This is an interesting topic. I hope I may be forgiven if I ramble on a little about it.
Like lots of other Olde Phogey model builders (I'm 54 years old, and built my first model in 1956), I'm troubled by the current state of the hobby. The local hobby shop seems to be disappearing from the landscape, the prices are going through the roof, and - most disturbingly of all - the number of young people getting into the hobby seems to be shrinking all the time. When I was in college, in the late 1970s, I had a job in a hobby shop in Columbus, Ohio. At least half the customers were kids. A couple of weeks ago I had a conversation with a friend who runs an excellent hobby shop in Newport News, Virginia. I asked him how many of his regular customers were kids. He laughed bitterly and said "zero."
There are, of course, lots of reasons for this. Young people today are offered all sorts of activities that provide short-term gratification - movies, videos, computer games, etc. We probably shouldn't be surprised that a hobby requiring time, and the development of manual skills, isn't as popular as it used to be.
Another problem is the current generation's declining interest in history. (My wife and I are both history teachers; we can provide plenty of evidence.) When I was in grade school, World War II was a common topic of conversation. My father, and the fathers of all the kids in my elementary school, told us stories about the war. The theaters and TV were full of war movies and documetaries. Every self-respecting sixth-grade boy, and some of the girls, could tell a P-51 from an ME-109. We played with toy soldiers, and with history-related board games.
Today, it being the beginning of the semester, I handed out a survey to the students in my college-level U.S. military history course. Most of the students -
most of them - couldn't tell me the year in which the Civil War ended. Several couldn't name two countries the U.S. was fighting in World War II. (All of them
did know what Pearl Harbor was. Thank you Hollywood.) Most modeling subjects (the big exceptions of course being car models) have something to do with history. It's not surprising that kids who aren't interested in history aren't interested in models.
There's another side to the story. Over the past twenty years or so, though it's happened so gradually that many of us may not have noticed, the pricing structure in the plastic kit industry has changed fundamentally. When I was in elementary school, a dollar would buy a 1/72-scale fighter from Revell or Airfix, a tube of Testor's glue, and a couple of bottles of paint. When I was working in that hobby shop, twenty years later, it was still possible to find a model that cost a dollar - and five dollars was enough to buy a weekend's worth of modeling activity. When I built my first Revell
Cutty Sark it was, at $10.00, the most expensive plastic kit on the market. Nowadays, a person who doesn't have $10.00 to spend might as well not set foot in a hobby shop. The prices of plastic kits have gone up considerably faster than inflation. The hobby has ceased to cater to kids with pocket money; the manufacturers are catering to adults.
One result of all this, let it be noted, is that the quality of the typical plastic kit has gone up tremendously. I can remember when a 1/72 kit with scribed detail was extremely unusual, and detailed wheel well interiors in any scale were completely unknown. In the late 1970s the magazine articles about ship models took it for granted that to represent a radar screen or a guardrail on 1/700 scale was impossible. And if you suggested the possibility that somebody would release a 1/48 Vindicator, with extensive cockpit detail, countersunk panel lines, etc., you would have been labeled certifiably nuts.
We are, I suspect, in the midst of what will be seen in the future as a golden age of scale modeling. The proliferation of cottage industry manufacturers, aftermarket parts, imported kits, specialized tools, specially-mixed paints by the hundreds, and all the other goodies that we take for granted has turned the hobby into something fundamentally different than it was fifty years ago. With the Internet and mail order to help them, the manufacturers are giving us an array of products that were, quite literally, unimagineable even twenty years ago.
I do worry, though, about the price we're paying for all that wondrous stuff. With the demise of the local hobby shop, and the lack of new blood in the form of kids taking up scale modeling, I have to wonder what the future will bring.
So much for the ramblings of a senile ship modeler. Sorry to have gone on so long.