It's an interesting kit, and a grand exercise in nostalgia.
If I remember correctly (a highly questionable proposition these days), it originally appeared in the early fifties with the name Wasp. I don't know the exact date. Revell's Franklin D. Roosevelt, according to Dr. Graham's history of Revell, was originally released in 1954. One of these two must have the distinction of being the first plastic aircraft carrier kit.
[Later edit: I may be wrong about that. The British company Eaglewall was making 1/1200 British and German waships at about that time, and I think that range may have included an Ark Royal. Can any British Forum members shed light on that?] [Still later edit: I found a website for Eaglewall kit collectors: http://www.shipmodels.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/default.htm It says the company did make an H.M.S. Victorious, but apparently not an Ark Royal. The dates are rather vague; it looks, though, like the bigger Revell and Lindberg kits did come earlier. Does anybody know the actual initial release date of the Lindberg Wasp?]
The Lindberg one has been reissued many times - including that phoney "CV-5" version. (I do wonder whether the people running the company at that time honestly didn't know that there were two WWII carriers named Yorktown. Quite a few people have trouble understanding that. For a while Pyro was selling a 1/1200 CV-5 Yorktown-class carrier with the name "Lexington" on it!) I'm pretty sure the cardboard hangar deck was included in the original kit. I think the motorizing gear was too, but I'm not sure. I think the original price was either $2.00, $2.49, or $3.00.
In terms of accuracy and detail, of course, it doesn't come close to modern standards. The underwater hull is a long way from reality - and, if I remember correctly, it has two rudders. (Every Essex-class ship had only one.) I suspect there's a legitimate explanation for that: in the early fifties the hull lines of up-to-date Navy ships were still classified. (That's undoubtedly at least part of the explanation for the flat bottoms on so many of Revell's and Aurora's early warship efforts.)
By comparison with the competetition, it was a formidable kit. Those 20mm guns may be oversized and oddly shaped, but the very fact that they're there, as individual pieces, puts the kit in a different league from, for instance, the Revell Iowa-class battleship (which is on just about the same scale - and which the company is still selling). Lindberg was the only company in those days that figured its customers could handle all those little parts. And that big tree full of Hellcats was enough to make a purchaser's jaw drop. (The instructions advised the modeler to chop off the outer wing panels on a lot of them and glue the wings back in the folded position.) I think Lindberg may have been aiming at a more sophisticated clientele than Revell was. This old kit pretty clearly was intended for adults, or high schoolers at the very least.
There's no way this old thing can compete with the latest from Dragon or Trumpeter (or event he old Hasegawa Essex-class kits). But it's a noteworthy part of modeling history.