AMT/Ertl 1949 Mercury Customizing Series

The postwar Mercury is the quintessential custom car canvas. When was the last time you saw a stock example at a show? While the Merc is an attractive car in stock form, in the hands of the world's lead slingers, it became a custom culture icon throughout the '50's. So it stands to reason that when the assembly kit hobby really began to take off in the early '60's, the Mercury would make it's way into 1:25 scale kit form. That eventually happened in 1963, when AMT introduced the 1949 Mercury Club Coupe as part of it's full detail Trophy Series.

This popular kit has been reissued numerous times, most recently in 2017, packaged in a box based on the original kit box artwork. But this time, we are going to look at a reissue from 30 years prior to that, when the kit returned to the AMT/Ertl lineup under their short-lived Customizing Series of kits.

As stated, since the '49 Merc is a custom icon, it was almost mandatory that it become part of this series. The series also included the 1966 Ford Thunderbird, 1950 Ford Convertible, and the 1966 Buick Wildcat. All four kits were reissues, the Thunderbird and Wildcat being reissues of the original annual kits, and the '50, like the Mercury, a reissue of an earlier Trophy Series kit. We'll get into what was special about the Customizing Series in a bit, but first...

That box art is so 1987. Every time I see the box of an AMT kit from this era, vaporwave starts playing in my head. 【 ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ】All four Customizing Series releases featured similar artwork. The boxes were also larger than the standard AMT box of the era.

This will look familiar to pretty much any scale automotive modeler, so we won't dwell too much here. One thing you won't find are the finned Offenhauser heads, two-carb intake manifold, or the mesh custom grille screen. These were added to the kit for the 1991 reissue of the kit. This kit has an awful lot of flash- later runs of the kit aren't nearly as bad. And it always seemed odd to me that the Merc seemed so light on custom parts when it's so well known as a lead sled.

The kit comes with two chrome sprues- the one with car parts and the other being AMT's standard car show props sprue. This and earlier versions of the kit include a grip shifter and piston/rod that are missing from later issues. The twin carb setup and twin bullet grille are also not present- these parts were also added for the 1991 reissue.

The one-piece window unit and lenses all come on one runner.

The kit includes two decal sheets. One is car-specific, complete with a graphic for the easel included with the car show props. You can fill in your own name and such in the blank spots. The other is a generic sponsor sheet that seemed to be in every AMT kit from that era. This kit also has printed whitewalls, though they're not anywhere near as good as the current printed tires from Round 2, from a quality standpoint.

This kit has two instruction sheets. The one for the kit itself, which is more or less common to every version of this kit, and the second, which is part of what made the Customizing Series special...

The second sheet shows the four kits in the series, and goes on to explain tips and tricks for customizing the model. To help you in this, AMT also threw in some tools and supplies.

Here are those tools and supplies... an emery pad, a small sheet of sandpaper, putty shaping tools, and two-part putty, which I doubt will be any good after all this time. As always... paint and cement were still sold separately.

I don't know how well the Customizing Series caught on, but considering that it only consisted of four kits and doesn't seem to have continued too far past 1988, I think it would be safe to surmise that it wasn't exactly a hit. That being said, the core kit is still worth it. Today the inclusion of the customization pamphlet and tools would be more of a quaint curiosity than anything. I am guessing that the tools you already have would be better than what's included here, up to and including the now ancient two-part putty! There's no real reason to pick up this issue of the kit over any other unless you like the box art. Or if you you can get it for a bargain-basement price, as I did with this one.

The Customizing Series is an interesting example of the kit manufacturers doing the classic "new bread with old flour" trick, which continues today with Round 2's penchant for classic box art, decals, and restoring altered kits back to their former glory. And who knows? Maybe they'll try the Customizing Series, or something similar, again at some point in the future. What's old is new again, and the automotive scale model hobby seems to be thriving on that these days.