The Little World

I do not mean to suggest that the activity cannot lighten the heart – that people cannot devote their spare time to it and come away happier. Many of us do, and want the good feelings to continue…in spite of the unwise purchase of kits that have gotten very bad reviews.

No, what I mean is that most of the attempts at jokes, humour, or outright laughter expressed as a three-dimensional scale model are doomed to failure. Things might be fun or funny when drawn or written about, but by the time they get to the styrene and paint stage they start to unravel.

Such is also the case when it comes to the fantasies that comic books or motion pictures put up. We’ve all seen the Aurora Famous Monsters series and some of the other AMT and MPC monster s in cars of the 60’s and 70’s. We’ve bought them and built them, and in some cases strived to make them look like the illustrations on the box art or the comics from which they were sourced.

Or we’ve invested in the slightly naughty whitemetal or resin castings of naked girls and tried to paint then to match the Armstrong, Petty, or Elvgren image that they were moulded from. Feeling ever so slightly guilty whilst doing so…

We would have been better, in most of these cases, getting out a dear old Airfix Spitfire and attempting to get the panel lines right and a decent amount of weathering on the wings – it would have been closer to reality and closer to fun.