MAN MADE MONSTERS: NOT JUST FOR KIDS Review By: Joe X Young
My earliest experience of Aurora model kits was when I was a small boy in the 1960s/70s. I first encountered them whilst flicking through a comic book, which particular comic has long since escaped my memory except that it was an American superhero one which ran a great many exotic advertisements for strange and fantastic things such as life-sized 7’ tall Frankenstein Monsters (which were 2-D cardboard cut-outs.), real working x-ray specs (which didn’t actually work), and a muscular depiction of Charles Atlas stating that I too could have a body like his. As things turned out, later in life I didn’t get the life-sized Frankenstein or the x-ray specs, neither did I get the Charles Atlas body, but something I did get was a Frankenstein’s Monster Aurora model kit which I must have had when I was around nine years old. In Birmingham, England back in the early 1970s these things were few and far between and for a basic gruesome little monster kid such as me it was fantastic. I did the best building/paint job that my little hands could handle. Sadly I don’t still have the kit, or even a picture of it, but the memory stayed with me. A few years later and that model kit was lost in a house move (so sad) but then one day I saw what was to become a fixation of mine for decades - ‘The Forgotten Prisoner of Castle Mare’. As the name suggests the figure is that of a skeleton dressed in rags, chained to a wall. Gloriously creepy and it totally ticked all of my boxes, so I just had to have it! However, that would mean going out and earning the money to buy it and justifying the purchase to my dad who had a totally different opinion of what I should be doing, and so he banned me from having it.
Page 78
