Monogram 1/24 Red Baron Kit First Look

By Michael Benolkin

First Look

If you were building models in the 1970s you'll remember a number of names like Big Daddy Ed Roth, George Barris, and others that appeared on kit boxes. Some of these names were full-scale customer car designers whose work would be miniaturized into kit form, while others worked in art concepts that would go straight into scale model designs, some of which would eventually be replicated as full-scale cars.

If these kits were in a Monogram box, one of those big names was Tom Daniels. Tom dreamed about designing cars as a kid and was accepted into design school before heading off to Detroit to live the dream of designing cars. Unfortunately, the reality was that it was rare to be able to design a whole car and Tom did designs for car and truck hoods for several years before heading back to California to work on designing parts for the Apollo space capsule.

Tom Daniels also worked for one of the hot rod magazines designing concept cars and this eventually led to a relationship with Monogram Models to help them create kits of his designs. Some of these designs and kits became so popular that others started building full-scale versions of these designs for the custom car shows. Over 70 designs would eventually find themselves recreated as kits and/or die-cast collectables.

I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Revell was reissuing this kit. I remember building this model many many many years ago. Of course I threw out the car and kept the Fokker Dr.I...yeah right. This has to be one of the coolest designs to come off of Tom Daniel's drawing board and I couldn't resist building it again after all of these years.

The kit is molded in bright red styrene and presented on five parts trees, two of those trees are chromed. A set of rubber hot rod tires round out the release. As you can see in the parts images, one tree is dedicated to the miniature Fokker Dr.I while the rest of the parts are for the hot rod.

I actually picked up two of these kits, one to build and one 'just in case'. Why? This kit is a good candidate to strip off the plated chrome. The chrome plating covers up some detail in these parts but doesn't cover up flash edges. It is also difficult to touch up this chrome where the sprue attachments are cut away and any flash is removed. Stripping off the chrome, cleaning up the parts, then applying Alclad II chrome and other metal shades, where appropriate, will really provide a nice contrast. If it doesn't, I have the chromed parts in the other kit...

This really isn't a complex kit, but with the open frame and exposed engine, you can do a few extra tweaks to make the car stand out.

Revell has really stepped up its game in the last several years after being acquired by Hobbico. We're seeing kits reissued that haven't been available outside the collectors markets for decades and from what I can see, there is much more to come. While I am always pleased to see reissues of their more 'mainstream' kits, it is even nicer to see some of these gems like 'the Baron' return to store shelves, even for a short run. Revell is finally making use of many of those old molds that have been sitting around warehouses and we're seeing old friends that have been off of our shelves for far too long!