The Little World

Also known as the cop-out.

Our club motto is ” True To Life – True To Scale “. It is a stirring thought, and has undoubtedly been arrived at through much heated discussion. Like all mottos, it is obeyed in reality sometimes, in spirit sometimes, and in the bin at others. There are models built by club members that are vessels of pure imagination – though they do not sail any worse for this.

I hope a battle of the motto will never be fought – that there will always be enough leeway and light behaviour to allow people to build what they please and to be proud of it. Even if it is not all that good, all that authentic, or all that believable…because the human imagination is a far more precious thing than a severe rule.

I have not strayed too far from reality in my scale model building – either in the childhood days or now that I am a dignified and serious adult ( can’t believe I wrote that… ). In the first period I had very little extra information to draw upon – most models were the result of building what the maker had put in the box. Of course, if the maker – like Aurora – made ghastly errors and foolish flights of fantasy, they were absolute truth to a kid, and it was only later literature that knocked the heads off the idols.

But even Aurora could be cut some slack when they made Famous Monsters. Hollywood had set up the fantasies, and Aurora was being damned authentic making injected plastic kits of them. I had few – and hardly ever ventured into the ” Big Daddy ” Roth sort of car monster – but their graphic design did not bother me.

I did kick up at the television puppet shows that so enchant the British builders. There may have been Thunderbirds and Japanese space Yamatos and such, but just like Muffin The Mule and Thomas The Tank Engine, they did not penetrate to North America of the 50’s and now raise no nostalgia.

Should I quail at them when others build them? Not at all – the models can be very well-done and are subsisting in someone’s memory. I am equally happy with modern Hollywood fantasies translated to kits as long as I do not have to build them.