All the fun of following instructions

Sean is on spring break and is kind of bored so I took him to the hobby store and bought him a Snap Tite model. The plastic model world has changed a lot since I was buying all those models for kit bashing just a few years ago. At that time you had to scrounge around for retro models, but today the store was stocked with reissues from Revell, Monogram and Moebius—cool stuff, like the vehicles from Lost in Space, the Universal Monsters, Tom Daniels creations like Rommel's Rod and the Red Baron. I bought a small Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea flying sub that included an accessory mini sub and observation sphere. It might look nice grafted on to the Lockheed jet bomber I found last year.

Plastic models pretty much exist only for nostalgia's sake now. Everyone I knew built them when we were kids and blew them up with firecrackers at New Year's. But today kids build Lego models. It's really strange to watch the change toward hyperreal aesthetics I think we would have found Lego figures too juvenile looking.

I'm trying to figure out the economics of models. I remember that when I was a kid models cost about $2.50 which was pocket change even back then. Now, a model costs about $17. I think the price difference is a lot higher than the cost of inflation. Maybe it's licensing fees. The dollars-to-complete time ratio also seems to be higher (inversely). Back then a $2.50 model would take maybe a few days to build. Now, a $20 model can be finished in an hour or two. So not only are models more expensive, they provide less entertainment value (e.g. keeping child occupied value) for the money. Talk about keeping kids occupied—I was thinking about the balsa wood and tissue paper airplane kits my neighbor's brothers would put together. The balsa wood cross sections imitated the actual structure of the airplane. The final step was to glue a tissue paper skin onto the frame. Then you'd throw the model into the air (they were aerodynamic) and it would usually crash land puncturing the tissue paper and snapping the balsa wood spars.

Today's models are more expensive, easier to build, more hyperreal (e.g., juvenile-looking) and more forgiving (even a Snap Tite is unforgiving compared to Lego). In models, as with everything else, the past generation thinks that the current generation has things too easy.