Modeling Now and Then
|
 |
There are Toys…and then there are ‘Toys’…
Isn't this a great P-40?
The colors are good, the insignia are sharp, the details are fine, and
the shark mouths and machine gun batteries are menacing enough for the
most furious strafing attacks over an Army Man set, deployed over old
rugs and towels laid out over the family room floor…
 If
you’ve been near a toy or department store lately, you’ll
recognize this plane as modern, an import from China. Some things nowadays
are far better than they were in the “Good Old Days”. I'm
often seriously impressed with how good many toys have become, compared
to their counterparts we had as kids. Look at the ‘kit’ this
came from. Just enough detail, everything prepainted and marked, and only
a few parts to snap together and hold with a few screws. What I had back
then was made in the good ol’ U.S. of A…in Lancaster, Pennsylvania…a
clunky old die-cast metal Hubley. It scarcely compares, except for one
great virtue: it was next-to indestructible!
 The
Hubley P-40, in fact, survived not just my playtime with it, but my two
younger brothers, also…and still ended up intact enough to go to
the Goodwill or Toys for Tots or whatever charity Mother gave it away
to. I shouldn’t be at all surprised to find it’s pictured
right here from today’s eBay auctions… after all, somebody
ended up with it!
 Its
‘replacement’ came in the mid-60s: the Monogram ‘Forty-Niner’
(after the price) P-40 plastic kit. Not as durable as the Hubley, it didn’t
make it to modern times, but here's a not-so-old reissue, courtesy of
Skyway Hobby Shop.
Permit a brief side trip into another aspect of my life back then,
compared to now. I was a bachelor for the last three weeks, as my wife
flew to New York City to care for new twin granddaughters. While she was
gone, there was nothing to prevent me from indulging in guilty pleasures
such as watching old Japanese monster movies and eating take-out pizza,
things we never do when she's home. So I reverted to the 60s for an evening…
Back then, I was a devoted ‘Rocky and Bullwinkle’ fan.
But if you missed an episode, too bad. As I said, some things are better
now: with VCRs and TiVo and recordable media, you can catch up on all
the old shows you missed! Those old television serials are not just available
on DVDs, but have been carefully restored to better-than-new condition.
Wonder of wonders—they’re in COLOR! I never watched Rocky
and Bullwinkle in color back then. All those scenes I remember in black-and-white
are startlingly fresh in color, such as the introductory skit where Bullwinkle
frantically hauls the water tub back and forth, trying to save Rocky from
falling to his doom off the high dive, or the short surrealistic sequence
where they fall into a stormy cataclysm but blossom unharmed into the
sunshine with a whole field of daisies.
Anyway, for the first time ever, I watched how the whole adventure
of Bullwinkle’s rocket fuel came out. Recall his attempt to make
his aunt’s Chocolate Pan Dowdy blasted him and Rocky to the Moon.
(Tim Nelson and you other modelers of vehicles of the early Space Age:
do your collections include Rocky and Bullwinkle’s STOVE?)
If you've read this far—if you read this column at all—you’ll
recognize the name of their guest star, Mr. Peabody. Let's pretend—a
great childhood game!—let’s pretend I persuaded Mr. Peabody
to let me use the Way-Back Machine to further the education of my past
self. After all, I was about the same age, and almost as nerdly, as his
own boy, Sherman. I’d take this fine modern P-40 kit back: “Look,
Scott-of-my-Past. See how much better this P-40 is than the one you're
putting together from that Monogram kit? It's a way-better job than anything
you can do, with your total ineptness at gluing and painting and applying
decals. Wouldn't you rather have something like this? Why not give back
Father's X-Acto knife and Mother’s set of Testors’ Enamels,
and just start collecting these easy-to-assemble prefinished models? This
P-40’s only one of many… you can have a whole air force full
of warplanes!”
What would I have replied at age 14? What would you readers out there
have done? Could we have been turned aside from our lifelong hobby, and
become more like toy collectors?
 There's
no way to really try this experiment, but I know myself pretty well, and
think that although I certainly would have admired this fine P-40, I would
still have realized that building plastic model airplane kits—bad
though I was at it—was a worthwhile hobby, and not at all the same
thing as merely screwing together a handful of parts some factory worker,
who cared nothing whatever about aviation history, had prepainted and
pre-marked with automatic machinery. Having outgrown the old Hubley P-40,
I would have realized that I’d outgrow this modern replacement,
fine though it is. It’s really the same thing…just a toy,
not a challenge and craft. Toy collecting is not plastic kit modeling,
then or now. I really believe I would have accepted back then the philosophy
we uphold now:
Build what you want, the way you want to, and above all have fun!
|
|
