A Brief History of Corvette Promotionals
Promotional models or promos as they are more commonly known are 1/25 scale preassembled/prefinished models of a given car.
During their early history dating back to the early 1950's promos were produced for car manufacturers and dealers to be given away to prospective and new car buyers. Unfortunately most of these early promos have not survived having been the victims of early plastic that warped easily or ended as children’s play things. In recent years promos have become valued as instant collectibles by an increasing number of collectors or as tampo printed commemoratives of particular events or occasions.
This article is not meant to be a detailed analysis or a complete history of promos. I’ll leave that up to the promo collectors to write. On a web site dedicated to scale Corvettes, it is important to discuss promos since many of the kits that we build have come from the same molds that produced the prefinished promos that we could have bought or wished we’d bought.
The popularity of Corvette models cannot be disputed with the first promos becoming available shortly after the first production Corvettes hit the street. Since that time the Corvette promo market has been dominated by a couple of very familiar names, MPC and AMT. Each year the company would produce a promo in a variety of authentic colors and we as modelers would later benefit by having a more detailed kit to build. This has continued from the ‘50's through to the present day with the result that we as modelers can have a complete year by year collection of Corvette models on our display shelves.
In the last decade AMT has also begun to provide us with buildable models of some of their promos in their SnapFast line of kits, examples being the 1953, Stingray III, ‘96 coupe and roadster and ‘97 coupe. In each case the molds also provided the promo collector with increasingly more interesting and complex promos. One criticism that could be truthfully leveled against many promos was their lack of detail and use of a single color for the entire kit. Over the last few years promos have been steadily improving with multiple colors and full markings applied to models such as the ‘95 and ‘98 Pace cars and the standard setting Mako Shark I. Unfortunately just as promos were reaching a plateau that rivaled what the modeler could create AMT seems to be abandoning the field. Hopefully the proposed limited production Revell promos will merely be the start of a new era in promos, for without them we may not have as many built models to line our shelves with.
For a complete list of promos made, check the Corvette Reference section in our site.
Page updated 04/05/00