Batosi420 notes that "most Americans" think of plastic model kits as products for children. He's probably right. But if most Americans do think that they're wrong.
Over the past thirty years or thereabouts, plastic scale modeling has, for better or worse, become almost exclusively an adult hobby. Olde Phogies like me can remember when just about every kid (well, ok, just about every male kid) built models, at least occasionally. Dr. Thomas Graham's fine book on the history of Revell observes that, from the mid-fifties through the mid-sixties (or thereabouts), model building was the leading leisure time activity for American boys. They bought kits not only in hobby shops but in department stores, drug stores, and even groceries. To quote Dr. Graham (p. 35): "The typical eight- to fifteen-year-old American boy could hop on his bike, ride to the neighborhood Woolworth, and check out the newest assortment of kits sitting on the hobby shelves beside the toy department. If he was lucky, he could speed on to the hobby shop just around the corner with a larger kit selection, where he could check out the array of built models in the display case. A few minutes later, back at home in his room, he enjoyed the supreme pleasures of popping open the box, smelling the aroma of fresh plastic, sorting through the shiny plastic parts, and imagining what the model would look like when it was assembled. A few years later, when he reached the mature age of sixteen and discovered the dual attractions of girls and cars, plasic model building would suddenly become very un-cool. But until then, making and collecting models absorbed the after school creative energies of legions of adolescent boys."
Those days are gone - and they've been gone for a long time. The entire landscape of modeling has changed. The twelve-year-old modeler has just about disappeared. (A couple of years ago I asked a hobby shop owner friend of mine how many of his regular customers were under the age of twenty. He laughed bitterly and said, "zero.") The local hobby shop is, except (maybe) in major metropolitan areas, well on its way to extinction. The prices of kits have risen astronomically - a great deal faster than inflation. (I can remember when I could buy an airplane kit at the drugstore for 29 cents, and the Revell Cutty Sark, at $10.00 was the most expensive kit on the market. Nowadays it's not unusual for a 1/72 fighter to cost more than $10.00.) The plastic sailing ship is almost dead. (Revell of the U.S. hasn't issued a new one since 1977. The company has been out of the sailing ship genre considerably longer than it was in it.) The Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese have taken over a big percentage of the market. (Even bigger, if we count the kits with American and European labels that are actually produced in Asia.)
The other day my wife and I paid a visit to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, in Washington. Longtime fans of that museum will remember that the gift shop on the second floor used to look like a great big hobby shop. Dozens of kids could be seen running around with shrink-wrapped boxes in their hands, begging their parents for money. At least one company, Revell, was marketing a "Smithsonian Series" of kits.
As of three days ago the Air and Space Museum was stocking exactly one plastic model kit: the old Monogram Wright Flyer. And I didn't see a single visitor pick one up and look at it.
I saw something similar a couple of years ago at Mystic Seaport. Its gift shop used to have a pretty sizable model department. When I was there most recently, in 2007, I was able to find two kits: the old Lindberg Bismarck and Hood. They looked like they'd been there a long time. No sailing ships - and no wood kits whatever (despite Model Shipways' promotion of its Charles W. Morgan and Emma C. Berry as "official kits of Mystic Seaport).
The people who run those gift shops know what they're doing. They don't stock models because they've learned, the hard way, that visitors don't buy them.
There are lots of reasons for the demise of the youthful modeler: the rise in kit prices, the popularity of computer games, etc., etc. This Forum is full of profound analyses of the problem. (I happen to think another factor is the miserable state of kids' knowledge of, and interest in, history. A substantial percentage of the college freshmen who are going to start doing battle with me in three weeks won't be able to name two countries the U.S. was fighting in World War II and won't know whether the U.S. supported the North or the South in Vietnam.)Whatever the reasons, the bottom line is that the goode olde dayes are gone - and they aren't coming back.
It's easy for the modern model enthusiast to sink into woe and gloom. A number of other things deserve to be noted as well, though.
As the prices of the kits have gone up, so has the average level of quality. It's tempting to get nostalgic about the quality of kits in the olde dayes, and some of them were indeed masterpieces of the kit designer's and moldmaker's art. But the average kit that shows up in the hobby shop (sorry, on the hobby dealer's website) in 2009 is a far more sophisticated product than its counterpart of forty years ago.
The decline of the local hobby shop has been accompanied by the rise of the internet hobby dealer. Every modeler now has relatively easy access to thousands of kits from all over the world. (I can remember when the rack of Airfix airplanes in plastic bags at the downtown hobby shop in Columbus, Ohio represented the ultimate in exoticism.)
The range of subject matter, though still not as broad as Tankerbuilder and I would like it to be, has similarly expanded. Yes, there are some gaps in it. (In the sailing ship field, the gaps are bigger than the coverage.) But I can remember when the only Japanese warship kit available in the U.S. was the Aurora Yamato.
The "aftermarket" for plastic kits, to all intents and purposes, didn't exist thirty years ago. Now we have access (if we can afford it) to literally thousands of styrene, resin, cast metal, and photo-etched metal parts that modelers in those days could only dream about. (Remember when it was taken for granted that warship guardrails and radar screens simply couldn't be reproduced on 1/700 scale?) And as of a few minutes ago, Pacific Front Hobbies listed 1235 different resin ship kits. That surely exceeds the total number of plastic ship kits that were available from all sources forty years ago.
The sources of information available these days are far more numerous, detailed, and accessible than they used to be. I can remember being utterly fascinated by the articles in a long-deceased rag called Scale Modeler (good riddance) and the delightful little Airfix Magazine, when those were just about the only periodicals targeting the non-operating model enthusiast. (Flying model airplanes and working boats were another matter.) Today you can find a book on just about any aircraft type or warship class you can think of, and find out about virtually any detail of your subject - in many cases without spending any money (because the material is available on the web). There was a time when we all assumed that "battleship grey" (Testor's glossy #18) was the right color for any model warship. Nowadays there are premixed authentic colors (not as many, admittedly, as the aircraft and armor folks have at their disposal), shelves of books and magazine articles to tell you how to use them, and dozens of people waiting enthusiastically on websites like this one to skewer you if you get any of those colors "wrong."
There are even some positive signs in my own favorite segment of the hobby, sailing ships. I personally think the plastic sailing ship market is just about dead and unlikely to be brought back to life. (That's another subject for discussion; I hope I'm wrong.) But companies like Model Shipways, Bluejacket, and Calder/Jotika have been doing some interesting things -branching out into new subject areas and making ingenious use of new materials and technology. Those firms are small, but some of the bigger HECEPOB (that's Hideously Expensive Continental European Plank-On-Bulkhead) companies look as though they may be seeing the light as well. And in the 53 years I've been in the hobby the library of good books on sailing ship models and technology has grown from the dozens to the hundreds.
Will the "big" American plastic kit companies (which actually don't seem to be so big any more) ever get back into scale ships seriously? I hope so, but I'm inclined to doubt it. There are just too many market forces working against them. So for the time being, at least, the American adult scale ship modeler has several options. One - be patriotic, refuse to buy foreign merchandise, and start looking for another hobby. Two - take up scratchbuilding. Three - concentrate on wood and/or resin kits. (Enough of them are made in the U.S. to keep a modeler busy for quite a few years.) Four - swallow your patriotic instincts, buy at least a few of those products from overseas (you can use American-made aftermarket parts, tools, and materials), and enjoy the fact that you're living in a golden age of ship modeling.