Showcase your Aurora figure kits here!

[YoungestMonsterKid]

Huh?! They look just right to my eyes as a monster kid.

heh, thanks

[Hepcat]

Some interesting and useful information regarding the scarcity of the original Aurora monster model kits can be gleaned from this book published in 1996 by noted board game enthusiast and collector Rick Polizzi:



The book contains the following estimate of prices for boxed Aurora monster kits:

Godzilla's Go-Cart $2700
King Kong's Thronester $1600
Lost in Space (Diorama) $1400
Gigantic Frankenstein $1350
Lost in Space $900
The Munsters $875
Lost in Space - The Robot $700
The Bride of Frankenstein $650
The Addams Family Haunted House $600
The Chamber of Horrors Guillotine $600
Mummy's Chariot $480
Godzilla $450
King Kong $400
The Creature $400
The Forgotten Prisoner of Castel-Maré $400
Wolf Man's Wagon $400
Land of the Giants $375
Dracula's Dragster $325
Frankenstein's Flivver $325
Dracula $300
Wolf Man $300
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Anthony Quinn) $275
The Phantom of the Opera $275
Dr. Jekyll as Mr. Hyde $250
The Frog $250
The Mummy $250
The Witch $250
Frankenstein $225
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (redrawn face) $175
The Vampire $175
Customizing Monster Kit - Vulture & Mad Dog $140
Customizing Monster Kit $120

Yes we can argue from now until the cows come home about a current price list let alone one from 1996, but the fact is that Polizzi's estimates provide a very decent ranking of the relative scarcities of these kits.

[YoungestMonsterKid]

The Vampire $175

What? But I thought The Vampire (along with The Frog) was one of the most rare Aurora model kits just in general.

[djmadden99]

They are usually rare because they weren't that popular or good sellers when they were introduced. Thus they didn't stay in the catalogs long and had low production runs. The Go-Cart was stopped by a cease-and-desist order from Toho (twice actually, because they did it to Polar Lights as well.) The Gigantic Frankenstein was just too expensive at that time to sell many units and the Bride was hard to find because she was never reissued...possibly because the molds were misplaced.
The Castle Vampire and Frog kits still don't have much appeal except for die-hard collectors. Aurora had a lot of misses (Captain Action comes to mind) and with a lack of cross-over appeal to collectors of other genres (horror, superheroes, TV shows, spy stuff) the value goes down. For example, the Whoozits series were a very short run and can still be had fairly cheap MIB.

[Hepcat]

What? But I thought The Vampire (along with The Frog) was one of the most rare Aurora model kits just in general.

They are usually rare because they weren't that popular or good sellers when they were introduced. Thus they didn't stay in the catalogs long and had low production runs.

The Castle Vampire and Frog kits still don't have much appeal except for die-hard collectors.

That is correct. The Vampire and the Frog are both very tough model kits to find these days for the reasons given.

The reason for the comparatively "low" price of these two kits in 1996 was relatively low demand. Back in the 1990's they were a fairly low priority for most model kit collectors, and that included me! The top priorities for most Aurora monster model kit collectors (and builders) were the classic ones with James Bama artwork, particularly the original six.

The very largest and best organized figure kit dealer from the eighties was probably John F. Green. I remember that a Vampire kit appeared on John F. Green's offering sheets for a number of years at a relatively low price of $150(?) or so. I inquired about it but I passed on it when I learned that the box wasn't in very nice condition. I also thought that the box art was a bit strange.

After acquiring most of the classic Aurora monster model kits though, my attention shifted to some of the secondary ones such as the Vampire. Now it's one of my higher priorities in the kit area.

[Hepcat]

Aurora had a lot of misses (Captain Action comes to mind)....

It's strange that the Aurora Captain Action model kit wasn't very popular when released because the Captain Action line of Ideal action figures had such a tremendous impact on a generation of youngsters that it still remains among the most widely collected toy lines from the sixties.

Toys You Had Presents Captain Action

Collector's Club - Captain Action

Here's a good Captain Action ad from the pages of the DC comics that hit the newsstands in November 1966:



Captain Action is another excellent example of an Aurora kit in which I had no interest back in the eighties and nineties but would gladly add to my collection today!

[horrorhunter]

I was crazy about Captain Action when I was a kid and I had CA, Action Boy, Dr.Evil, The HQ Carrying Case, the Silver Streak car with garage, and several costumes and accessory kits, but I had zero interest in the kit. It just seemed unnecessary and repetitive if you already had the action figure which you could actually play with.

I sold my CA stuff back in the late '70s and used the money for comics. I wouldn't mind collecting CA if everything weren't so expensive these days, but since I focus mostly on monster stuff now I really don't miss it that much. There's only so much money and storage room. I did buy the Playing Mantis reissue Captain Action, Dr. Evil, Green Hornet, and Kato, when they came out new a few years ago. I have those displayed on closet shelves with my Sideshow 12" monsters.

[Hepcat]

There's only so much money and storage room.

So very true!

[YoungestMonsterKid]

When Captain America shoots his mighty laser!!!!!!!!

[YoungestMonsterKid]

also just looked up the Captain Action model

the problem is obvious in that he doesn't really have a cool base or anything, but I realize the reason why is because we don't really know anything about Captain Action other than the fact that I doubt kids kept him in his own suit as much

what they should have done was work out some kind of legal deal so he could have like parts of the costumes of the other characters with his base

[Wich2]

 >the Captain Action line of Ideal action figures had such a tremendous impact on a generation of youngsters<

Cap lived, and lives, large in our legends, Hep - but he never SOLD all that terrifically. In ANY of his incarnations.

[BijouBob8mm]

That five spaceship gift set seen on the cover of that model book posted up above by Hepcat is slated for reissue soon...retaining that original box art!

A few pages back there was talk of the JFK kit from Aurora.  For a while I'd been seeing these show up on a semi-regular basis on eBay.  I recently stumbled across an open but complete one at a local antique mall.  Been tempted to pick it up, but so far haven't.

[StyreneDude]

>the Captain Action line of Ideal action figures had such a tremendous impact on a generation of youngsters<

Cap lived, and lives, large in our legends, Hep - but he never SOLD all that terrifically. In ANY of his incarnations.

So true, and something the current managers never got either. They kept trying to make the Captain the main focus instead of just producing costume sets, which is what everyone kept asking for. They wasted tons of time , money, and resources slapping the CA logo on hats, mugs, T-shirts, a new comic series that was D.O.A and even an animated series. All flops.

[BijouBob8mm]

Ooops.  Meant to post this up above....

http://www.culttvmanshop.com/Spaceships-of-the-Future--classic-5-kit-set--reissue-from-LindbergRound-2--4395-PREORDER-RESERVATION-_p_3698.html

[Hepcat]

It's tough to overemphasize how crucial a role these Aurora monster model kits had in turning me into a monster enthusiast as a kid.

You see unlike most of my fellow baby boomers on this board, I wasn't exposed to any of the Universal monster flicks as a kid. First of all, we didn't acquire a TV until sometime in 1961. Secondly our TV only picked up the one local London station, CFPL, until we got cable in 1966. I don't remember CFPL televising any monster movies while I was still in grade school meaning that any monster movies that CFPL might have aired would have been well past my bedtime. And there was certainly no horror host on CFPL.

Moreover I just wasn't a big TV watcher as a kid anyway. I doubt that I even watched six hours of TV a week, and most of that was cartoons when I came home for lunch and right after school. Watching baseball games bored me and Hockey Night in Canada was telecast only on Saturday evenings and initially only the last part of the games was televised between 9:00 and 10:30. I'd typically fall asleep before the end of the game anyway. Regular CFL telecasts on CFPL didn't start until a couple of years later. I remember listening to radio broadcasts of CFL games on CKSL radio in 1961 and 1962 instead.

The only horror movies I can remember seeing prior to mid-1962 were the following:

The Day of the Triffids (at either the Twilight or Sunset drive-ins).
The Monolith Monsters (at either the Twilight or Sunset drive-ins).
The Curse of Frankenstein & Horror of Dracula (double feature at either the Capitol or Loews downtown theatres).
Target Earth (at a Saturday kids' matinee at our neighbourhood Hyland Theatre).
The Quatermass Xperiment (at a Saturday kids' matinee at our neighbourhood Hyland Theatre).



Now I'd been exposed to the fabled Topps You'll Die Laughing cards in the schoolyard in 1959 but I didn't have any at the time:





And the Leaf Spook Stories cards were the first non-sport cards I collected aggressively as a kid in early 1962:











I had the complete set of the first series and a bit of the second series.

But it was an expedition with my mother to the Kresge store on Dundas Street in downtown London one day in late 1962 that proved truly pivotal:



That's when I first encountered the Aurora Wolf Man model kit:



When the Creature then turned up with the others at the Kresge store in 1963 my already fevered longing for these kits shifted into overdrive:



I couldn't imagine my mother buying me one of these kits so I just didn't ask. DC then stoked the fire of my desires with these two ads on the back covers of their comics hitting the newsstands in September 1963 and January 1964 respectively:





As it turned out, before getting one of these kits I managed to score a super cool Creature-Wolf Man wallet by meeting my sales quota of Globe and Mail newspapers one Saturday morning in the spring of 1964:



It was the Mummy that would actually be the first Aurora kit I'd then acquire and build:



The Bride of Frankenstein was the second:



All great memories of course, but not one of them has anything to do with watching the classic Universal monster movies on TV!