The Thing That Would Not Die

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What he wants to do is to diversify enough to fight off challenges from the Hasbros and Mattels of the world. (Playing Mantis has already survived trademark-infringement litigation with Mattel. The suit was settled out of court.) He now has 2 solid brands; he'd like to build up to 10.

And he has two secret weapons. The first: customers such as the guys on the bulletin board, gleeful pseudo-grown-ups who share his child-of-the-'60s sensibility. The second: his company's ability to spin on a dime and give those guys what Lowe knows they want.

That's how he decided to revive a line of monster models originated in the '60s by a company called Aurora Plastics Corp. In those years, Aurora models were bigger than Star Trek. Aurora produced model kits of classic monsters (like the Wolf Man and the Mummy) as well as characters from television (like Batman and Superman). And did they ever sell! "Those guys were easily putting out 200,000 or 300,000 units at a run. I'm sure some of the best-sellers, like Frankenstein and Dracula, were up there with sales of 2 million or 3 million apiece," says Thomas Graham, professor of American history at Flagler College, in St. Augustine, Fla., and author of Greenberg's Guide to Aurora Model Kits. "At the time, plastic models of all sorts were sold everywhere -- in candy shops, drugstores, bicycle stores -- and I even found mention of one mortuary. They were easy to find, they were inexpensive, and pretty much all your friends were building them."

By the 1980s, Aurora was gone, a victim of bad business decisions. With it went the entire market for monster models. The models weren't missed until their original fans grew older and started searching for the icons of childhood -- a pursuit that Graham claims is healthy. "The people I know who are living long and prospering are those who still enjoy playing," he says. "Playing with toys in particular."

Take Lowe, for example. He built Aurora models as a kid and remembered one with special fondness: the haunted house from The Addams Family TV series. "I loved it," he says. So in 1995, under the name Polar Lights (Get it? Aurora? Polar Lights?), Lowe had the kit re-created, offering it as a $60 exclusive at the high-ticket FAO Schwarz toy-store chain.

The collector's market went nuts. Original Addams Family house kits were selling in Toy Shop for at least $500. A year later, when the remade kit went into wide release at less than $25, a new market was born. Make no mistake: the days of 300,000-unit runs of a monster model are over. Most Polar Lights kits are produced in runs of 15,000 units. Yet Polar Lights has been successful enough for the line to be expanded to include 60-odd kits. To date, the most successful is a new original done in the Aurora style: a model of the Jupiter 2 spaceship, the interstellar Winnebago featured on the TV series Lost in Space.

Playing Mantis launched Polar Lights just as intelligent life was being discovered in cyberspace. In late 1995 and early 1996 -- through bulletin boards on Prodigy, America Online, and other services -- collectors, craftspeople, and genre fans were discovering whole communities of like-minded souls.

Lowe and his managers caught on to the phenomenon -- sort of. In 1995 they stuck up a quick site, just some early brochureware. But for serious marketing, Playing Mantis held fast to traditional methods -- newsletters and print ads. Part of the reason for going slow on the Web was that Lowe was no fan of online customer interaction. "I would do chats and look at boards on AOL, but I found that I didn't get a lot of new ideas from them," he says. "Besides, there are some vicious people out there. Some of the employees who left would get on the boards and say things that just weren't true. There were competitors who got on there just to screw around with you. I might go on to see what's being said, but in terms of being Tom Lowe on the boards, I don't do it anymore."

But Greco had no such reservations. She and Hank Hagquist, an outside contractor who was Playing Mantis's original Web master, were old friends from Riley High in South Bend. Hagquist was running his own site, called Hobbytalk, for fans of radio-controlled car models. He talked to Greco about starting a section devoted to Playing Mantis products. "I thought they could be a good subject," he says. "I thought the people who bought or collected their products were real enthusiasts, people with a passion."

In 1998, Hagquist established a board for Polar Lights, moderated by Greco. Dave Metzner, the company's product-development manager for model kits, helped Greco answer board members' questions. But it was she who ruled the board. Judiciously leaking product news, insisting on cordial relations and polite language, Greco -- signing missives with an enthusiastic "Moi!" -- gathered a loyal cadre of fans to her cyberclubhouse. Yet even after hundreds of members had signed on, she didn't fully understand the potency of the boards until Polar Lights released that model of the Jupiter 2.

The kit, enthusiastically received, had a flaw: a hatch inside the ship was upside down. That detail would escape 99.9% of normal buyers. But this was the Internet, where obsessive behavior hangs its hat. Board members were all over the error, and Metzner, with Lowe's approval, decided to correct the flaw for the second run of the kit.

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