“YOU CAN’T TELL A BOX BY ITS COVER”

It’s a crisp cool Saturday in the Autumn of 1961 and you’ve been waiting for weeks, probably sitting there in school every day watching that big clock in the front of the classroom and counting each passing minute. Having diligently saved up your allowance, boosted by newspaper route earnings and some lawn-mowing money, you’ve amassed the princely sum of one dollar and fifty-five cents and after weeks of youthful anticipation, you hop on your Schwinn and head for Main Street and the town hobby shop – the one with a name like “Hobby-Rama”, or something of that ilk.

You enter the magic emporium, say hello to a few of your friends and then you spot it up there on the shelf – the prized kit you’ve been waiting to buy! In this case, it’s the United Air Lines Caravelle by Lindberg, a model you’ve wanted ever since seeing the exciting new airliner out at your local airport. Unlike larger four-engined jets entering airline service that year, this sleek French airplane has its twin engines mounted on the sides of the rear fuselage, giving passengers a quieter ride by leaving the roar of its Rolls-Royce Avon turbojets far behind the aircraft’s cabin. The Caravelle’s distinctive bullet-shaped nose lends a futuristic look to the elegant machine and newly-designed United Air Lines markings perfectly complement the graceful lines of the jet.

Arriving home, you head for the kitchen table, remove the cellophane wrapper and prepare to see the same modifications made to the kit that Sud Aviation made to the actual airplane, for Lindberg’s United Caravelle VIR kit is a re-issue of their beautiful Air France Caravelle III, an earlier configuration of the jetliner. Most noticeable on the VIR is a new larger eight-pane windshield and the absence of an avionics fairing on the upper fuselage sweeping into the dorsal fin of the vertical stabilizer. Other modifications included thrust reverser apertures on the engine nacelles and the magnificent Raymond Lowey-designed red-white-and-blue United markings. All of these elements are accurately depicted on the box cover showing Ray Gardke’s beautiful airbrush rendering of the jet taxiing in after landing at “Anywhere USA” Municipal Airport.

You can’t wait to see your finished Caravelle sitting proudly atop your dresser, so you open the box, and – Surprise! It’s really just the Air France Caravelle III kit, only with United decals, even though the blue on the decal sheet is slightly too dark. But wait - the cover art showed the correct airplane. How could this be?!!! Welcome to the very beginnings of a phenomenon that changed the model industry forever as consumers got hip to the sometimes not-so-subtle differences between the stunning and dramatic paintings on a model’s box cover, and what actually lurked inside the box waiting for unsuspecting young model builders. It was called the “Truth in Advertising” era, and photos of build-ups began to replace our favorite cover paintings as a result.

While different model manufacturers had different approaches to their box art, certain companies were notorious for luring buyers with enticing illustrations only to have something entirely different inside the box. Take Aurora’s Boeing 707 for example. Originally issued in Pan American World Airways’ colors (since Pan Am was the 707 launch customer), the cover photo showed an actual PAA 707-120, the first iteration of Boeing’s revolutionary transcontinental jetliner. Inside the large-scale $1.98 kit however was something more closely resembling the Model 367-80 prototype with nearly-flat sides on its too-short fuselage, a stub vertical stabilizer, straight engine pylons, rounded non-radar nose, and a long line of squared windows that were stamped into the fuselage. When built, however, the finished model just didn’t look like the real jet.

Amazing to me as a young modeler and airliner fan was that Aurora’s Douglas DC-8 kit served as the complete antithesis to its 707. Although devoid of fine surface features like those seen on Revell’s smaller United DC-8 model with its “Flush Rivet Detail”, Aurora’s kit of the big Douglas jetliner captured the look and feel of the real airplane perfectly. The model even sat slightly nose-low on its landing gear just like the real thing! Throwing a final curve into this odd equation were Aurora’s Convair 880 and 990 models with their myriad problems and inaccuracies compared to the jewel-like Ryan X-13 Verti-Jet kit that the company released at approximately the same time.

Manufacturers buying molds and re-issuing other company’s models would sometimes create boxtop anomalies of their own. Take Comet’s Grumman S2F Tracker for instance, originally molded in mid-1950s Navy Gull Grey. When Aurora re-issued that kit, they released it in early-‘50s Navy Dark Sea Blue plastic which looked very cool on the box showing the S2F spotting on a carrier’s starboard catapult, but left the decals the same as in the Comet kit. Kinda hard to see those black Navy titles on a dark blue fuselage, but that’s what the modeler was stuck with back in the Jurassic “pre-Micro Scale” era.

While consumers now demanded accurate representations of a model’s contents on box covers, initial court rulings from a flurry of Truth in Advertising cases sent shockwaves through the industry. Just how far was “too far”? Disclaimers now appeared in small print on boxtops or side panels saying something like “Model shown on the cover is a photograph of an actual buildup of the kit inside this box assembled by trained professionals. Your results may vary. Paint and cement not included. Do not try this at home. The white zone is for loading and unloading only”. Well, you get the idea, and they even had the nerve to put a modeler’s supposed “Skill Level” right on the box!

Famed Revell cover artist Jack Leynnwood was once asked about the biggest challenge to his work after these new rulings took effect. Said Jack in his wry acerbic style, “The art directors told me I couldn’t put men on the deck of the battleship in my painting because there were no actual men in the kit!” There was also an alleged report of a lawsuit filed by an angry parent because the model of a WWII fighter didn’t actually fire its machine guns as shown on the boxtop illustration. What next? Were parents going to demand that a real Polar Bear be included in Revell’s U.S. Coast Guard Ice Breaker kit just because there was one shown standing on the icepack next to the ship in the cover painting?

In typical 20/20 historical hindsight, the magnificent yet ‘inaccurate’ model boxtops of the 1950s and early-1960s are what gave these now highly-collectible kits a mystique all their own. Was I upset upon discovering that my own $1.49-plus-tax investment in Lindberg’s United Caravelle was a bust? Sure. Did the world tilt off its axis? Hardly. I built it anyway even detailing the cutaway interior in full United colors, and the model indeed looked stunning sitting atop my dresser. Toughest part of the story was learning years later that by today’s modeling standards, I’d only be considered a “Skill Level 2”!