T-rex, I'm having a little trouble understanding your last post. But here's a little historical information on the plastic kit.
The Titanic sank in 1912. Plastic, as we understand the term today, didn't exist at that time. The first model kits, as we would recognize them, originated in the 1920s or thereabouts. (I've seen advertisements for ship model kits from that time that consisted of boards, sticks, and pieces of metal and paper - what we'd probably call scratch-building supplies today. And a few companies, such as Cleveland Models, were producing flying model airplane kits made of balsa wood and tissue paper.)
People have been building wood ship models at least as far back in time as the ancient Egyptians - and maybe longer than that. By 1912 some extremely sophisticated (and large) ship models were being built - all from scratch. (The maritime museum where I used to work had some from that period that were really exquisite - as big as fifteen feet long.)
The first plastic material that got mass distribution in the consumer market seems to have been the stuff called celluloid. It was cheap and fragile; it melted very easily and deteriorated quickly. It actually seems to have been in use for some purposes as early as World War I; clear "inspection panels" on WWI aircraft were sometimes made of celluloid. The first consumer goods made out of plastic seem, from what I can tell, to have been things like combs and hair brush handles - things that previously had been made out of wood or rubber. Plastic attracted the manufacturers because it was cheap.
The first "plastic models," so far as I know, were airplanes and ships made for the U.S. government during World War II. The Army Air Forces and the Navy commissioned "recognition models" of friendly and enemy aircraft, generally on 1/72 scale. (That seems to have been the origin of that scale's popularity among airplane modelers.) Many of those model airplanes were made of wood, but some were simple plastic castings. The Navy bought thousands of little shiop models, on the scales of 1/500 and 1/1200, for use in ship identification classes. Most of them were made of wood and/or metal. When I was going through the boxes of WWII recognition models at the museum where I used to work, though, I found one box full of merchant ship models that were cast in a plastic material (celluloid or something similar). By the time I saw them, those particular models had all warped into the shapes of bananas, and were oozing an ugly, oily substance that smelled like vinegar. We had to throw them out. Those early forms of plastic didn't last more than a few years.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, there's some argument about what the first plastic model kit was. The earliest one I've heard about was an American Gato-class submarine, produced by a company called Varney in 1948 or 1949. It had a simple, one-piece, cast plastic hull and a few other parts. (Varney's main product was model railroads. Maybe the company was making a few plastic railroad cars by 1948; I'm not sure about that.) The Varney submarine molds were later bought by Lindberg; the kit, in a slightly modified and improved form, is still available under the Lindberg label.
Plastic kits started really catching on in the early 1950s. Revell, which was the industry leader for a long time, started out as a manufacturer of ladies' cosmetic products. (The name "Revell" appeared for the first time on a ladies' cosmetic compact, during World War II. All this information comes from Dr. Thomas Graham's fine book, Remembering Revell Model Kits.) In the late 1940s several companies were experimenting with plastic as a material for making kids' toys. The first Revell model kits were cars; they were modified versions of toys, sold in separate pieces on the hunch that purchasers might enjoy putting them together. The idea caught on in a hurry.
The first Revell ship kit was, as I mentioned earlier, the Missouri. In its original form it included an electric motor. It made quite a splash in the then-infant hobby industry (which mostly consisted of balsa wood airplane and ship kits). Revell started producing plastic kits of lots of subjects - airplanes, cars, ships, horse-drawn vehicles, tanks, space ships, pistols, and even animals (a squirrel, a kitten, a puppy, and a koala bear). By 1960 the Revell product line included well over a hundred kits; there's a list of them in the appendix of Dr. Graham's book. Several other companies, including Monogram, Lindberg, Hawk, Strombecker, Renwall, Premier, and ITC (Ideal Toy Corporation) in the U.S. and Airfix and Frog in England, were also in the game. By the end of the 1950s building plastic models was "America's number one hobby," especially among boys.
The Revell Titanic was first released in 1976. (According to Dr. Graham, "Revell thought a long time before making this model; after all, who would watnt to make a model of a ship that sank?") One reason they decided to do it was that another Titanic kit was already on the market. A Japanese company had produced a big, 1/350-scale Titanic a couple of years earlier; it was first sold in the U.S. by a company called Entex, and it's reappeared several times in other companies' boxes. I'm pretty sure that Entex 1/350 kit, from the mid-1970s, was the first plastic Titanic. It is, even by the standards of 2007, a pretty good model. The old Revell kit isn't bad, but by comparison to the latest ship kits it's pretty simple and, in some ways, almost primitive in its detailing.
According to Dr. Graham's book the going price for that Revell Titanic kit in its original box is $10.00 to $15.00. Compared to some of the rarer Revell kits, that's not much. (That's probably because the kit has been reissued several times since then; it isn't hard to find.) By comparison, the Revell science-fiction "Space Station," kit #H-1805, released in 1959, is estimated to sell for $800.00 - $900.00. Keep an eye out for it.
I remember when the Revell Titanic was released. I was working in a hobby shop at the time; the kit was a pretty good seller. It originally appeared in a typical Revell box with a color painting on the cover. I think the box T-rex's is in may not be original; if it has a picture "drawn" on it, maybe the original owner drew it. T-rex - if you can post a picture of the box here, maybe somebody in the Forum can help identify it.