Some of my earliest memories are Monogram kits that came in baby blue boxes. The first kit I built, with help from my Dad, was Monogram's P-40B Flying Tiger. Over the years of my childhood, I built all of those Monogram kits at one point or another, or even multiple times. So with eBay making old things available again, I set out to acquire as many of those old baby blue box kits as I could get my hands on. I managed to get all but maybe 2 or 3 of them. The Voodoo was actually difficult to find, and was one of the last I acquired.
The kit I bought still had the celephone wrapping on it with its price tag.
Anyone who has ever built any of these old Monogram kits knows that they typically are light on details, especially these smaller box scale kits like this one. I previously built the Wildcat and Bf110, and took the opportunity to add details where I could in those builds. Ditto for this one, despite its diminuitive scale. I added sheet styrene as bulkheads, air intake trunking, and the cockpit, and some tubing into the engine exhaust cans. Had I not added the bulkheads, trunking, and tubing, there would have been an empty hole from intakes to exhaust, like a Red October with its caterpillar drive I suppose.
The pilots looked like astronauts or something out of The Right Stuff.
I painted this Voodoo with Tamiya's bare metal silver spray paint, with some Vallejo black, Tamiya red, Tamiya white, Tamiya sky blue, and Model Master Metalizer titanium. The markings that I painted - the red lightning bolts and the blue and white mid-fuselage striping - were inspired by a Voodoo of the 60th Fighter Interceptor Squadron in 1970.
I decided early on to build this Voodoo "in flight". With that in mind, I needed a stand, as this is a Monogram kit that did not come with one of their little stands. I used some acrylic rod and cut out a V shaped wooden base for the task, and enlisted my daughter to decorate the base. I had to explain to her this aircraft, known as the Voodoo, and suggested a theme based on voodoo imagery and the Disney movie The Princess and the Frog with its voodoo-dude villain. I think she did a good job painting the base.
The kit did include a small decal sheet that was 52 years old. I sprayed it with some Testors decal solution, let it sit over night, and when I cut out the decals and put them in water ... nothing happened. I soaked them well longer than normal, and those decals never budged. I don't know if the use of the Testors maybe sealed them to the paper backing, or if these decals were just bad, but whatever, I scrounged my spares box to find the U.S. AIR FORCE, USAF, tiger heads, and national insignia. The insignia is clearly wrong for this aircraft, but they were close to the right size, and they beat having no insignia.
Next up is the Monogram Pro-Modeler F-102 Delta Dagger.