SCALE MODEL NEWS

WE HOPE YOUR CHRISTMAS DAY WAS A GOOD ONE! And here's another photo album for you to while away some post-turkey moments. The 1984 movie Ghostbusters has become one of the best known fantasy movies ever made. Matching its popularity must be the awesome number of kits and diecasts featuring Ecto-1, the Cadillac ambulance ( header pic ) used by the trio who saved New York from forces beyond our imagination. Old model kits never die, they just carry on being interesting ( below ). The Rambler company is no more, but it was once a well regarded brand with cars that included the Rambler Station Wagon. The 1:25 scale kit produced by  Jo-Han  was subtitled a 'Curbside Custom Cruiser.' Area 51 ( below ) continues to be a subject of intense discussion and argument among UFOlogists and conspiracy theorists. So this UFO diorama by Mat Irvine echoes the debate by featuring military personnel and a government agent, inspecting dead or dying aliens at the scene of a disastrous crash. ...

David Jefferis on close encounters: On the night of September 19-20, 1961, the US couple Betty and Barney Hill reckoned they experienced a close encounter with a UFO. During the incident they ‘lost’ two hours, but survived intact, to file a report to US Air Force investigators the very next day. They claimed to have seen a silent, cigar-shaped craft, crewed by up to 11 humanoid aliens. The Hill Incident There was no hard proof for their story, but the Hills insisted it was true, and that they had been kidnapped for a short time by the UFO. The event became the first widely-publicized claim of an alien abduction, and was later published as the best-selling 1966 book The Interrupted Journey and the 1975 TV movie The UFO Incident . Well, the Hill Incident took place half a century ago, and assorted UFO stories have rarely been out of the media since, or indeed, from toy and model company brochures. So what’s available right now? Atlantis UFO invader from outer space This 1:48 scale model...

SMN report: We mostly associate Tamiya with top-line traditional plastic kits - and quite rightly, for they are superb products, as we recently showed with the newly-released 1:32 scale P-51D Mustang. But Tamiya doesn’t stand still, and the company recently paid the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather Vietnam to create an ad campaign based around the catchline, ‘Tamiya Put It Together’.  Print ad series Ogilvy & Mather’s solution to the brief was a series of print ads featuring fictional kits based on popular and continuing conspiracy themes - Elvis Presley lives, Roswell UFO aliens, Moon Landing hoax, Who killed JFK, and the death of Marilyn Monroe. Fictional the kits may be, but O&M put much hard work into the visuals, which look really convincing until you look hard, and notice a few pointers to the truth - for example, the Lunar Rover sports a 1950s-era auto steering wheel, a cute in-joke we reckon, as the originals had side-stick controllers. Request to Tamiya Howev...