Bill Bruegman has the kind of job a lot of us only dream about.  As president of Toy Scout's Inc., he makes his living buying, selling, collecting and writing about toys.  And not just any toys.  He's the one and only author of Aurora: History and Price Guide, which we excerpted for this Imaginarium's article on Aurora. He's also a gracious and kind interviewee who was more than happy to share his insights about the popularity and even spirituality of modeling and toy collecting.

What motivated you to such a Herculean task?

Probably the same passion that you say you had as a child.  That, and I didn't get as many of Aurora's as I would have liked to. [Laughs]

Who did?!

When I was seven or eight, I had this friend who was always able to get the ones I couldn't find.  He'd bring them over and spend the night and we'd look at the box art and then wake up early the next morning and build them.

What was your first Aurora kit?

I think it was Superman.

That brings up an interesting point.  Aurora did a lot more than just the monster kits but people seem to remember those first.  Why do you think that is?

Well, their Monster line is definitely their signature kit.  It was definitely a case of being in the right place at the right time with the right product.  Another good example of that would be Ohio Art with the Etch-A-Sketch or the James Co. with their Slinky.  They all did other things but nothing is quite as well known.  In fact Aurora did figure kits for six or seven years before they started their monster line.

Arguably Aurora kits were the apex of the whole Monster craze.  The only thing in the same league as far as popularity went was Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. But what do you think fueled the craze for the monster kits specifically?  What was it about those figures that plastered them into the American psyche?

Well, for one thing the kits were so life-like. And they were carefully detailed after the Universal Monsters.  They weren't just generic Frankensteins and Draculas, they were Boris Karloff Frankensteins and Bela Lugosi Draculas. Because of television syndication Universal was able to sell it's movies as a package to TV.  And they really took off. In fact right about this time was when the whole horror host craze was really big.  So a kid could get a kit that was identical to what he saw on late night Friday TV.  It was an incredible tie-in.  Secondly, I'd have to say the box art. James Bama's images were so powerful.  Nobody could ever say Aurora skimped on the packaging.  In fact Aurora didn't skimp anywhere.  They had the best sculptors, the best everything.  They were definitely the leaders.

I've always wondered too, about the idea that it was adults validating these things for kids. People trusted authority a lot more back then.  Having an adult on TV affirm your interest in monsters, especially when he was dressed up in some crazy costume and hosting a Creature Feature was really powerful.  Not to mention Forrest J. Ackerman and Famous Monsters.  It was one thing to argue with your school friends about which Universal Monster would win a cage match but it was another to take it a step further and get to explore it with your own hands.  I mean you got to build your own Frankenstein. Wow!

Oh, yeah.  That's right on the button.

One question I have has to do with the current wave of nostalgia.   Over the last ten years we've seen the rise of whole television networks, tons of "look back" type books about toys and games.  I even saw one the other day devoted solely to breakfast cereal box art and prizes from the 60's.   But until recently it's been impossible to obtain plastic figure kits?  Why did it take so long for them to make a comeback?

Well actually it was attempted a few times in the late 70's and early 80's by Monogram but they were trying to sell the product to a younger generation that was just discovering computer games.   Monsters aren't always trendy, they're always in the background but they're not always the thing.  Timing is everything in the nostalgia market.

This brings up an interesting point.  Why, outside of the vinyl kit industry, don't we see the development of new figures?  There's the occasional Independence Day or Alien tie-in, but beyond that you don't see Freddie Krueger, or Jason or Pinhead being made into affordable plastic figures.  Why aren't those figures inspiring the same level of devotion?  I mean, the old classic monster figures are actually being re-issued.

Yeah, but the target market is still you and I.   For better or for worse the world seems beyond the time when a kid, on their own, would sit down and spend a couple of hours putting a kit together.  Nowadays he's liable to be doing something electronic, or maybe even putting together a web page.  You may see Freddie, or Jason appear in plastic model form in another ten or fifteen years.

I think you're right.  But don't you think there's a difference between Jason and Frankenstein, or Pinhead and Dracula?  The new monsters lack a certain fairytale quality to me.

Yeah, well you know, a lot of the older classic monsters started out as normal people and even after they became monsters they were more to be pitied than feared.  Poor tortured Larry Talbot forced to become a ravening wolf when the Autumn moon burned bright, or Frankenstein's Monster forsaken by it's creator, left to wander the world hated and despised.  There was a tragic element to their stories that's missing in most of the modern horror tales.  Today's monsters seem to be there for shock value only.  The two kinds of monsters come from almost two completely different worlds.

Well,  the least sympathetic of all the Universal Monsters, Dracula,  hasn't been reissued which seems to help make your point.  Especially since the vampire is such a prominent figure on TV and film right now.  But the vampire's changed in ways those other classic monsters haven't. Vampires today are almost always anti-heroes.  Blade would be a good example.  Bela Lugosi was not an anti-hero.  He was the personification of evil.  So was Christopher Lee.  Do you think we'll continue to see Universal's Classic Monsters through the years?

Oh, yeah.  Of course Universal is going to be around long after we're gone and these have been very successful properties for them.  There's no question in my mind that they're going to outlast the Freddies, and the Jason's.

[For more on this discussion of comparing classic monsters to contemporary "slashers," see Lint Hatcher's and Rod Bennett's article here at the Imaginarium, "Monster Fan 2000".  -- ed.]

It's been funny to me through the years to watch Universal try to update the characters but they've never really been successful doing that.  People still want the Karloff Frankenstein and the Chaney Wolfman and Mummy.  Do you think there's any unhealthy aspect to the nostalgia craze?

It is problematic.  Take collecting .  It can become an obsession just like alcoholism or gambling.  I've seen a lot of divorces and trouble in people’s lives because of it.  And there are a lot of lonely people out there who use it vicariously.  Don't get me wrong.  I think collecting is a wonderful thing.  But I've been in the field for a lot of years and for instance I've seen the Trekkie thing get out of hand in peoples lives.

I have a friend who’s written what is essentially a positive book on Star Trek , but he addresses that very thing.  I remember one time having the opportunity to visit them home of one prop and toy collector and he told that after an earthquake he'd contemplated suicide because of losing a number of things.

I don't think you see a finer example of materialism than in collecting.

What do you think has kept that from happening to you?

Being  a dealer -- for one thing.  If I were to win the lottery tomorrow, I suppose that I'd be more of a collector.  But as a dealer I get to have everything on the shelf for a little while.  And since I always have stuff coming in and only have so much shelf space I have the benefit that the stuff around me is always changing.  “Everything's for sale” is my motto.  And sure I pull a few things out for myself but usually those aren't even the things that have a high dollar value.  They just happen to be things I like.  I collect over sixty different things myself, and many of them are things that probably no one else in the world collects -- but that's the beauty of it.  I don't have to keep up with the Joneses.   I don't collect those things so I can show off to my friends -- that I have something rarer or in better shape.  I collect because it means something to me.  That's collecting in its purest sense I think.  My favorite thing to collect are things I remember or things I actually had from my childhood.  So I guess I'm more of a memory collector than I am a collector of any specific thing.  There's just something about looking back at that time of life and forcing yourself to slow down and appreciate it.  It could be a worthless old newspaper with an ad for a store that I used to go to or it could be a valuable model kit. Either way it's not the thing itself.  A good example would be the Aurora kits.  There are really only six kits in my own collection, and those are the ones I had as a kid.  I'm like everybody else who loved Aurora -- I'd like a Big Frankie or a Godzilla's Go-Cart -- but I don't have to have them.   Of course, as a dealer I have had them all -- in a sense.

Do you feel you have a sense of spirituality that comes to bear on your love of collecting particularly monster oriented stuff?

I don't know.  I've never had the sense that my spirituality was degraded by appreciation of these things.  In many cases, it’s just the opposite that has been true – especially when you're talking about the older Universal horror creatures.  Being a child during the first big monster craze and then growing older and developing that sort of appreciation of the characters does help you to understand how deep those stories really are.  The books the characters are based on are considered classics and so are many of the films.  I've not really watched much horror films from the 70's to the 90's.  The slasher craze and emphasis on violence misses the whole point to me.  The early stories had so much substance and meaning.  They were no different to me than King Arthur going out to slay a dragon.

C.S. Lewis talked and wrote a lot about myth and the importance of encouraging it in children' lives.  I'm so grateful for being introduced to that, in part, by Universal Studios and Aurora.

Yes.  To appreciate myth, you have to have a pretty fundamental understanding of good and evil. That understanding is very convoluted in today's films.  You start out with that black and white view and move on to the gray later.  But today's films are all twisted up when it comes to that.

Thanks for talking to us Bill.  We hope to run into you at one of the shows.


If you are a fan of Aurora make sure to get yourself a copy of Bill's book.  And be sure to check out our review of it as well as Bill's website, Toy Scout's Inc.

See also: It's Alive: Aurora Monster Models
Rise From the Dead