This will come as no surprise to anyone, but I built a lot of model car kits when I was young. Between the ages of six and thirteen, the model kit aisle at Toys R Us was the center of my universe. Any money I saved from my allowance, or received from relatives for birthdays and such, or earned from doing chores around the neighborhood, all went straight into a cash register at Toys R Us in exchange for a brightly-colored cardboard box full of plastic parts. But every once in a while, if I chose carefully, I could get a free model kit just by cutting off part of the boxes and mailing them back to the manufacturer.
I don’t remember what my first model kit was, but I know it was a snap-together kit. It wasn’t until I was eight or nine years old that I graduated to glue-together kits, assembled with that Testors non-toxic plastic model cement that smells like lemons. I made a terrible mess of the first one, a Ford Mustang; it ended up with glue oozing out of every joint and a huge thumbprint in the middle of the rear window. But I kept at it, because moving up to glue models opened up a whole new world of possibilities to me. Not many snap-together kits were offered, but if you could glue, the model car world was your oyster.
Model Products Corporation, MPC for short, was founded in 1965 by a former employee of AMT Models. Like AMT, MPC made its early name by producing promotional models for car dealerships, and offering kits of the same cars. MPC was sold in 1970 to General Mills, which sold model kits and other toys under its Fundimensions brand. Starting in 1980, the box lids of certain MPC car kits bore a new logo: “Special Golden Wheels Bonus!” I assumed, as others probably did, that this meant the kit contained special gold-plated wheels you could put on the car. MPC was well-known for including “custom” parts of dubious taste which could be installed on your model. But the actual meaning was so much better.
As the flyer inside the box explained, if you collected 20 of the Golden Wheels tokens from the side of the box, and mailed them back to MPC along with $1.50 for postage, they would send you a free model kit. There were four tokens per 1/25 scale kit, so it was essentially a “buy five, get one free” deal.
Later, the program was renamed “Golden Opportunity,” and expanded to include other subject matter: Golden Wings for airplane models, Golden Stripes for military models, and so on. And the choices were more numerous. As few as ten tokens could be redeemed for a small, simple kit, or if you managed to save up a hundred, you could get something really special, like a 1/12 scale Bentley. There was even a sweepstakes in 1984 in which MPC gave away a real Corvette, and you didn’t even have to put it together yourself!
MPC ran ads in Boys Life magazine and comic books as well, offering four Golden Opportunity tokens free to get you started. There was a catch: You could only redeem four of the magazine tokens per order. The rest had to come from model kit boxes.
I know I took advantage of this program at least a couple of times. I remember getting a Pontiac Firebird model using tokens, and I think a Dodge pickup as well. The Golden Opportunity program ended in 1985, when MPC was sold to toy giant Ertl, which already owned AMT. Any tokens you hadn’t redeemed by then were of no use to you. Sorry, kid.
I do have several Golden Opportunity kits in my current collection, enough to score a free kit, if only the program were still running. I think I’d go for the Toyota Supra this time. I don’t think I ever built that one back then.
MPC is now owned by Round 2, and many of its old kits have been reissued. The reissues use the same box artwork as the originals, with a few changes: the panel where the Golden Wheels once resided is still yellow, but now houses some extra information about the kit. The new kits are very good quality, maybe better than the originals, but as hard as they try to capture the magic of the old ones, it just isn’t the same. I guess Robert Frost was right: Nothing gold can stay.
By the way, yes, I do still build model kits, or rather, I have started building them again. Here are a few of my recent efforts. The black Corvette is from a 1980s MPC kit.
Top graphic image: Mark Tucker
The MPC kits were just the gateway drug. I moved from MPC on to Monogram, then Testors’ captive import Fujimi kits and then onto that sweet, sweet Tamiya stuff. These days I’m on the hard stuff… mostly 1/12 scale Italeri and Tamiya with lots of scratchbuilt detail.
When I built them, at least a decade before you considering that there was no such thing as non-toxic model glue (only the stuff that kills brain cells), I remember Revell being really good quality, MPC was good, and if I remember right Monogram was OK, and AMT was usually garbage, with flash all over the place and more likely to be missing parts. I did learn x-acto skills to trim flash, though, and to always check against the parts list before starting.
Mark you have to edit in a story about the buy here pay here 2 door multi color 1960s whatever
Huh, the catalog doesn’t provide the scale for the Star Wars stuff. Disappointing, considering “relative to human pilot” is an easy reference point.
My old girlfriend’s father had a huge collection of these in fancy glass display cases and lining the walls and rooms and just busting out everywhere in the downstairs room. Must have been 100s. He had a little 10×10 room dedicated to making scale models. Mostly cars but a few other odds and ends too. It was fun to look at.
I should get back into models. I think 1988 was the last time I did one. It’s relaxing.
I used to do the ships and once a tank.
Great trip back Mark! I vividly remember that ad, as I loved the array of different (item and scale) models. I kept my Golden Wheels in an envelope in the drawer of my little kid’s desk, agonizing over whether to take a sure thing with a small Camaro or save for the mid level destroyer. I don’t think I ever did anything with them though, and I’m sure my mom threw them out after I started reading Bad Boys Life and wondered if x-ray specs removed just clothing.