Many of us were thrilled in the early-to-mid 1960s when a strange and of course weird batch of models were produced by Hawk Plastic Models featuring wacky drivers of various vehicles ranging from dragsters to motorized coffins to worn out jet aircraft and beyond. The process of building these Weird-oh kits taught us a lot about assembly, painting, and unfortunately, clever ways to end a model’s era of display in our bedrooms, etc.
Schiffer Books has many titles of interest to model builders.
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Mark Cantrell, the author, got to know Bill Campbell, who lived well into his nineties, and covered his life as an artist and at the same time covered much of the History of Hawk Plastic Models. The book is divided into seventeen parts and contains a large number of pictures of Campbell’s drawings, box art and proposed models and other forms of art, including some of Campbell’s political cartoons.
The most interesting chapters for modelers start with Part 3, The Hawk Years, which describes how Bill Campbell, then an artist for a company called Promotional Arts, happened to luck into an opportunity when an art director from a common tenant in his company’s building came and asked him if he was interested in delivering a box art painting that involved an aircraft. Since Bill could draw airplanes, he was introduced to the Mates brothers, who owned and managed Hawk Models, and once they saw his portfolio, they asked him if he'd complete a painting of a McDonnell F2H Banshee by the end of the week. Bill Campbell pulled it off and his involvement continued as the story of Hawk continued with him doing an increasing amount of box art for the company. Several interesting models we all remember such as Hawk’s chrome F-104 Starfighter in “Authenti-Plate” finish and the atomic-powered Beta 1 are amply described with photographs of models, box art and reproductions of the instructions along with the evolution of the company. |
Part 4 covers the development of the Weird ohs, which started out as doodles Campbell fiddled with on his drawing board and his effort to convince the Mates brothers that these drawings could be turned into models that could sell. Of course the well-known saga of how the first few Weird-oh models did not look exactly like the box art is described as well as how all twelve Weird-ohs came to be. The Part briefly includes side stories about how Hawk’s competitor Revell jumped into the fray with Ed Roth’s Fink “monsters” with some interesting comments about how Jim Keeler and Ed Roth felt about their production. Mark Cantrell did not cover Monogram or Lindberg’s lesser extent of jumping into the fray but mentioned how the success of the Weird-ohs was a financial boon for Campbell and fellow Hawk artist John Andrews with their nice 1963 Christmas bonuses.
Brudder Dick's "Freddy Flameout," a Bill Campbell design, built from the Hawk model kit.
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Part 5 covers the development of the “Silly Surfers” and also the less successful “Frantics.” Part 6 is an interesting description of “The Weird-ohs that Never Were” which included more ideas from Campbell that were not accepted by the Mates brothers or anyone else. Other parts cover Campbell’s political cartoons and other ideas he came up with over his long career that did not materialize into model kits, etc. but are interesting to read about nonetheless. How Hawk ended up and how the Weird-ohs were re-released in various incarnations and even with some different molding in a couple of cases are described.
The author did not appear to miss much of anything applicable and interesting and the book was an easy and fun read and brought back a lot of memories about Hawk, Weird-ohs and the Silly Surfers since I built plenty of Hawk kits in the 1960s. And if the reader is not really interested in some of Bill Campbell’s other endeavors that are covered in the book, there is enough information strictly about Hawk, Weird ohs and so forth to make having the book more than worthwhile. |
I can highly recommend the book to anyone with appreciation for excellent artwork, Hawk models and Bill Campbell’s wild ideas, which came to reality in terms of some very iconic and of course weird kits. It was amazing to read of the influence that Campbell had on the modeling world we so much appreciate.
--Dick Engar
--Dick Engar
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