AURORA'S
The following proto-type was up on eBay recently...
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The seller's description for the Green Knight went as follows....
"AURORA GREEN KNIGHT PROTOTYPE MASTER PATTERN FROM THE HMS ARCHIVES.
All this week I will be selling some very special items from my own personal collection. These one-of-a-kind artifacts are part of the HMS Associates Archives, a large accumulation of prototypes, renderings & blueprints, publicity photos and other research material, and miscellaneous paper items that I purchased several years ago from the previous owner of this now defunct company.
In order to appreciate the importance of these pre-production pieces of toy history, a little background on the company that produced them is necessary.
HMS Associates, founded in the late 1940's by three partners, was based in Willow Grove Pennsylvania. The company specialized in product development, taking their client's abstract ideas and converting them into "patterns", prototypes that could then be sent to tool companies who would copy them and make metal production molds.
In 1952, one of HMS's partners, Raymond Haines, solicited Abe Shikes, president of Aurora Plastics Corp., convincing him of the huge potential market for plastic model kits, which was expanding greatly at that time. Thus, an almost two decade long relationship was born in which HMS provided Aurora with prototypes for virtually all of their models, as well as slot car bodies. In addition to Aurora, HMS performed services for a number of other well-known toy/hobby companies, including MPC, Ideal, Hasbro, Galoob, Kohner, and Remco.
In 1994 the company was dissolved and all of it's assets sold, with the exception of the archives. The last owner (who purchased the company in 1989) was savvy enough to save most of this wonderful material from being discarded. After many years of negotiations, I was most fortunate enough to be able to obtain the entire remaining contents of the archives, the best examples of which will be offered here on Ebay.
What we have here is one of the premier pieces from the archives! The legendary unproduced AURORA GREEN KNIGHT OF LANDSCHUT PROTOTYPE MASTER PATTERN! One can only speculate as to why Aurora never put this great kit into production. After all, the cost of creating this hand carved masterpiece was in the thousands of dollars even back in 1959! Although the kit was mentioned in the '59 dealer catalog, it never made it past this stage you see here. How unimaginable that it should survive 44 years, in pristine mint condition. The quality of craftsmanship is astounding, including the individual links of chainmail showing through between the sections of armor. Yes, this was entirely hand carved from solid blocks of acetate plastic.
The green color that you see is the color of the plastic, not paint. The head and chainmail were expertly painted at HMS in 1959. I have original dated color slides of the piece as documentation.
This is your only chance to buy a piece of Aurora model kit history that no other collector in the world will ever own. This is an unprecedented opportunity to acquire
absolutely unique pieces of baby boomer toy history. Everything I offer from
the HMS Archives is 100% lifetime unconditionally guaranteed to be authentic and as I represented it."
So there you have it! -Buc