Nice collection! Over the years I’ve often had more waiting to build than what was finished. My collecting slowed down a bunch about 10 years ago as I finally had most of everything I always liked, and the priority has always been working on the real truck first and models as a lower priority. Now that the truck is essentially finished, I’m migrating back to toys again! So here’s a rather lengthy response to a short question.
I’m a baby boomer and grew up during what I consider the golden age of plastic model building. About 1958-1964 were the absolute best years in my opinion. Before that time very little was available, and afterward Vietnam and other social distractions took center stage taking young guys away from modeling.
The first full size model I obtained (1/24–1/25 scale) was in about 1956-57. I have no idea what brand it was, and I don’t think the car represented an actual vehicle but it looked kind of like a 55-56 Chevy. It was black and came with chrome trim for the body sides. All I remember of it was that after the trim was glued to the sides, it looked like a car with chrome tree sprue stuck all over it and I quickly lost interest.
Next came the Highway Pioneers by Revell. I bought several of these over the years:
At that time I think they started out around 49 cents and grew to around 69 cents, so if I gave up enough candy I could afford to buy one myself. Car dealerships usually had walls of “promo” models available in every model and paint scheme offered, but I had no connections to obtain any of these.
Everything changed in 1958 when AMT released their first 3 in 1 kits. The first one I ever got was the 1959 Chevy convertible. The kit looked like this, but my rendition certainly did not:
Being 10 or 11 years old with limited car styling and engineering skills under my belt, I smashed the wheels trying to drive them on the heavy splined axles, and put “everything” on the car that came in the kit – skirts, roll bar, racing decals, louvers, scoops, lake pipes, etc. I also used tons of glue to make sure the parts wouldn’t fall off! Talk about a glue bomb.
The next big evolutionary step was the Trophy Series kits from AMT. The marketing guys at AMT were smart, they showed stuff on the box art that couldn’t be built without buying more than one type of kit. They also made all of the engines interchange, so you could easily swap in Buick, Olds, Chevy, Chrysler, Lincoln or any other engine they included in a kit. It was brilliant thinking, and hooked a lot of kids in my age bracket into mechanically customizing their models. There were also no trademark infringement issues back then, so engines were identified as what they actually represented. It wasn’t until perhaps the 1980’s that manufacturers threatened the model producers, and made them identify the engine generically as “flathead” or “overhead valve engine” instead of what it actually was.
So back to history - the first release of the Trophy Series was the 1932 Ford roadster:
They couldn’t keep up with production and soon released the 1932 Ford 5 window coupe which also sold by the car load:
The 40 Ford coupe (my all-time favorite model) came next:
The 39/40 Ford sedan, 49 Ford coupe, 36 Ford chopped coupe/roadster, and Model T double kit followed soon after:
The best part being all of these first production models were molded in black (my favorite color) so paint wasn’t needed. Within a year or so they started molding in gray, blue, or white and I quickly lost interest and spent years searching for the older black kits.
Monogram was also around, and made beautiful models (actually much more accurate than AMT). They were molded in whatever colors were depicted on the box. But they could only be made stock and were in what was an oddball scale at the time – 1/24th. The Black Widow was my favorite:
