The 1977 mold in a new box
Pick up a Revell model kit in a store today and the box can look brand new, with fresh artwork and a copyright line from this decade.
The plastic inside can be almost fifty years old. Not the pieces themselves, the steel mold that shaped them. The Revell and Monogram P-51D Mustang in quarter-inch scale still comes out of tooling that has been around since 1977, and you can still buy it new. F28
And the company whose name is on the lid is not the American company your father knew. Revell's own website says it has been part of a private equity group based in Munich since 2018. F22
None of that makes the kit a bad buy. It makes it a different buy from the one the box suggests. By the end of this you will know who actually makes a Revell kit today, and five things to check on the box and the sprues before you pay for one.
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One more thing before we start.
How Revell started
The story starts in Los Angeles during the war. In 1943 a man named Lewis Glaser set up a small plastics molding business in Hollywood called Precision Specialties, the firm that would later become Revell. F1
A few years later, in Venice, California, Glaser had the idea that would define his company: a true-to-scale car assembled from several separate plastic parts. Revell's own history calls that the birth of the plastic model kit. F2
The first real Revell mold, cut in 1953, was the battleship USS Missouri, sold in a narrow box. F3 That ship is worth remembering, because it tells you what the business really was. The kit was cheap. The steel mold behind it was not.
A guide to old kits puts it plainly: cutting a steel mold for a model is time consuming and very expensive, the single greatest production expense. F29 Once you own the mold, every extra box costs you plastic, paper and ink. So a kit company has a very strong reason to keep old molds working for as long as anyone will buy what comes out of them. Hold on to that, because it explains the box you will see in the store.
By the early sixties Revell was the name every hobby shop carried. It even hired the custom car artist Ed Roth as a stylist around 1962, and in 1963 it paid him one cent for every one of his kits sold, which added up to thirty-two thousand dollars. F35
But size did not mean profit. A history of the company quotes an industry source saying that, unlike its rivals Aurora and Monogram, Revell was only marginally profitable, despite being the largest model producer in the United States. F38
Monogram, Mattel and the merger
That rival, Monogram, started in Chicago in 1945, making balsa wood ship and airplane kits. It was founded by two former employees of another kit maker, Jack Besser and Bob Reder. F6 By 1962 Monogram had a plant on Waukegan Road in Morton Grove, Illinois, with two hundred people making plastic models and hobby supplies. F7
Mattel, the toy company, bought Monogram in 1968 and let it go again in 1984. F8 Two years later, in 1986, a New York private equity firm called Odyssey Partners bought Monogram, bought Revell in the same year, and merged the two. F9
The usable equipment moved to Monogram's plant in Des Plaines, Illinois, F9 and the Revell plant in Venice, California, where the whole idea had started, was closed. F10
From there the name changed hands like a piece of furniture. In 1994 Revell-Monogram was bought by Hallmark Cards, as part of its Binney and Smith division, the Crayola people, and that lasted thirteen years. F11 In May 2007 it was bought by Hobbico, a radio control hobby company from Champaign, Illinois. F12 F15 And in 2012 Hobbico also bought the German Revell company, putting the American and the German operations under one owner for the first time in decades. F13
The German Revell
That German company deserves its own minute, because it is the one that survived. Revell opened a German subsidiary in Bielefeld in 1956, and a year later moved it to the neighbouring town of Bünde. F4
For years the Germans mostly sold kits designed in America. Their first original in-house kit, a BMW motorcycle in 1 to 8 scale, came in 1971. F36 By the mid-eighties the Bünde operation had its own development department alongside production. F37
Meanwhile the American side was moving its own production out of the country. In 2003 Revell-Monogram, which had been the last American plastic model company still making kits at home, announced that all its tooling and production would move to China. F14
2018: the auction
Then came 2018. On January 10, Hobbico filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and put itself up for sale. F16 The assets were sold at auction on April 13. F17
People often remember it as one sale. It was two. Horizon Hobby bought most of Hobbico's radio control brands for eighteen point eight million dollars. F19 Revell went separately, to a German investment group that appears in the U.S. court papers under the name Blitz 18-313, for about three point nine million dollars, with conditions that could move that number up or down. F18
Three point nine million dollars for the name that started the plastic model kit. F18
After the sale, Revell USA stopped operating. A hobby retailer put it bluntly at the time: Revell USA had in fact closed its doors. F20 By the end of June, Hobbico had converted to Chapter 7 and was being liquidated. F21
Who makes the kit today
So who makes the kit you buy today? Revell's own site answers the ownership part: Revell has been part of the QCP Group, based in Munich, since 2018. F22 The company says it keeps sales and marketing organizations in the United States, Britain, France, Austria and the Benelux countries, and that Europe is its core market. F24
The American arm that exists now is described by a hobby retailer as an importer and a warehouse, with the decisions made in Germany. F23
Where the plastic is molded is harder to pin down, and I want to be careful here, because the company does not publish a factory list. What I can tell you is what modelers report from the boxes in their own hands. One says the American Revell tooling has been made in China since probably the late nineties, perhaps earlier. F25
Another looked at a recent reissue of the F-5E fighter: the box was printed in China, the plastic molded in Poland, and the whole thing packed in the United States. F26 A third checked several current kits and found them printed in Germany but made in other countries, Poland and Korea, with a Korean company called Ace Model making some of the small armor kits. F27
Take those as reports, not as an official map. But they all point the same way. The name on the lid is German, the decisions are German, and the plastic can come from almost anywhere.
The box lies about age
Now the part that matters when you are standing in the store. The biggest thing the box does not tell you is how old the mold is.
A guide to judging kits before you open them says it directly: a copyright date on the box might say 2023, but the molds used to make the parts could have been engineered in 1975. F30
The Mustang from the start of this episode is the example. Revell and Monogram kit number 85-5241, the P-51D in 1 to 48 scale. Its molds go back to 1977, and it is still sold new today. F28
That is not a scandal. Remember the economics: the steel mold is the most expensive thing in the business, F29 and a kit company can keep a good mold running for decades by giving it a new series name and new box art instead of cutting new steel. F29 Some of those old molds are still very good kits. Some of them show their age.
So here are five checks, in the order I would do them.
Five checks before you buy
Check one. Ignore the copyright year printed on the box. As we just saw, it tells you when the box was printed, not when the mold was made. F30
Check two. Look the kit up before you buy. The same guide recommends Scalemates, a free online kit database, to see a kit's whole history of releases and reissues. F30 Each release there is tagged, with labels like new tool, new parts, rebox or new decals. F34 If the first release of the plastic inside your box is from 1977, you will know it in ten seconds.
Here is what that looks like in practice. Type the product number from the end of the box, 85-5241 for the Mustang, into the search. F28 You get a page for the kit, and under it a list of every time that plastic has been boxed and sold, oldest at the bottom. The line you are looking for is the first one, the one tagged new tool. F34 Everything above it is the same steel, wearing different clothes.
Do it on your phone in the aisle, before you walk to the register. It is the difference between buying a kit and buying a date.
Check three. Look at the panel lines on the pictures of the parts, or through the window of the box if it has one. Older tooling from the seventies and eighties usually has raised panel lines, little ridges on the surface. Modern kits almost always have fine recessed lines cut into the plastic. F31 It is the quickest visual clue to the era of a mold.
Check four. If you can see the sprues, look at the edges of the parts. A worn old mold can leave what the guide calls a tell-tale halo, a fuzzy, indistinct edge where the plastic has pushed into worn-out parts of the tool. F32 That thin extra plastic is called flash. It can be cleaned up, but a lot of it means a tired mold and more work for you.
Check five. Read the product number. The same guide says Revell's new-tool kits are often identifiable by product numbers starting with zero three or zero four, together with modern digital box art. F33 Often, not always. It is a hint, and the database in check two is the proof.
If you do only one of these, do check two. It takes less time than reading the back of the box.
Should you still buy Revell?
So should you still buy Revell? Here is how I would think about it.
If you want a nostalgic build, the kit you had as a kid, an old-tool reissue is exactly what you are after. It is the same shape your father glued together, and that is the point. Just go in knowing it may need more sanding and filling, and that the details will be of its time. F31 F32
If you want the best fit and the finest detail, look up the kit first and choose a Revell release marked as a new tool. F34 Those are the ones designed with today's methods, and they are a different product from a 1977 mold in a new box, even when the two sit on the same shelf at the same price.
And if you are buying for a child's first kit, a simple old mold is often fine, and sometimes easier. Kids forgive raised panel lines. They do not forgive a hundred tiny parts.
If you buy in a hobby shop rather than online, use the people behind the counter. Ask them one question: is this a new tool, or an old mold in a new box? A good shop knows, because its regular customers ask that question every week. And if they do not know, the database in check two will tell you before they finish looking. F34
Buying online, the trick is the same, with one extra step. Listings often show only the box art, and the box art is exactly the part that gets repainted for every reissue. F29 So copy the product number from the listing, look it up, and only then look at the price. A fair price for a fifty-year-old mold and a fair price for a new tool are not the same number, even when the pictures on the lid look equally new.
What I would not do is judge a kit by the logo, or by the date on the lid. The name has passed through Odyssey Partners, Hallmark, Hobbico and now a Munich investment group. F9 F11 F12 F22 The one thing that did not change hands is the steel. The molds are still there, some from the fifties, some from last year, and they are the thing you are actually buying.
The mold that never dies
One last detail. Revell's own history says its most successful model worldwide is the Titanic, with more than two million copies sold. F5 That is the company's own figure, and I cannot check it independently. But it tells you something true about this business either way. A good mold does not die. It changes owners, it changes boxes, it crosses oceans, and it keeps making the same ship.
The first Revell mold was a battleship, in 1953. F3 More than seventy years later the company that cut it has been sold four times, F9 F11 F12 F17 and the idea it started, a real object in pieces that you put together with your own hands, is still on the shelf.
How old is your kit?
If you have a Revell kit in a closet, look up its number tonight and tell me in the comments how old the mold turned out to be. I would like to know what the oldest one is that people still have unbuilt.
And if you want the next story, a new one comes out every day. Thanks for watching.