet so most of the models we made ended up meeting 12 guage buckshot!! Though at the time I was only strong enough to shoot once. I think my shoulder still hurts from doing that kind of stuff.

Oh btw, I just wanted to let you know it is a privledge to be able have these dicussions with officers!!

Is it in the instruction sheet or what? Burning, shooting, cherry bombs, bottle rockets, its all been done. I started building when I was around 8. The friend who got me into it and teaching me all the neat things also tought me how to "PROPERLY DISPOSE" of those unwanted kits.

The dreaded BB gun or firecracker was the end of many models. I can remember the Monogram kit Destroyer Ramsey being set ablaze and floated out into the creek, coming under a hail of fire from the Daisy Red Rider. At least when we were children, this was about the worst thing we did. Look at what goes on today. Some of those kids need to build a kit and then blow it up.