Baggies to Blisters

[malpaso]

Following on from the excellent "Nostalgia" thread, does anyone else wonder how the changeover to blister packs happened , I.e. in the shops themselves.  As I recall one week there were bags and the next week a shiny new carousel, no baggies in sight!  Where did they go?  Did Airfix recall them all and rebox?  I don't recall seeing baggies and blisters side by side anywhere.

I actually liked the blisters as they caught the loose parts and less breakage.  Though we soon spotted some kits had moved up to Series 2, the robbers!

Cheers

Will

[old thumper]

I don't know for sure as I was a bit young back then. I think I remember seeing the bagged kits in bargain boxes though, they always looked very tatty and nobody seemed interested in buying them.

[Richard Humm]

I remember one of my local model shops having both bagged and blister packed Airfix kits on the back wall in the early 1970s.

 

The reason some kits moved from Series 1 to Series 2 when the change came is that the parts wouldn't fit in a blister pack (for example, the F4U with its one-piece lower wing).

[Seahawk]

One way of working out when the changeover came is to think of kits that you can only recall being issued in blister packs.  For me two such are the Cherokee Arrow and the Scorpion tank.  Scalemates isn't too sure when in the 70s the Arrow came out but dates the first appearance of the Scorpion to 1975.  

[Graham Boak]

I received the Arrow and the Canberra from my best man the night before my wedding: that makes the release date the first week in September 1974.  However, possibly failing memory says they both came in boxes.

[Richard Humm]

The Arrow was announced in the October 1974 Airfix Magazine, so could well have been out in September (I remember buying the BN Defender a couple of months before it was mentioned in Airfix Magazine). The Canberra may have been out earlier in 1974. However, the first issue of the Arrow was definitely in a blister pack. The first boxed Series 1 kits in the UK don't seem to have been out until late 1978, though they were boxed in Germany a couple of years earlier. IIRC, the German ones were initially a blister pack folded over and put into a box.

 

The blister packs came out in 1973. I think there's a reproduction of an advert from the time showing the Matilda in one of Arthur Ward's books.