Rick R

Yep. GM killed it long before it stopped breathing, unfortunately. We'll be doiing a coffee table book on the C/D GTO in 2013, the pics are just stunning and this will tell the whole history of the car at a point near its 50th birthday. Till then, check out www.GeeToTiger.com, Jim Wangers' website. Jim has been the standard bearer for the Pontiac hobby for decades, and was the original owner of the C/D GTO...

A friend's mom when I was in high school had a surf green '57 BA Vert, so rusty you could look through the windshield and see the ground behind the car. That might be a neat one to do...

Just a great kit, one of the foundations of Monogram's re-emergence as a force in the hobby starting in the early '80s. I did the cover article in Muscle Car Review magazine (August '07) on the Car & Driver magazine GTO v. GTO road test '64 GTO, probably the most significant Pontiac on the planet, and this kit is spot on for every element of a replica of that specific car.

One of the best kits the hobby has ever seen, period.

I like the early 60s Pontiacs too... My dad ws working for Chrysler Corporation Aerospace in Huntsville and got into the new car thing in '60 with the first of five new Pontiacs as he worked up the line and added options every year. His '64 was a Nocturne Blue Grand Prix, and of course I got the promo and the kit. The resin body is definitely the way to go...

I LOVE this stuff! Oddest Box art is a tossup between the AARI cop car kits and the old Hubley '60 Ford wagon kit. The AARI Dodge/Plymouth Police car kits showed some kind of gunfight/shootout between the San Diego County Sheriff's Department and some miscreant, but the distances reminded me of the old Naked Gun TV and movies where the combatants were a couple of feet apart... The Hubley Ford Wagon art was dumb even when I was a little kid... the wagon, festooned with dopey flame decals, tack-on mirrors. antennas and spotlights, was depicted as competing... winning!... a dirt track stock car race, with the flagman leaping skyward waving the Checker as the car careened through a corner, its inboard wheels aloft. It was a confusing image probably rendered by a 'square' illustrator who had never seen or heard of any racing events ever. Funny. Dumb. So bad it was good. The AARi kits got critical of American society through the 70s and 80s and I always thought they should have been more appreciative of the market. After all, we were buying their kits not to build, but to mine for parts!

Lookin' good, Mike! I have seen a few Starliners that have the roof trim area done in a different color, looks good sometimes. Lots of foil needed on these!

John DeLorean was heading Pontiac at the time and tried a coupla times to get a sports car for Pontiac, but GM never agreed. A couple of Banshees were prototyped, one an OHC six, then this one, GM brass still resisted, gave Pontiac a Camaro variant instead, it became the Firebird, they did well with it.

Nice work and as usual an entertaining and engaging story...

Lookin' good... I sense a theme...

CARS FOR THE MOVIE were built from wrecked/used Mark III Continentals at Barris' shops in SoCal. The main thing you'd be looking for is the 'chopped' roofline, best sourced from the AMT '70 T'Bird. the rest of te body was just rolled sheetmetal welded at the inside of the 'roll'. Do the same thing with sheet plastic... Hardest part will be the bumpers and grille... Good luck!

Interesting path you've chosen here! That Buttera chassis would probably cost $40000 to build today, and is a neat alternative to the truly ratty rat rod underpinnings normally found on those cars, so you may have invented a new genre'... the 'poser' Rat Rod!... Just think! All the technical advantages of a modern street rod with little to none of the polishing necessary! and NO JAGGED EDGES!

Re: The 4-4-2 Depending on the person filling out the order forms at the dealer, 2-tones were still popular into thee mid-60s. In '72 I bought a beautiful '66 4-4-2 post coupe in Fort Walton Beach Florida where I was stationed in the Air Force, and oddly enough it was silver blue with a white painted roof just like the new box-art car. The 'vert kit is a blast, best -up top ever- it's an A/C equipped 4-barrel car and of course the parts from the Hardtop are interchangable. Love the wire wheel covers in that kit! The kit replicates a pretty fast car, with the W-30 and a 4-speed. I wasn't so lucky, mine was an Automatic 4-barrel, still a stout car for all of $850, ($250 down and $53 a month/18 months) I put 23k miles on it in a year, had a blast, pretty much ruined it but I shoulda kept it. I'm why they're rare! re: the Z-16 Since this was a really high buck package for the Chevelle lots of dealers ordered the cars (only 201 were made) 'loaded' to the gills with options, including vinyl roofs. The Exact Detail line of 18th scale die casts offered the Z-16 in every color scheme available, red, yellow, and black, each color with and without a vinyl roof. Great models though the Revell kit is more accurate.

Nicely done! Always great top see a fine model shown the proper respect! A little Cobra trivia... Years ago I interviewed Dean Jeffries for TV, he painted the first Cobra, CSX2000, four different colors in four months for Carroll Shelby. Shel had only one car, wanted people to think he had more. Shel and his crew picked it up the first time (pearl yellow) at DJ's shop as they left L.A. to drive to Detroit for the first money meeting with Ford, towing the Cobra on a single-axle trailer behind a Falcon Wagon. Think about that... 2000+ miles towing an equal weight to the tow car... bias ply tires, crowned roads, drum brakes, one axle, towing a now-priceless car... Guys had stones...

Paint looks great, Mike, far better than the actual car! Are you going to shave the 'F' off the hood? Most episodes the car was without that. Re: Simon & Simon, it did last 8 seasons but only because of the writer's strike, same reason Crime Story had a second season. It was NOT a good thing for Jameson Parker, who'd been signed to do a sitcom which went away because S&S came back and he was under contract. Universal just re-shot old scripts in that last year, and most weren't very good. The series had done a great send-off episode at the end of S7, 'May The Road Rise Up...' partly shot at Barris Kustoms in North Hollywood. That one's worth a search, but the series DVD didn't sell well so it may never see the light of day.

Kinda like looking at a Playboy from the early '70s and then seeing Barbi Benton now. There's just so much more of her!

And I thought the original film lost its relevance when it started being a 'statement'. That was a bit pretentious for me... I did like Vigo Mortensen as Kowalski, and I thought the car stuff, with the Challenger being a collectors car rather than an anonymous bland late-model car, added a lot to the movie. Vigo'll never work that cheap again... I also remember that when I wrote the review I was still buzzin' from attending my first studio advance screening and was loath to be too 'critical' lest I never be invited to another. That's passed now. I still like the movie. So there.;-)

Okay, I'll call it 'fewer major-league blondes'... and perhaps less likely to become Hollywood staples and media-mogul bazillionaires...

Thanks, Danno! (I think...) The parts of the movie I saw reminded me more of Toby Halicki's 'Gone in 60 Seconds' more than AG, and I recall thinking that Gone stunk out loud when I first saw it in a walk-in in Anchorage in 1974. It aged better than I had expected and made Toby a pile of money. I would put this in the same category, true outlaw filmmaking. Would I compare it to AG? Not really, just wanted to see the response. You gotta understand that AG and the other movies mentioned by posters here were done with studio budgets, tho small ones, and done by 'industry-approved amateurs' like some guy named George Lucas with a high six-figure budget and promises of major distribution. I do prefer this to Grindhouse, which I thought was car-destroying, celluloid-bound sewage. I thought 'Two Lane Blacktop' was beyond boring, and I've tried... I really have... to like Hollywood Knights but it seems a waste of time but for the cars and Michelle Pfeiffer. Then again, I did like the TVM remake of Vanishing Point... accurate car stuff and a reason for the run. The Producer/director/writer/male lead for this (recalling Toby again...) is a young guy from Oregon who builds hot rods for a living. He knows he'll never need to rent formal wear for the Oscars. Still I applaud his efforts and hope he does well with it. That's all...

I'd like to see Mobieus, after an astonishingly successful premiere season for their Chrysler and Hudson kits, do a proper '62 Pontiac Grand Prix, '61 Catalina bubble top, or '60 Catalina hardtop. Put all the factory performance bits into it, give a choice of wheels including 8-lugs, and induction systems and offer proper decals and interior finishing instructions for stock, drag or Nascar versions. Then maybe a '61 Cadillac Coupe DeVille or a Buick LeSabre hardtop. Then a '40 Mercury coupe...

Imagine American Graffiti with fewer blondes, less music, better cars, more realistic street racing, and you got the picture... Set in small town Oregon, modern day, with some great cinematography. A true triumph of indie film-making! Go to americanthrillridemovie.com to see the trailer!

Hey, Mike, just curious about your build of the '65-'66 Spenser Mustangs... In the series, the pilot episode showed the car in a great stance, top of the wheel wells at the top of the tires much like the Mustangs sat when hew. In the series, the cars were raised to contend with Boston's tank-trap atreets and potholes. Years ago when I built my first model of the car I had it sitting nice and low... what 'set' did you use for yours? I'm planning another one, deciding which I should use. Old notes... Back when the show started in '86 I built one with the cheap black-center round-hole modular wheels used the rims from the old MPC stock car kits, looked good! Which kit did you source your Keystones from? I like the ones in the old-tool AMT '57 Chevy. Ever wonder why the series used that Mustang? When I talked to Urich's S2&3 stuntman Mike Runyard years ago he said it was Urich's call, he wanted it because he had a first-gen Mustang when he was in college... Also, the Mustang GT used for a few eps in S2 was the same car used for Ford's brochure photos for the Mustang GT for that model year. Brochure pics that year were taken in an assortmrnt of cities, Boston for the Mustang GT, and when the shoot was done Ford gave the car to the production company. Apparently there were a lot of complaints from viewers who hated that the '66 was destroyed, (I only wrote once...)part of the reason for the 'new' '66 after a couple of months, but the switch was always planned... Use of the new car gave the new GT a good early 'hero image' with the public and the production company used the time to refinish their original cars. The presentation of the car to the show was covered in USA Today's entertainmant section. Ford took the GT back and it was totalled (t-boned a Thunderbird or a CV IIRC) in a driver training film that ran on ABC later in '87, hosted by... Robert Urich, then it was crushed.

Looks like a great start... I was disappointed in the TV movies, and traced the fault to the female Producers who did the shows for the Lifetime Tlelvision. They focused on Urich and monimized the other style elements that had made the show special. I recall that in one of them they had Spenser in a red Ford Probe...GACK! Parkers Spenser probably wouldn't even PARK next to one of those! Doesn't surprise me that the original '66s were gone, years ago I talked to Mike Runyaed, Urich's stunt guy for part of the run of the series, he said most of the cars were New England rust buckets... There were as many as five at any one time, and they were pretty much junk by the end of the series run. He said they were hauled around to locations on a car carrier trailer, I bet that made a great picture...

I like that a lot! Since you don't have to go completely stock with a Pro-Touring car, how about using some stoplight red in the rear grille grooves between the taillights? Pro touring cars are all about the details, and that would be a prototype-style styling trick.

George Barris was in on the game when the 3-in-one kits started at AMT and by '61 he was a power, but he didn't build himself and he didn't care about anything but the bucks and the 'box credit'. In one of the early publicity pics for the AMT lacquers he's shown in the back of his office, in the sun, holding a '61 Ford body (hoodless) up in front of his body in readiness for painting. In the other hand is a can of AMT lacquer, label to the front so all the kids could see it, ready for use. Thing is, he's wearing a really nice watch and ring and a white shirt and a tie, no covering for anything including his hand... I always wondered how many kids got 'pounded' or 'grounded' or for that matter, painted, when they did the same thing...