Capturing the Imagination
One reason Pola was a favorite manufacturer of mine is because their catalog and packaging illustrations seemed to imbue their models with a kind of ethereal quality, which tends to draw one into the realm of imagination—the very same place one resides when getting a thrill just watching a little model train chugging 'round a simple loop of track. (It's the same reason I've always had a soft spot for first-gen Merten figures, which came in boxes with simple background artwork.) Other manufacturers did the same, but for some reason Pola's artists had a magical style that, to me, no one else seemed to capture.
