Frankenstein's Flivver 1965 & Daniel Boone

1965 - The monster craze continued to persist among preteens and teenagers.  Hot rod and sports car models were selling well to the same group.  Hawk had begun issuing a combination of monster and hot rod kits with a comic twist based on designs by Bill Campbell two years earlier.  Not to be outdone, Aurora began designing and issuing combination monster/car kits.  They were called Monster Rods.

I have to say I love the Hawk Weird-Ohs, Silly Surfers and Frantics kits.  I don't love the Aurora monster rods kits in general.  I bought them and I built them, but I still don't love them.  I could easily be wrong, but most of the Aurora kits strike me as rushed and not well thought out.  A couple of them do not, for me, fit together well and they do not have the same sense of style and whimsy Hawk was able to put into the Weird-Ohs.  Part of the reason could be while Bill Campbell was apparently pretty much free to create, Aurora designers were limited by their subject matter.  They had to come up "funny" cars which more or less fit the Universal Monster who would be riding them.  Apparently the name of the vehicle had to start with the same letter as the monster's name in most cases.

All of the above being said, here is the original box for Frankenstein's Flivver:

And my built up:

Johnny West Corner

I am going to add a Johnny West figure to the bottom of each new entry until I run out of them.  The first figure to come out was actually Daniel Boone.  The figure was only issued in 1965.  A rather recent acquisition for me.  Took me quite a while to decide if I wanted one.  He doesn't quite fit with Johnny, since he was around about 150 years before our favorite cowboy.  Even more than the early Johnny and Chief Cherokee, Daniel is brittle and crumbles easily.  Get a stand if you are going to display him.  He takes a tumble off a shelf, he is going to, as Jim Croce said, "look like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone."  Unlike the rest of the line, Daniel's hips and legs are not articulated so that kind of sets him apart also.

Mostly what changed my mind about owning him is I had gathered up an almost complete set of his gear while I was trying to complete my Bill Buck and Jed Gibson.  You will notice a couple of off-color pieces still.  I don't have these yet in Daniel's brown, but I don't like the way he looks missing a belt.  I chose to leave off the bearskin poncho thingie because with it on he looks too much like Bill Buck.  It is just tucked away in a little box that says "Daniel Boone" on the end of it.  Actually, I have a 500 count card collector box dedicated to each of the figures which holds any accessories which they are not displayed with.   Although I might show an original box in this blog for illustration purposes or because I got one with a figure, I am not really a box collector.  I own original boxes for less than half my collection.

Daniel was sculpted to look like Fess Parker, the actor who played Davy Crockett for Disney and later Daniel Boone in the TV series of the same name.