The Little World

Shed a tear for the poor bedraggled box-scale kit that sits abandoned on the hobby shop shelf.

It may have been there for months or years – left all alone in the world when its maker passed into the great bankruptcy in the sky. It is getting dented and dusty…shabbier with each passing day.

And worse is to come. Its mould has been put up for sale and acquired by a garage factory somewhere in Middle Europe. It will have any internal birthmarks savagely scrubbed off with a Dremel grinder and be put to work in the moulding shop. Plastic of unknown composition will be forced into it under some uncontrolled pressure and the flashed or short-shotted results squashed into a cardboard box.

It will be a mercy if the factory pays a local graffiti artist to paint a new box top picture…if money is tight the old one will be Photoshopped back onto the cheap cardboard.

The decals will be revised by a local kindergarten and printed by hand with a rubber stamp. They are merely for decoration, though not of the kit. They’ll fly into fragments as soon as water touches them.

But be of good cheer. The price will be modern and reflect the 70 years of inflation since the mould was first used.