Moebius Models and the Aurora Revival

Moebius Models’ reissues of Aurora favorites bring back fond childhood memories

As kids growing up in Oregon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, my older brother and I were enraptured by the monster movies we’d see on TV, with spooky characters like the Wolfman, the Mummy, Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, Godzilla, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Sprawled on the floor in front of our family’s black-and-white TV, lying on our stomachs with our ankles in the air, we’d be enthralled by these creepy tales for hours on end.

And like many boys of that era, my brother was also an avid builder of model kits, and of course, I idolized him and loved to look at his models. (He’d hit me if I touched them, so I learned pretty fast that while admiring them was okay, they were strictly hands-off.)

Some of his favorite model kits were the Monster Scenes from Aurora. They were easy to build, since you simply snapped them together–no messing around with that horrid smelly model-kit glue (a cause of much concern among parents of the era, as I recall)–and they were easy to paint with those strange Testors enamels which made everything they were applied to shiny and glossy.

Of course, his mania for these small-scale model kits was tempered by the fact that Mom refused to allow him to own too many of them. Like many adults of that time period, she was concerned that their horrific subject matter would have a deleterious effect on his moral growth. That was why my brother was never able to add “The Victim” to his model lineup–Mom felt that a model kit of a scantily-clad woman in distress was a bit too mature for him. She had similar objections to “The Hanging Cage” and “Vampirella,” but he was permitted to purchase and build “Dracula” and “Frankenstein,” along with Aurora’s earlier releases of “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

My brother had a friend at the time–you know, one of those kids that you hang around with but your parents disapprove of just a little bit.  His friend had some of the creepier Aurora kits, such as the aforementioned “Hanging Cage” and the grotesque “Dr. Deadly,” as well as their larger-scale “Guillotine.”  Plainly my brother’s friend was a kid on the way to a ruinous life!

And I, as a dinosaur-crazed kid back in the days before “Jurassic Park,” was permitted to own a few examples from Aurora’s similarly-scaled Prehistoric Scenes line, notably the pteranodon (which Aurora called “Flying Reptile”) and the “Sail Back Reptile,” otherwise known as a dimetrodon. My brother had the “Neanderthal Man” and the “Tar Pit,” too, both of which blended in remarkably well with the monsters.

I hadn’t thought about these nifty little models in years–and then last week, we got several of Moebius Models’ re-releases of them here in stock at HLJ.  I held the box from Moebius Models’ fantastically detailed re-release of the Aurora “Monsters of the Movies”swimming “Creature from the Black Lagoon” in my hands and looked at that great cover art, and was once again plunged back to the relatively carefree days of my childhood, watching great old movies on TV and helping my brother pick out the best place in his room to display his prized monster models. What a great feeling!  I might just have to send my brother a copy of the Vampirella model–he’s old enough now to handle this saucy vampiric dame, I think.

If you’d like to return to those simpler times, we’ve got a fine selection of Aurora re-releases of these classic Aurora model kits, as well as kits of vehicles from the 1960s TV shows “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” and “Lost in Space.” Atlantis Models, Polar Lights, Pegasus, and Revell have also re-released some wonderful kits from that era, plus new suff, too. Check ‘em all out by clicking the links below!

Moebius Models

Polar Lights

Atlantis Models

Revell