Pardon the Hamster

Being forced to move and with no money, I have now sold all my Aurora model kits and all but two of my Polar Lights repops and originals.  I'm keeping the cold-cast porcelain Wolfman that Lisa Greco sent me, and the numbered Guillotine signed by the company owner Thomas Lowe.  All the rest...all my hard work, my award winners, my best paint jobs, all the evidence of my growth as a model builder...all gone.  My original Superboy and Captain America, gone.  My black-and-white Universal Monsters, gone.

Got a great price for them, anyway, and they went to a fellow modeler and an appreciative home.  Still, it was painful to see them go. 

I was a  kid in the Seventies when I found Aurora kits of the classic monsters at K-Mart.  These were the square-boxed glow kits, with the James Bama artwork vandalized to express that some of the parts were now being molded in glow-in-the-dark plastic.  There had been thirteen in the original line-up, with only The Bride of Frankenstein dropped for the glow series.  I built as many as I could before the line was discontinued.  I didn't know about painting them, and when I saw someone else had done so I went home and attempted it myself - using watercolors!

My Aurora collection grew when my mom signed me up for a "model of the month club", a way to get rid of overstock presumably.  They had models from any number of companies, and each month would surprise me with something random. 

As an adult I saw a picture in a magazine of the old Aurora Frankenstein.  Nostalgia, you see, eveything old was hot again.  Anyway, it was a fantastic paint job and I wanted to to do that too.  After a few months I brought all my old kits (in such poor condition) down from the attic, stripped them, took them apart, and did them all over again...starting with Frankenstein.  I did my best to recreate that wonderful paint job, and got nowhere near the mark.  What surprised me, though, was that I gave it my own touch...and was pretty damn good.  I'd never been that good, and had not been in practice for decades.  How did that happen?

About that time I discovered that a new company was cashing in on the nostalgia market and had bought the rights to a great many Aurora models (and the name Johnny Lightning, rival to Hot Wheels).  Playing Mantis began putting out the old kits under the new name Polar Lights.  They'd been at it for maybe a year when I stumbled across them.  They were using a daring new business model utlizing not just a web site but a message board for their customers to interact with each other and with the company itself.  The Polar Lights Bulletin Board would soon be featured in Inc. Magazine for its success and innovation.  I can proudly say that I spent some time as a volunteer moderator on that site under the screen name 'dreamer'.  The site was run by the company's public relations manager, the beloved Lisa Greco.

Doing those old kits allowed me to play around with color quite a bit.  I'd had some interesting ideas to experiment with, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.  For the Mummy I consulted the best color photos of Egypt and its ruins that the local library offered.  For Dracula, I painted the diorama of natural surroundings in dusty, dull earth tones to suggest death and decay, while the figure himself looked feverish in stark reds, whites, and blacks - the ideas to suggest he was a thing apart and thus not natural.  That idea didn't come communicate well.  PL's original Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera, OTOH, was a big success as I painted him and his organ (PLBB running joke) to suggest an old sepiatone photograph.  That one garnered me a Best in Class at Sci-Fan near Seattle.  For the matching King Kong and Godzilla builds, I did the Tokyo Terror in drab pastels to siulate the unrestored, faded look of the '60s movies, and did his Skull Island counterpart in rich earth tones highlighted by flecks of bright tropical colors.  Paired, but opposites.  It was the first time as an artist that I delved into color.  Now I'm beginning to experiment with it in two-dimensional painting.

There's a story about the demise of Playing Mantis under the new owners who bought it out, and how they treated their loyal community with disregard, the PLBB (and sister board for Johnny Lightning, the JLBB) with disdain, and the eventual dismantling of the company.   Inc. Magazine's praise had been lost on them.  They were bottom-liners.  There was also a lamentable disturbance in the force on the BB, which was not owned by PL but leased from a webmaster.  I ended up resigning as moderator to protest the treatment of the BB family, no longer allowed the freedom to do my job anyway.  People were looking to me to help them, protect them, and I couldn't having been essentially locked out by the guy with the keys.   I won't bother with all that, but I can say that Mr. Lowe eventually began again with a new company named Round Two.  He eventually won back the Polar Lights title and trademark and is now once again going strong.  I haven't checked to see if there's a new BB or online community.  Sadly, model kits had already become too expensive and I was priced out of the market.

They were good great times.  One of our running jokes was a phrase that one of our members coined, from a childhood memory involving his brother, the Aurora Guillotine, and a pet hamster that had been "condemned" by the French Revolution.   Thus is named this blog.

Someday I hope to do the complete line of those thirteen monsters again, in black and white.  And maybe this time I can keep them.  I had a grand scheme for the Salem Witch.

This is my third current blog.  The first is for reviews of movie and TV.  The second began as a chronicle of efforts to jumpstart my artistic endeavors, but as those efforts were undercut by a life slowly disintegrating the blog became something else: an art block blog with no art and a great many posts sounding off for the sake of my sanity.  Posts much like the ones I'm writing now, here.  So I've broken those off into their own blog.