SCALE MODEL NEWS

ON JULY 4, 1947, something supposedly happened near the town of Roswell, New Mexico, an event that the world has never forgotten. It was the purported crash of a UFO - an alien spacecraft - and the recovery of the crashed ship and several of its occupants. Mat Irvine:  Except that the incident may have been at a different spot, perhaps even somewhere else entirely, such as Socorro, 175 miles away. There are plenty of theories and conflicting reports, but one thing is common - interest in the ‘maybe’ event hasn’t gone away. A whole sub-industry has grown up around Roswell, including books, magazine articles, TV shows, movies, the Roswell UFO museum - and yes, model kits. A neatly designed and produced 1:48 scale Testors kit already features a manta ray-like UFO shape, supposed to be more correct than a circular flying saucer planform. And now there is a resin-based 1:48 scale kit ( below ) that includes the whole Roswell crash scene as a well produced diorama. What you get in the al...

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...