Hot to Trot: Plastic Horse Kits - Keeping Costs Down!

With plastic horse kits like the Aurora Black Fury blogged this week, I have noticed something while looking in to these - although Aurora, Revell, and Remco all produced a number of different horse kits, these came from just a few actual moulds.

Mould the horses in different colours, and include a few different accessories, and you have a 'different' kit.

Aurora did three horse kits - the first was issued on its own as Black Fury, and with three different riders and saddles, etc, as the Gold Knight on Horse, Apache Warrior on Horse, and Confederate Raider on Horse.

The Thoroughbred Race Horse seems to be the only Aurora kit that was not issued with a rider.

Then the last kit was issued on its own as the White Stallion, and with the Lone Ranger and Zorro kits. There was also the Forged Foil version, which was covered with sheets of metal foil.

Remco did the three Action Stallion kits, all of which were actually the same kit, but in different colours and with different accessories.

Now it looks like Revell did exactly the same thing. There were five horse kits in the 1960s, and four in the 1970s, some of which were re-issues of the earlier kits. But there were only two different horse models.

Two of the kits were tie-ins with TV shows - Blaze King from National Velvet, and Black Beauty (which is not even mentioned on Scalemates, or in the Thomas Graham book on Revell).

None of the Remco or Revell kits included riders. Scales also varied, but were around 1/8th (Aurora Black Fury), to 1/10th for the Revell models, and 1/12th. I have no idea what scale the Remco kits were.

Well, that was one way to keep costs down.

I wondered if readers had encountered the same thing with Action Man and Sindy toys horses?

Paul Adams from NZ