eBay decided to give me a little nostalgia moment today.
This popped up in my recommendations, and I immediately recognized the box. I built this exact Monogram 1/72 B-52 when I was a kid.
I remember hand-painting that entire camouflage scheme with a brush. No airbrush, no fancy tools—just me, a paintbrush and what seemed at the time like an absolutely enormous airplane.
Seeing that old box art brought back a lot of good memories. I sure wish I still had the model. I honestly have no idea whatever happened to it. My guess is that at some point my mom probably decided a giant B-52 collecting dust had served its purpose and quietly made it disappear.
It’s funny how seeing one old model-kit box can instantly take you back 50 years.
Aww, bless! I’ve racked and stacked all but one of the model kits from my youth on a private wishlist on Scalemates. The only one I can’t quite put my finger on was a Fokker Dr.1 for which none of the scalemates kits are ringing any bells…
The point of the Zero in the Japanese group build was to reacquaint myself with aviation modelling before I reattempt the same Hasegawa 1/72 Kittyhawk Mk.1 I built when I was maybe 11 or 12. While the scale of that disaster was technically 1/72, today me would have wished I had more adult supervision…
Do you have a little Palpatine on your shoulder saying “Dew it”?
I had this same model that I built in 1968/1969 when I was in junior high. It had a little slide button that “started” the engines (a whirring sound). I also built the see-through Monogram P-51 that was mounted on a red pedestal that had two push buttons - one to start the propeller revolving and the other to raise and lower the landing gear. Recently saw it on Ebay.
Hey! I built that same Mustang, and I also built the Visible V8! The red pedestal and the buttons for the propeller and landing gear bring back some great memories.
I was feeling pretty nostalgic last night when I posted this, and now you’ve added another memory to it. It’s funny how hearing about one of these old kits can suddenly bring back things that have been sitting somewhere in the back of your head for 50 years. Now I’m going to have to go looking for pictures of that Mustang and see what else comes back!
Funny you should mention Testors. I was in Hobby Lobby yesterday and they had the original Testors paints in those little packs on a carousel, just like I remember them. It was very 1970s. Seeing that display brought back a whole bunch of memories.
And I discovered something else while I was there. Apparently everything on the model rack at Hobby Lobby is 40% off all the time now. It was mostly cars, with a more limited selection of aircraft, Gundam and a few other things, but if they happen to have a kit you want, 40% off makes for a pretty good deal.
Between the old Testors paint display and the model kits, it felt a little like I’d walked into a hobby shop from my childhood.
The first half of my life was spent in the UK, where I grew up on Airfix, Frog and Matchbox kits. It’s the latter that give me real nostalgia– the Roy Huxley box-art, the clear window on the back of the box, and the bizarre two and three-coloured sprues. First one I built was the AH-1G, my favourite was the Supermarine Walrus.
That’s interesting. Growing up in the UK, you had a completely different version of the same childhood hobby experience than I did here in the U.S.
I had no idea Matchbox kits came with two- or three-colored sprues. That’s pretty wild. I suppose the idea was that a kid could build the model without painting it and still end up with something colorful.
It’s funny how different the hobby could be depending on where you grew up, and yet we all seem to have the same kind of nostalgia for the kits we built as kids.
