Hi folks. Many years ago, when I was working for Revell, (Australia), I aquired several kits branded Advent. I gather they were actually Revell kits boxed under a different logo. From memory they included the Type VII U-boat, and the USS Olympia among others. (I think I still have these two in the stash somewhere). Has anyone heard of this brand before? No big deal, but I’m curious to know more about them.
Advent was a short lived Revell brand name for ‘economy’ model kits in the late 70s. They took things like older Revell kits past their prime, car kits without chrome plating to save costs, or having the licensing eliminated to make the kits as generic and cheap as possible to sell in mass market retailers. There were quite a few car kits and other old bits of Revell tooling using this branding. I’ve seen the 1/175 B-52 in Advent branding, for example. This is the tooling Atlantis Models now has. It only lasted a year or two in the late 70s. Advent boxings are considered somewhat rare by collectors because of the limited time Revell used the branding, but in general the kits are frequently not that expensive, or are readily available in their ordinary Revell forms.
Dodgy, read this link http://www.modelerjoe.net/shipmodellist.html#Advent
I belive I bought an Advent 1/144 Laker Airways DC-10. “Freddy Fought Fare” went the tagline. Gosh, that was a long time ago. Even then I stank at spraying gloss white!
Thanks for that MJames. The late 70’s would be around the time I was working for Revell and we only had a few in this boxing, so I’m guessing they were just samples as they never went on sale here. I was taken with the Olimpyia kit as I had not seen it before. Its probably terrible but I still intend to build it… One day…
Thanks for that. What a great link! I’ve also learnt to spell Olympia!
I’d rather not discuss spraying gloss white!
When I was a kid in the 70s, Advent was used to rebox many of the older Revell kits, but at a cheaper price.
I had the Russian Spy Trawler in the Advent box. I also had one of the Nam era big jets. Like the Vigiliante or Skywarrior, something gray over white scheme with US Navy markings.
The boxes looked “new and improved” but inside were very old kits.
In very small type on one of the long box sides color trim was ‘Advent, a division of Revell, Inc.’. The instructions did usually have the Advent logo on them, but were otherwise the same as the ones in the Revell boxings. Had a Revell ©️ date on them, as well.
I was working off of the notion that Aurora used at the time; the new little white box issues had improvements done to them over the older standard bix box kits that came with vacuformed bases.
Some Aurora kits had molded on zimmerit texture, others had additional detail molded on to the surfaces. But Revell kits were just straight reboxes.