This was actually assembled and painted at the Aurora factory, and then shipped built up to hobby stores.
I had an epic day last Wednesday, what I thought would be a boring trip to a storage unit turned out to be an amazing discovery! When I found the records and remnants of my father's 1970s toy distribution business including these funky signs he used to use. I have been looking for one of these for years.
My dad's company provided toys and novelties to smaller chain stores (especially Mac's Milk locations) across Ontario and provided them with mostly rack toys and closeouts. While I haven't unearthed any physical toys (yet), I sure have some groovy artifacts in the many invoices and pay ables he had, VPS dealt with all the big names and carried all the Brands, Mego, AHI, Larami, Barton, Aurora, Parker Brothers, it's pretty extensive, here are a couple of examples:
This cool invoice from Grand Toys (distributor for Azrak Hamway and later Mego) shows an order of 576 Batman parachute figure figures, I'm salivating, I don't own one now! Looking at how much AHI Superhero stuff VPS carried, it's not surprising I'm totally obsessed with it now.
This invoice from Aurora shows a big order for the classic comic scenes kits, these are really happy memories for me. I remember putting every single one of these together as a kid and playing with them as if they were action figures.
I've got tons of this stuff and I've never been happier to go through a pile of boring old company records before!
A tradition in my house every October is Monster Model day, where I get the kids together and we paint a couple of Aurora reissues and use them as our centerpiece for the month. Above is last years, I had a lot of trouble finding kits locally so I actually bought this years kits when I first saw them in July and I'm glad I did, they sold out quick!
This year I chose these Revell reissues of Dracula and Frankenstein, my daughter actually hugged her Dracula kit box when she saw it, a big hit. The deal is, I do the gluing, they do the painting, occasionally helping with tough stuff like the eyes.
I've put together Frankenstein before and it's amazing that the molds are still holding up! My compaints are the same as they were 16 years ago when I put together the Illuminators versions, it's tough to make the guy stand properly and I had issues with the jacket but it was no big deal.
Dracula's headsculpt looks different somehow but I really ended up liking it, I'd love it if it ended up on an action figure again the way AHI did them.
Viola! Not bad considering they're four and seven, they even learned the magic of "Dry brushing" from their dad. What I found most interesting was the amount of blood the kids put on the characters, I guess some things never change. Next year I think we'll do the creech and wolfman or maybe the phantom..
For Maxx Fx Fans, here is a 1989 article (click on it for a larger read) about the problems Matchbox encountered when they attempted to market Freddy Kruger toys to children. This was more based on the cuddly talking doll (bad idea) but it eventually doomed Maxx as well. I don't give a toss about Freddy personally but find it a shame that those wonderful Universal Monster toys weren't released. If you haven't already, I insist you spend the next hour checking out creator Mel Birnkrant's fantastic Maxx Fx site.
And lastly, I found this postage stamp sized ad in an old Canadian newspaper, it's for a clearance of Aurora Monster Scenes kits (which got Aurora in a lot of trouble at the time) and I know that the Giant Insect kit is one thing a lot of collectors would have loved to have found for under a buck.
