Spotlight Hobbies


Steve Scott talks about the Monogram kit in his blog that was linked to in the comment section at the bottom of the Autopian article... *LINK*

His blog faq is linked below.

Here's the quote from Steve Scott's blog about Monogram... and it isn't pretty:

"Will Monogram ever re-release their model kit? No, absolutely not… for several reasons. As I was told several times, and as many other people have been told through the years, that the tooling was “scrapped” many years ago… even though it was our verbal agreement / contract that I could buy the tooling if they ever stopped producing it! After they SOLD OUT to big Detroit money and started focusing on muscle cars, they discontinued the kit WAY too soon. I called many times, every couple of months, and was told each time that the unused tooling wasn’t available for sale “yet”. Then… I was told that it was “scrapped”! Not nice at all! It doesn’t bother me at all that Monogram no longer exists.

They also mistreated me in other ways that made me not want to talk to them if they ever happen to contact me about reproducing it again… something that never happened. They paid me to put together a package of everything they needed to make the tooling and the packaging, thereby saving them A LOT of development cost! I paid a draftsman to measure everything and make a complete set of plans / blueprints. I sent MY plans to them, with MY copyright notice all over them, along with several photos for reference, copy (words) for the box, instructions, etc… AND ALL the very high quality, COPYRIGHTED color transparencies of the car that I took, that were used on the boxes! They should have paid me A LOT more just for the use of MY color transparencies that they used on the boxes! Everything was MINE that I LOANED to them. It was ALL supposed to be returned to me after the kit was produced. This DID NOT HAPPEN!

WORSE… several years ago, a hobby store owner was selling three of MY COPYRIGHTED black and white photos on eBay that I LOANED to Monogram! He even stated in his eBay description that a friend acquired them while he was working at Monogram! I wrote to him and told him that they were my property, that however he acquired them… they were stolen! He didn’t care. I had to pay him $20 for them! Yes, he will have a nice write-up on my website one of these days, and most definitely in my book! The color transparencies have not turned up. If anybody knows anything about the whereabouts of my other black and white photos, color transparencies, copyrighted plans / blueprints, etc.; please let me know.

On a much brighter note… I’m working on producing a MY OWN much better, “All New And Improved”, new kit! Go here to learn about it: www.UncertainTModelKits.com

Even better news! Since Monogram developed and produced their Uncertain-T model kit using MY very detailed and COPYRIGHTED blueprints / plans that I LOANED to them… which they never returned to me… then abruptly stopped producing the kit… MUCH sooner than they should have… and soon scrapped the tooling which they PROMISED to sell to me, I consider that I will be keeping their promise for them by making MY OWN tooling to exactly reproduce the original kit. Whatever copyrights they had, they transferred back to me when they didn’t honor the verbal contract with me to sell the tooling to me!"

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