These are the original thirteen monster models produced by Aurora in the early-to-mid sixties. Since then, they have been re-produced by various companies, so they are all fairly easy to acquire today, though a mint original in the box usually goes for hundreds of dollars.
The original box design easily captured our pre-pubescent attention in the stores. The artwork by James Bama, a commercial / fine artist who did thousands of paperback covers, including the Doc Savage books. The picture without the lettering were taken from an 1967 Aurora catalog which used Bama's paintings without the lettering, allowing us to see the sometimes obscured bottom third. The two pages from which these scans were taken are reproduced towards the bottom of this page.
Although Bama is a well-respected fine artist whose paintings sell for top dollar, most of the original Bama paintings you see here are gone forever. An excellent article dealing with this can be found here, and an excellent retrospective Bama book is available here.
Click on an Aurora box to see build-ups of the model and more info:
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The following are the two pages from the 1967 Aurora catalog (from Holland - hence the "cm" measurements), from which the above Bama paintings (far right column) were scanned.
And who can forget the Famous Monsters of Filmland ads which enticed us to buy yet another batch of models to replace those which we had blown up with firecrackers?
