Ah, pirates!! Our fascination as a culture with pirates has been going on for a very long time, but the image of the pirate as we've come to accept it began in the late nineteenth century, when Howard Pyle published his first illustrated pirate story. Through the remainder of the 1800's and into the early 1900's, he continued to produce illustrations that would undeniably shape the archetype of the pirate as we know it. With the birth of the film industry, Hollywood played a large part in keeping the interest in pirates growing, with films like Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, The Black Pirate, The Crimson Pirate and many others, all feeding an ever growing hunger for tales of swashbuckling adventure. In 1950, Disney released their film version of Treasure Island, and Robert Newton's portrayal of Long John Silver pretty much locked in the image of how a pirate should not only look, but sound. By the mid 1960's when the Aurora Model Corp. was on their dizz...
I've been building models since the days when monsters ruled, and "Aurora" was king of the kits. I'll showcase some of my favorites I've built over the years and am in the process of building, and maybe even a secret or two about how I bring 'em to life. Although I focus mainly on figure kits, don't be surprised to see the odd vehicle or two. And I do mean "odd". Those are my favorite kinds of kits, after all.