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I am trying to remember what year it was. It was while I was in grade school, and at least a couple of years before we moved from Mountlake Terrace to Burlington, so I am going to take a stab and say it was 1975. My mom came home one day with a present for me: a plastic model of an Ankylosaurus. Of course I was totally into dinosaurs at the time (what kid isn't?), and I thought it was amazingly cool. I remember building that model, the smell of the glue as I pressed the pices together and globs of glue oozed out because I had used too much. I remember turning that dinosaur around and around in my hands, pleased that I had actually built it myself. In fact, I liked it so much that it wasn't long before my mom took me to the hobby store to pick out a new model to build.
I walked down the aisles of models at Che-Bar's Hobbies in Lynnwood, boggled by all of the cars, airplanes, tanks and ships. Row after row of models to choose from, a truly awesome sight. Bear in mind that in the mid 70's building models was a very popular passtime for kids, long before the advent of video games and such. These days it is virtually impossible to find that kind of selection anywhere. I eventually found the dinosaur kits and was trying to decide betweek a t-rex or a triceratops, and then I walked around to the next row to see if there were any others. I am not exagerrating when I say that what I beheld was like being greeted by a glorious light and a chorus of angels. I had stumbled upon the aisle of Aurora monster models. Frankenstien. The Wolf Man. The Mummy. The Phantom of the Opera. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I was absolutely awestruck. I walked out with the Hunchback kit, and thus began many happy years of being an Aurora freak.
Several years back I rekindled my love of Aurora when a mondo cool company called Polar Lights started reissuing some of the kits. I built several of them, and ammassed many more that are still sitting in a closet waiting to be built someday. (I have hopes that once my new eight foot long desktop is installed I will have a work surface to use for model building). For a while I had all of those boxes actually on display in my apartment. I even have a framed Guillotine kit, a signed and numbered edition straight from Polar Lights. That is going up on the wall in my office in the near future. How much of an Aurora geek am I? Enough that when I saw "The 40 Year Old Virgin" in the theater and it got to the scene when he was packaging up his collectibles to sell on ebay, I had thoughts in rapid succession: "That's an original Wolf-Man kit in the long box! Way cool! Oh, but it's a fake. The cellophane is all wrong for it to be real." I am simultaneously proud and embarrased to have been able to recognize all of that from a fleeting camera shot.
So this past Thursday when I picked up Ben from school, his physical therapist suggested that building models would be an excellent excercise for Ben. It would utilize his fine motor skills, and give hime a complex task to complete while following pictoral instructions. She had had him build a soap box derby car during his therapy session, and on the whole he seemed to enjoy it. Needless to say, I was thrilled at the idea of being able to share model building with my son. When we got home I perused my rather large pile of unbuilt kits, looking for a good starter kit. I discovered that I had four snap-together kits from The Planet of the Apes, and I thought those would be perfect. On Friday afternoon during my lunch break (Ben had no school Friday), I sat down with Ben and helped him build his first plastic model. He got a little bit frustrated in places, but on the whole he was very engaged and seemed to enoy it. And so, here it is, Ben with his first model:
On Saturday we built another one, and again he seemed to enjoy the process. Now I am keeping my eyes open for some dinosaur kits. As it turns out, that very same Ankylosaurus that started my modeling passion has been reissued by Revell and I would very much like to get one for Ben. He would recognize it as a character from Land Before Time. I would recognize it as a genuine passion handed down from father to son.
I walked down the aisles of models at Che-Bar's Hobbies in Lynnwood, boggled by all of the cars, airplanes, tanks and ships. Row after row of models to choose from, a truly awesome sight. Bear in mind that in the mid 70's building models was a very popular passtime for kids, long before the advent of video games and such. These days it is virtually impossible to find that kind of selection anywhere. I eventually found the dinosaur kits and was trying to decide betweek a t-rex or a triceratops, and then I walked around to the next row to see if there were any others. I am not exagerrating when I say that what I beheld was like being greeted by a glorious light and a chorus of angels. I had stumbled upon the aisle of Aurora monster models. Frankenstien. The Wolf Man. The Mummy. The Phantom of the Opera. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I was absolutely awestruck. I walked out with the Hunchback kit, and thus began many happy years of being an Aurora freak.
Several years back I rekindled my love of Aurora when a mondo cool company called Polar Lights started reissuing some of the kits. I built several of them, and ammassed many more that are still sitting in a closet waiting to be built someday. (I have hopes that once my new eight foot long desktop is installed I will have a work surface to use for model building). For a while I had all of those boxes actually on display in my apartment. I even have a framed Guillotine kit, a signed and numbered edition straight from Polar Lights. That is going up on the wall in my office in the near future. How much of an Aurora geek am I? Enough that when I saw "The 40 Year Old Virgin" in the theater and it got to the scene when he was packaging up his collectibles to sell on ebay, I had thoughts in rapid succession: "That's an original Wolf-Man kit in the long box! Way cool! Oh, but it's a fake. The cellophane is all wrong for it to be real." I am simultaneously proud and embarrased to have been able to recognize all of that from a fleeting camera shot.
So this past Thursday when I picked up Ben from school, his physical therapist suggested that building models would be an excellent excercise for Ben. It would utilize his fine motor skills, and give hime a complex task to complete while following pictoral instructions. She had had him build a soap box derby car during his therapy session, and on the whole he seemed to enjoy it. Needless to say, I was thrilled at the idea of being able to share model building with my son. When we got home I perused my rather large pile of unbuilt kits, looking for a good starter kit. I discovered that I had four snap-together kits from The Planet of the Apes, and I thought those would be perfect. On Friday afternoon during my lunch break (Ben had no school Friday), I sat down with Ben and helped him build his first plastic model. He got a little bit frustrated in places, but on the whole he was very engaged and seemed to enoy it. And so, here it is, Ben with his first model:
On Saturday we built another one, and again he seemed to enjoy the process. Now I am keeping my eyes open for some dinosaur kits. As it turns out, that very same Ankylosaurus that started my modeling passion has been reissued by Revell and I would very much like to get one for Ben. He would recognize it as a character from Land Before Time. I would recognize it as a genuine passion handed down from father to son.