The Little World

Okay, I get it to some extent.

If you’re making plastic model kits that you want to sell in the hundreds of thousands to little kids, you need to take into account that they will not be painting them. Heck, the littlest ones won’t even be decalling them – they’ll just go from box to gluey fingers to the sand pile in a straight line.

I get that there has to be some visual reward for the non-expert builder who just claps plastic together and puts on the decorations. An X-plane can be moulded in white ( apart from the X-15 ) and a P-47 can be moulded in olive drab green and a Hellcat can be moulded in dark blue. Heck, if you’re Aurora you can mould the decal position onto the wings and the kids will be grateful.

If you’re Matchbox you can make the wings and tail a different colour plastic from the fuselage and someone will be happy.

But why, oh why, did Revell choose the Insanity Yellow for the plastic on the P-26? They could have picked the other two common colours for the thing – the blue or the olive drab – and made it just as good. If they wanted to matchbox the thing they could have made the fuselage, wheel spats, and tail in the dull colours and the wings in yellow and been champions of the school. Instead we got the Yellow Peril.

I was tempted to turn the saturation up to “9” and freak you all out. Be thankful I have no fluorescent pink backdrop boards or your monitor would be smoking as you read this.

I opted for a plain grey Mr. Surfacer undercoat and a semi-gloss black pre-shade. That’s hideous enough as it is. You’ll have to take antacid tablets until tomorrow when the final paint reveal is ready.

Take some comfort – it must be worse in the model hot rod world.