Aurora was a huge company in the world of model cars in the 1960s and â70s. They were among the big brands of model car kits, but more importantly, held the pole position in the world of slot cars. Their Model Motoring, ThunderJet, and AFX slots led the charge in electric motoring in the US.
If you were a kid in 1972, you might also remember an additional line of Aurora toy cars. The Imposters was a new series that held an awesome secret. And as it turns out, an enduring mystery as well.
The Imposters were plastic-bodied cars, a little bigger than 1/18 scale. They were labeled as âmild-mannered street cars that change into mean racing machines!â You would wind up the mechanism on the mostly stock-looking cars, then press a release on the back of the chassis, and WHOA! The front of the car slowly, dramatically extended to expose a monster engine and drag pipes, the back popped open to reveal a fire-suited driver, and then it shot off like a rocket.
Pretty cool, huh? They show a VW Beetle, and an AMC Gremlin in action, as well as shots of a Ford Pinto and a 1940s Willys coupe. Collect them all!
Except for one thing⊠Youâre not likely to run across the Gremlin in an antique store or online or in a museum. Ever. Even though it shows up in the commercial, the Gremlin never made it into production. It seems the other three cars were the only ones to get to the store shelves, and only in a single color each. The VW in yellow, the Pinto in blue, and the Willys in pink.
Every comic book of the era showed a fantastically scribbly VW illustration along with photos of all the cars, sans the Gremlin.
However, marketing materials from Aurora for 1973 showed all four cars again. In fact, the Gremlin upped the game a bit. It appeared in the brochures in blue, along with decals on the side proclaiming it the âGotcha Gremlin,â and photos even show it with pop-up police lights sticking out of the roof.
So what happened to the Gremlin model? Here’s another video about the Imposter asking the same questions…Â
Model licensing 50 years ago wasnât as regulated and tight as it is today. So itâs not likely that American Motors nixed the model for legal reasons. In fact, AMC owned Jeep, which included the Willys brand, so allowing one but not the other would have been odd.
And it seems unlikely that Aurora would axe one model out of a proposed quartet for budget reasons, as the company was riding high in the early 1970s. If anything, it would have made sense to expand into more models. Hey, everyone in my neighborhood owned at least one of them!
Maybe there was a problem with the production of some of the parts. Other companies, such as Hot Wheels, sometimes chose to abandon certain models if a mold was damaged or lost. On the other hand, the elaborate mechanism in the Imposters cars was at least 90 percent identical across all the cars, so the parts differences were just the cosmetic plastic body panels.
The cars in marketing materials were shown in colors that were never actually mass-produced⊠it seems the three known cars were only released in single colors. So the Gremlin may have just been a pre-production prototype that wasnât as close to prime time as the others, and it fell by the wayside due to deadlines.
So weâre left with a trio of real Imposters and one fake Imposter. If you can shed any light on what happened back then or better yet, actually own the Gremlin model, let us know in the comments!
Ron Ruelle is a cartoonist, writer, and illustrator who also writes about model cars. You can see his work at www.ronruelle.com
I’m wondering if how much it favored the Hot Wheels “Open Fire” six wheeled Gremlin with aircraft engine subdued it?