Since I moved to Utah, I’ve found a total of three good hobby shops within drivable range. (For the purposes of this discussion, a “hobby shop” is defined as a store with a lot of plastic model kits, but not a hugenormous chain store like “Michaels” and “Hobby Lobby.”) One in Logan, one in Riverdale, one in Sandy.
The Logan hobby shop closed up about a month ago.
The Riverdale shop had its last day today.
The Sandy shop is still there, but I always seem to overhear people talking about it evaporating as well.
I hear this sort of thing is not uncommon. Partially this is due to the economy being sucko. Partially it’s due to kids not being as interested in building models as they are in playing Xbox (get off my lawn!). Partially its due to the Internet. And a lot of it is due to the hobby just being damned expensive.
Compared to the kits that were available when I was a kid, thirty fricken’ years ago, the current crop of kits are technologically advanced, extremely detailed and fabulously well engineered. They are also extremely expensive. Back In The Day, I could buy a decent model kit of an F-14, say, for three to five bucks. Today’s F-14 kit would easily run nearly ten times as much. A check on Squadron.com shows prices for a 1/72 F-14 model running from $18 to more than fifty damned dollars, with most about $30.
Now, I know there’s this thing called “inflation,” but it doesn’t even come close to explaining the price increase. Using this inflation calculator, three bucks in 1980 money works out to $7.92 in today’s money.
There is another source of trouble here: lawyers. Behold one particular license agreement: license.txt There was a time when a model kit company that wanted to make a model of an aircraft would ask the designing company about it, and the company would dump drawings on them to make sure they did it right. Now the companies have to jump through a whole lot of expensive legal hoops. And what’s the result? The same in scale aerospace as real aerospace: American companies are fading away, while the Chinese and Russians are going full speed ahead. It should thus come as no surprise that the manufacturer of the only 1/144 scale Boeing 787 that I’m aware of is not Monogram, or Testors, or Revell, or any other American model company… it’s Zvezda Models from Russia.
So, what do we have here. We have a model & toy culture that is seriously depleted as far as affordable replicas of actual aircraft. We have a space program that’s been dull as dishwater for decades, and has just had what remained of its harbles lopped off. We have more lawyers than engineers being produced. We have exceedingly few references to aerospace in popular music, and those that we do get (“Rocketman,” “Silent Satellite,” “Major Tom,” etc.) are all friggen’ depressing. We have a vast array of aerospace companies being merged into a very small number of monolithic, risk-averse megacorps.
It’s not just a matter of how bad things are now… but also the cultural shifts indicated by that lack of aerospace toys and models for kids means that fewer kids will be inspired to become aerospace engineers and the like. Anybody here really going to be surprised if America ceases to be relevant in the field of aerospace within the next generation?
21 Responses to “Sic Transit Hobby Shops”
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I noticed the same thing here in Illinois,Scott. The well known? hobby
shops around here have even dropped a lot of their inventory as well
thanks to our wonderful economy and yes they have their foreign
made models here too but they have a knack for coming up with some
unusual ones however which makes it kind of cool like the Fiesler 199
model of a modified Me-109 that used a third temporary wheel right
behind the pilot seat to take off with a 500 pound bomb and then drop it off with a small parachute in tow but I just don’t remember the exact
name of the aircraft at this moment. I was a hobby shop cruiser when I was younger myself.
The price of Japanese models in particular has gone right through the roof.
A while back, I saw an ad for a 1/72 scale model Tiger II tank that was around $30.00…when I was a kid, I could have gotten two Tamiya 1/35th scale Tiger II tanks for that much.
In fact, the high quality of today’s kits might be working against them; when I was a kid, I started building cheap or small models, then progressed onto more detailed and expensive ones once I had gotten the basic skills down.
There aren’t many “entry level” kits around anymore, and God help the eight-year-old who runs into something with photo-etched parts on it, as it will put him off on building models right at the start.
Lindberg still makes a lot of their old line of kits at pretty reasonable prices, and that’s probably as good a place as any for a future modeler to start, as they aren’t overly challenging to build:
http://www.lindberg-models.com/
For me, they are also a real nostalgia trip, as I always liked their kits better than the Aurora ones as a kid.
I built lots of Aurora kits as a kid, in the 60s. Lindberg kit weren’t sold in the same variety at the hobby stores here.
As best I can tell, Richmond, Virgina, has only two real hobby stores. The best one vanished about five years ago.
Every time I think about building a model I back away because of the cost. I’m not going to spend $35 for a chance to satisfy some idle curiosity. When I was a teen, I gave some thought to buying four P-40s and a B-17 so I could build a XB-40; would that be done for less than $100 now? I think I could have done it for $10 in 1966.
Yes, the level of complexity puts off the kids. My son never got interested in the 90s because there weren’t any simple kids on which he could learn technique.
Also, the kits fall into narrow ranges. One summer I bought a simple kit of the XP-50, for example, for 98 cents. To get an XP-50 now would cost a lot more and would require a lot more time to “get it right.” But I can find many kits of specific tanks and airplanes that everyone knows well.
Aurora kits filled a need. So did Revell’s 49ers and Hawk’s 50-cent delights. (I’d still love to build the Hawk V-1 and Baka bomb kits.)
Thanks for the inflation calculator. It tells me that the $2.25/hour I was paid on my first job — which paid for all sorts of neat models — gave me the same power as $14.66 has today.
Ah, the cultural shifts …
What do you think the kids will aspire to me in the next generation? What is indicated by the directions of toys, books, movies, and teaching?
My suspicion is that the kids will be closet perverts who fantasize about doing violence, while they expect to be employed as teachers, social workers, nurses, and police.
Did you ever build the Aurora Me-109? That would be my candidate for most inaccurate model ever made. The fact that it as molded in metallic red plastic didn’t help either. Hideous little thing covered with giant rivets.
I saw one of those low price Entex XP-50 kits also, but never bought it.
Lindberg is reissuing the old Hawk Ohka:
http://www.ehobbies.com/lnd70548.html
No news if they will also do the V-1.
If you Keep an eye on eBay, you might be able to get the Testors reissue of the dual kit at a pretty reasonable price.
There’s one on there now with $12.95 being bid for it.
Most Aurora kits had rivets from Hell. The kid next door built the Bf109 kit. I took one look at it and backed away. I think I built only one P-38, and I converted a P-40 into the submarine in the Rick Brant book “The Phantom Shark.” Remember that the Aurora P-51 had an engine one could see through side panels that popped off? Somewhere in storage I have almost all of the instruction sheets from everything I ever built.
Thanks, but I think I’ll pass on getting back into model building. I already have a Titanic kit I was supposed to finish about ten years ago. I just don’t have a place to build, in this house.
One of the things I recognized only recently was that my interest in models was a re-direction of my interest in the real thing. No one would take me to touch real airplanes (or submarines), so I tried to learn how it all worked from models. That had a downside: I encouraged a cousin who was building pipe rockets a bit too much, and he blew up the den one Saturday morning. He was on his way to building huge rockets for me because I was going to launch myself from my back yard to the junior high school football field, in my Erector-set version of a Ba349. Oh, to be 11 again!
Scott,
All I have here in Hell Paso is Hal’s Hobby Shop. Miraculously, they are still around somehow. But I know you feel about this issue altogether. It’s sad really. In the US, everything aerospace-related is shit now. It sucks.
The Me-109 was one of the earliest Aurora kits, and believe me, it showed.
The thing wasn’t even a particular type of Bf-109, having features on it that went everywhere from the Bf-109C to Bf-109F version.
Their P-51 always hit me as odd, like they were trying to radically shift their approach to models as their competitors pulled ahead of them in level of detail.
All the old Aurora catalogs are on-line over here BTW:
http://www.majormattmason.net/aurora/catalogs.htm
I didn’t realize until fairly recently how plastic models got started; originally, some “carve it yourself” wooden display model manufacturers started adding plastic detail parts to their kits, and as time went on, more and more plastic parts were added till the kits lost all the wood and became all plastic. Monogram goes clean back into the wooden model period, and made wooden models with those sort of detail parts.
I used to have a wooden Strombecker kit of the Douglas Skyrocket which had a solid molded canopy bulge made from transparent plastic.
You can check out the old plastic-wood hybrid kits on this website:
http://www.philsaeronauticalstuff.com/oldmodels/oldmodels.html
…as well as the earliest all-plastic ones.
Thanks for the links, Pat. Most of that stuff was before me. I did build some of the Aurora kits. I will never forget the beautiful B-29 and P-61 kits: they were huge, and they made me think of modifying them. Had I had access to a similarly-scaled XS-1, I’d have made the appropriate modifications.
How can we attract the attention of kids who are just now figuring out what interests them? A friend of mine teaches 4th grade, and she reports that kids that age are just starting to choose their interests. I know I really got started on specifics in middle school (back when it was “junior high school”).
There’s a chap in Vermont who has his shop students in his high school build a hovercraft each year. How about a static replica X-1 or LEM?
There aren’t many “entry level” kits around anymore, and God help the eight-year-old who runs into something with photo-etched parts on it, as it will put him off on building models right at the start.
Funny, at the Hobbytown USA near me, I see bagged “quick build” prepainted models sell for under 10 bucks each, and non-painted smaller-scale Revell/Monogram “minikits” go for under 5 bucks. The level of detail is about what you’d expect on the latter, but they’re a great bargain if you’re looking to get your own age-appropriate (the parts are very small) kid into the hobby. That’s the whole reason most of the American model-makers have split their kits into 2 or 3 “challenge levels” or what have you, so you have the snap-together build-in-2-hours kits on one end (to get kids interested) all the way up to photo-etched metal parts and cast-iron autobodied kits on the far end of the scale.
Another source to look is at some of the “big box” stores. I know Wal-Mart doesn’t carry model kits, but a similar midwestern chain called Meijer has some of each skill level, up to the last several times I’ve been in one.
Like everything else, plastic modeling will be a hobby that had a beginning, rise, golden age, decline, and end…. to be replaced by something else.
The handwriting was on the wall about the time the prepainted fully assembled aircraft and tank replicas arrived from their Chinese factories at far lower prices than detailed models in the same scale could be purchased at, and now even those are dwindling away.
I kind of like the hovercraft idea, as at least that’s something someone can get some use out of, unlike a replica static aircraft.
Maybe build-it-yourself robots will be the next big hobby craze, made up of Erector Set like modular components.
One thing that hasn’t been brought up in this discussion yet is the blighting effect long and unpopular wars have on military model sales.
Vietnam cut so badly into sales of military themed models by Revell and Monogram that they went off in bizarre directions in an attempt to reclaim their market share, and this is one of my favorite examples of that, the 1959 Revell Helios lunar spacecraft reissued as a Hippie Rocketship in 1968:
http://www.ninfinger.org/models/kitplans/revellh1851.html
Dig it, man! It’s going to be one way-cool trip! 😉
1958 Time Magazine article about Revell and the Helios model:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,810775,00.html
Scott;
If the shop in Riverdale was one that started with a “D” in the name I’m not all that surprised they had “issues”. I was there asking some questions on building an RC model for someone who was contemplating building an aircraft under the new “sports” plane catagory and was wondering on scaling up (and down) model building techniques.
An older gentleman had come in to look at the model kits and when he inquired about easier to build “snap-tite” type models those at the counter simply laughed at him and told him to “go-to-HobbyLobby” if he didn’t want to build a REAL model!
He left more than a little angry, I left shorty after and while I was already more than a little upset at the condisending attitude of those at the store I was more than a BIT put-out because the majority of the hecklers were “customers” who were simply hanging around the store while the owner and his counter-monkey simply looked on through the whole affair and made no effort to help either myself or the other gentleman.
Turning YOUR hobby into a business is never easy, less so if the overall mentality of the “business” is something you simply run so you and your friends can “hang-around” and talk hobby-shop.
As to Hobbystores in the Area, have you been to End Zone in Roy? (Clearfield? I’ll have to look up the address) The owner has been backing off of late on his “quest” to carry EVERYTHING “hobby-ish” and getting back to business of actually supplying what people want. I’m hopeful he’s managed to make the change in time, but he’s currently got a semi-good stock of model kits of various types.
I will have to check again but there was a small store near the mall just off Hill Field Rd.
Randy
Thanks for the Revell links, Pat. I never saw that kit in any of its incarnations.
The thing that’s frustrating about hovercraft is that they’re not street legal and — there are lots of complaints about this –they’re damn near uninsurable. As a result of these two aspects of the experience, they’re seen as less-than-serious vehicles. A static replica of a spaceship is seen by kids as more “real.”
Didn’t Edmund Scientific try to market a modular robot kit, a decade or so ago? It’s a good idea that may have simply been overlooked.
Whatever they do, kids need to see devices that do stuff bigger than the kids see in daily life. They need to know that their world can be larger than the classroom or the Xbox.
I only saw it in the Solaris version and bought it out of curiosity when I was young. It’s actually a very fun kit and fairly well detailed.
The other reissue was the space pursuit set:
http://www.ninfinger.org/models/kitplans/revellh1850.html
Made up of the old Convair Space Shuttlecraft and top section of the Revell XSL-01 Moon Rocket design, and that was fun to build also.
I’ve seen several build-it-yourself robot kits, but the finished robots don’t do anything useful. Sticking one together that could say do the dishes, walk the dog, or mow the lawn would be fun and actually perform some useful function when finished. Of course that would probably kick it out of the price range of a hobby like model building, but a lot of ham radio enthusiasts have several thousand dollars that they have incrementally invested in their radio equipment and antenna arrays, so maybe it’s possible. Roombas and the other robotic vacuum cleaners aren’t all that expensive and they do useful work…and became the first widespread use of domestic robots, like promised in golden age science fiction.
They also don’t have those pesky Three Laws Of Robotics incorporated into them, so maybe a cunning student could redesign one to do other things as well to expand his horizons beyond his classroom or Xbox…say electrocute his teacher with a giant capacitor strapped to the front, or pull down girl’s panties as it zoomed under their skirts, its upward facing camera system live-linked to the internet.
The plastic model industry really has suffered from a major cultural shift that’s been going on for 30 years or more. The old business model that made AMT and Revell-Monogram so successful was to push a large volume of kits (especially car kits) in the major retailers and toy stores. But young people don’t build models anymore. The industry has adjusted to selling a much smaller volume of higher-priced kits to a much smaller market: adults who built plastic models back when they were cold-war kids.
Today’s kits are amazing in their level of detailing because that’s what the older market wants, but I’m sure the prices could come down if the hobby expanded its ranks. On top of that, model companies have new expenses to deal with. The aerospace giants and auto companies now charge licensing fees for models of their products. This gets a bit ridiculous when Boeing wants fees for models of the P-51 Mustang, developed 70 years ago by NAA. Additionally, EPA regulations ensure that the decals will never be printed in the US; this market has been completely ceded to Italy and Mexico due to their relaxed regulations on the decal-printing process.
AMT used to rule the model car market; they broke down the car into sub-components like chassis and engine, put those of separate parts trees, and could keep right up with Detroit by just making a new body and interior, selecting the wheels from all their molds of those, and sticking it on one of their existing engine-chassis combos.
The only downside is that they used to mold everything in white, so you were going to end up painting all the car components other than the chrome parts; fine for big time car modeler fans, but daunting for someone who primarily did other types of models.
Although I only rarely did car models, I had a ball with this giant Lindberg dragster kit back in the 1970’s: http://www.lindberg-models.com/land_model73048.html
Which is so large scale that superdetailing it is a piece of cake.
They have now added chrome plating to it, the lack of which was the only shortcoming of the original kit.
You airbrush some transparent yellow, brown, and blue over those exhaust pipes to simulate heat discoloration, stick in a oil stain here and there, and that thing will knock your eyes out.
They don’t show it on the photos, but the version I had also included a driver, another great target for some superdetailing.
Lindberg apparently also has the right to the old Hawk molds, so maybe we will see that great kit of the cutaway space station based on the Atlas ICBM coming back.
Scott, did you have one of those as a kid? I had around three or four of those over the years.
> If the shop in Riverdale was one that started with a “D” in the name I’m not all that surprised they had “issues”
That’s the (former) one. But I never encountered anything like what you described there.
> End Zone in Roy
Never even heard of it. Thanks for the heads-up.
Not a lot of folks HAVE heard of End-Zone it seems beyond the crowd that have frequented the store since it was on Antelope… (and a LOT smaller)
Oh there is also an RC/Hobby shop in Layton. Frequency RC in the strip-mall north of the mall itself. Not many models but they say they will order anything you want :o)
Randy
I wrote:
“Roombas and the other robotic vacuum cleaners aren’t all that expensive and they do useful work…and became the first widespread use of domestic robots, like promised in golden age science fiction.
They also don’t have those pesky Three Laws Of Robotics incorporated into them, so maybe a cunning student could redesign one to do other things as well to expand his horizons beyond his classroom or Xbox…say electrocute his teacher with a giant capacitor strapped to the front”
That “cunning student” apparently being iRobot, builder of the Roomba, who just swung a deal to stick TASERs on their robots:
http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=86&id=344