Airfix Kits (Shire Library) by Pask Trevor

Author:Pask, Trevor [Pask, Trevor]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Airfix Kits
ISBN: 9780747811589
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

The Series 1 HMS Victory dated from 1956. It remained a popular kit for some years and by the late 1980s, following polythene bags and blister packs, was packaged in a small box.

The Matchbox kits represented serious competition for a time. The twocolour presentation of the kits was highly innovative.

Matchbox eventually grew to become a serious rival to Airfix, but there was realistically no prospect of another company supplanting Airfix until the 1980s. Airfix had a better system of distribution, and a brand name that had already become the generic term for the products of its competitors. Airfix was even confident enough to have its own monthly magazine, launched in June 1960. At first it was a showcase for Airfix products, but it quickly became an editorially independent magazine for the wider modelling community. The magazine carried a range of features on building, improving and converting kits, together with articles on war gaming and history, so that modellers could understand fully the context of their models. The magazine also carried impartial reviews of other manufacturers’ kits – giving credit where credit was due – and illustrating the confidence Airfix had in its own products.

In the 1970s the magazine led to a series of generic modelling guides, and a yearly annual. The 1970s also saw the appearance of a series of titles focusing on a single aircraft, ship or tank. Each subject was related to a specific kit, with the book intended to be both a history and a guide to get the best from the kit. This type of ‘affinity’ publishing was still successfully pursued decades later by manufacturers such as Games Workshop and Tamiya.

In the 1960s and 1970s Airfix moved into the realm of acquiring licences to produce kits associated with popular films and television programmes. Notable kits included figures of James Bond and Odd Job from Goldfinger and the ‘Little Nellie’ autogyro from You Only Live Twice. The Pan Am Orion spacecraft from 2001: A Space Odyssey was also a very popular kit in the late 1960s, as was a set of figures linked to The High Chaparral television series. There was also a set of figures of Robin Hood and his company. (Although the box art for this set was clearly inspired by Errol Flynn, no mention was made of the classic Hollywood film produced a couple of decades previously – lawyers would be more on-the-ball in the twenty-first century!)

Airfix had a productive association with Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, although surprisingly they never produced a kit from the Andersons’ most famous television series, Thunderbirds. The year 1968 did, however, see the Angel Interceptor aircraft from Captain Scarlet appear, and in 1976 the Eagle transporter spacecraft from Space 1999 was created. Intriguingly, Airfix also had a link with the Andersons via two ‘lost kits’ featuring the starring vehicles from Fireball XL5 and Stingray – the two puppet series that immediately pre-dated Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet. The moulds for both kits were made by Airfix, but they were produced in plain boxes as a promotion by the Lyons Maid ice cream company.

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