Flawed Thinking

Well, 'tis my favorite time of the year again, and for the first holiday of the season I thought I'd revisit the bizarre case of demonic possession that ushered in The Fall of the House of Aurora. It's a story that never fails to make me scream in horror, "WTF WERE THEY THINKING?!!"

 

I covered it briefly (well, as briefly as I cover anything) in my 2011 Halloween 'toon, and there are a dozen-and-one (or maybe a hundred-and-one) sites on the ol' www where you can get the details, and, if you want to pop over to Amazon, Aurora designer Andy Yanchus and co-author Dennis Prince have written a 256-page tell-all about the entire sordid affair. But none of the foregoing will stop me from retelling the story here.

 

For the main attraction in their 1971 lineup, Aurora decided to build on (and hopefully relive the financial good times) of their earlier "Famous Monsters" kits by coming out with smaller (1/13th scale) monster kits with diorama-like "movie set" bases and backgrounds. Called "Monster Scenes", they featured a mad doctor called Dr. Deadly, who looked like he probably failed to get a job in the concentration camp medical experimentation field because he didn't meet SS ethical standards; a Frankenstein monster (who was pretty much Mr. Country Club Republican compared to the rest of the crew); a licensed rendition of Warren Comics' Vampirella, whose well-molded contours raised the eyebrows of the sort of whiny-butt do-gooder Liberals and fire-and-brimstone Bible-thumpers who go through life raising their eyebrows at such things just to show how much better they are than you; and an equally well-endowed babe in a ripped halter top and a pair (also ripped) of what Catherine Bach would immortalize a few years later as "Daisy Dukes", who was marketed as "The Victim"--and, as if that wasn't enough to unleash the wrath of the Politically/Morally Correct, the rest of the kits in the line featured a variety of mad lab machines and medieval torture devices for her to be a victim of.

 

And, rest assured, the aforementioned wrath of the More Socially Concerned Than You/Holier Than Thou crowds was indeed unleashed. Proving that when the issue involves sex in America, politics can not only make strange bedfellows but some downright perverted ones, feminist sweathogs on the Left and religious nutcakes on the Right met Concerned Parent Groups in the middle, so that all of them could get their guts completely tied in knots together over the idea that some kid, somewhere, somehow, might be getting some enjoyment out of life, and hit the street to show their righteous indignation. The street they hit was the one in front of the corporate headquarters of Nabisco, which had just purchased Aurora, and whose management, having no idea that "Monster Scenes" were hitting the shelves (and the you-know-what was hitting the fan) even as the ink was drying on the contract, found themselves waking into a firestorm of controversy and condemnation rather than the sweet deal they thought they were getting into with one of America's most profitable toy companies. Which, of course, led to them to cancel production of the "Monster Scenes", fire the entire Aurora management staff without so much as a "Ho, Ho, Ho!" just before Christmas, and cravenly cave to the do-gooders demands and concentrate on producing "educational toys".

 

Which, of course, led to Aurora, one of the pioneers and best-known names in the plastic model industry, permanently closing its doors, because what normal child wants "educational toys"? I recall seeing somewhere once a picture of either a N.O.W. cow who was at the protest because she was too ugly to be on a date or a Missionary Position Mom With A Mission, holding a placard saying "Sadistic Toys Make Twisted Boys". Where do people get such bizarre ideas, anyway? While you might--rightly--accuse Aurora of woefully misjudging the general public's potential reaction, you can't say they didn't know their market: if that poor satchel-butt had had even a glimmer of an inkling of the slightest hint of a clue, if she'd ever had a thought in her head that a preacher, principal or political commissar hadn't hammered in there, she'd have known that "Twisted Boys WANT Sadistic Toys".

 

Still, Aurora should have guessed what was going to happen (after all, even if it wasn't anything like the Schweinfurt-Regensburg barrage they flew into with "Monster Scenes", they'd gotten flak enough a few years earlier over their model of a French Revolution guillotine which actually decapitated its victim). So, I can only continue to be amazed that they went through the whole process, from initial concept skull session to units on the retail shelves without SOMEBODY saying, "Hey, wait a minute, let's think this through..."

 

But this year's 'toon deals with less of a "WHAT TF...?" aspect of the story than one that begs the question "Why tf...?" For the full details, you can check out Andy Yanchus' "Vampirella's Salacious Sink Mark" at www.monsterscenes.net/vault.htm, but for those who don't want to venture further afield, I'll give the down'n'dirty details here.

 

For those of you not in the hobby, sink marks are a bane of the plastic modeler's existence, the sort of thing that made us reach for our Crucifixes and garlic and wooden stakes until we found out that Testor's Contour Putty and Squadron Green Stuff work a hell of a lot better. They are round or elongated oval dimples in the surface of a plastic model part, caused by uneven rates of cooling of the styrene during the molding process. The uneven rates of cooling are caused by the differing shapes and thicknesses in the part, and the worst offenders in this regard are the locator pins and sockets that are designed to help get the parts aligned during assembly and keep them aligned while the glue dries. Like all Aurora figure kits, Vampi's body was molded in two parts, a front half and a back one, and, like most (or probably all) of their figure kits, one of her sets of locator pins and sockets were in her crotch--so I'll give you three guesses where her elongated oval sink mark sunk!

 

As Mr. Yanchus relates, viewing of the initial test run parts caused some smirks and giggles among the guys in R&D (one can easily imagine all the wink-wink, nudge-nudge-ing that must have been going on), some laughter among the gals in the office (again, one can envision all the "Honestly, MEN...!"-type eye rolls), and--there's one in every crowd--sent one "challenging individual" (as A.Y. calls her) in the marketing department into a FemiNazi tizzy. And, of course, after the laughter died down, it also caused a revamp of the process.

 

Which brings us to the "Why tf...?"

 

Why at this point did they decide to come down with a case of the galloping scruples and go to the time and expense of re-engineering? Given everything else about the whole "Monster Scenes" story, it seems nothing short of astounding that they actually saw this flaw in the molding process as a problem to be fixed instead of as a fortuitous happenstance to be capitalized upon. I mean, when you're selling a line of model kits with names like "Gruesome Goodies" and "The Pain Parlor", with box art blurbs saying "Rated X...for Excitement!", and putting ads for them in comic books with the screaming headlline, "Kids--Build Your Own Torture Chamber!", would it have outraged the public (or jammed the corncob any tighter up Ms. Snitsworth-in-Marketing's rectum) to have put a blurb on Vampi's box about her being "Authentic In Every Detail--From Her Fearsome Fangs To Her Cunning...Camel Toe!"?

 

Somehow, I doubt it. I suspect the most that would have happened is that it would have made us young pervs even more eager to trundle down to our local hobby shop or five-and-dime as fast as our chubby little legs would carry us to (ahem) snatch one.

 

Done