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SAVING THE PLANET…WHERE’S MY INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION?!
Can it be that “Ghidrah, The Three-Headed Monster” was only a silly Japanese cinematic fantasy?
Can it be that the Douglas X-3 Stiletto project, the most advanced aerodynamic and engineering marvel of its time, was a failure?
Can it be that the governments of Japan and the United States of America wouldn’t have pooled their technological resources to face this most terrible menace from Mars?
Can the releases of the movie and the Lindberg model, so close in time, be mere coincidence?
Can it be that the conversion of the Douglas X-3 into a high-performance jet- and rocket-powered stratospheric interceptor, armed with advanced targeting radar and powerful nuclear missiles—so Ghidrah could be intercepted and destroyed before he could return to Earth next time—is only the product of my imagination?
Yes. Even during month of March madness, all these things are true. Too bad that the quest for a weapon against Ghidrah reaches fruition only at NorthWest Scale Modelers and Seattle IPMS displays… and here in this column.
As I mentioned before, part of the reason for the resurrection of Lindberg line is that they're the only ones who ever went to the expense of making molds of certain unusual subjects in 1/48th scale, among them the X-3 Stiletto experimental aircraft. The plane was important, intended to advance the state of the art both in aerodynamic design and aeronautical engineering, particularly in the use of titanium as a primary structural material. It was to thoroughly explore flight at Mach 2.
From what I've read, however, the engines fitted never did reach their potential, and in consequence the airplane itself was only slightly supersonic, never approaching its design speeds. Still, its sleek lines and some of its construction features eventually went into the design of other aircraft, particularly the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter… which is coolest jet fighter that EVER was!
I should have built this model way back Then, but perhaps it was too expensive for me to buy, and I was never given it as a gift at Christmastime or my birthday. I did build models of the Douglas Skyrocket and North American X-15, though, which were also cool…
As I also mentioned before, way back Then, it never occurred to me to do other than assemble a kit per its instructions, and put on the provided decals to match the box art. Only in modern times Now have I fallen under the evil influence of the NWSM and IPMS gangs, with their ‘Model-fy’ and ‘Schneider 49’ group fantasy builds, and similar nonhistoric nonsense, and begun to realize that anything the mind imagines, the hands can model in plastic.
I admire craftsmen able to take the old Lindberg kit and make it into a good representation of this historically important—if somewhat disappointing—prototype. This kit definitely shows its age, with poor fit in places, the most rudimentary of cockpits, an unacceptably ‘see-through’ structure interrupted only by a pair of very crude jet engines in nacelles, and anachronisms like raised panel lines and coarse rivet detail. But I found it an adequate basis for my fantasy of dealing with Ghidrah.
My guilty pleasure, even in my…ah, let's be kind and just say ‘maturity’… is I still watch old Japanese monster movies. (When? When my wife goes off to visit grandchildren…you don’t think I’d try to expose HER to such cinematic epics, do you?) It doesn't matter how silly they are, or how cheesy the special effects. The 1964 movie cannot be recommended except to other Japanese monster movie fans. But for what it's worth, the Japanese monster movie industry (I don't think it's inaccurate to name it such) has gone from strength to strength over the decades since the first Godzilla movie. Plots may not have become more sensible and rational, but budgets and production values have steadily risen, along with the ability to simulate giant robots and monsters ever more convincingly. Ghidrah himself, aka ‘King Ghidorah’ or ‘Monster Zero’,
has appeared in several movies, always as difficult to defeat as in his debut, when it took the combined powers of Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra to send him packing. (They won not just by raw strength, but by good ‘moves’: Rodan plays aerial ‘Chicken’ with Ghidrah, who must’ve expected him to turn away, but POW! —Clobbered him head on! Godzilla employs the best soccer kicks to shower each of Ghidrah’s 3 heads with boulders. And Mothra, even as baby caterpillar, ties the Martian up in scads of sticky spider-webby silk goop. Good enough for him, too! —That’s how we do things on Planet Earth!)
The Ghidrah figurine you see here, that I found on eBay, is absolutely out of scale with the Lindberg model. The ‘real’ monster towers over a hundred meters high, and would absolutely dwarf my X-3 interceptor. I built the kit more or less stock, except that the prototype’s weak engines have been augmented by a pair of wingtip-mounted rocket thrusters, made from Monogram MiG-15 slipper tanks. The missiles came from an AA Models A-5 ‘Fantan’ attack plane kit, the auxiliary fuel tanks from the Monogram P-38 Lightning, and the ‘retractable’ attack radar antenna from bits from my scrap box and the guts of a worn-out computer hard disk drive.
The one area where you could say I tried to engage in some ‘serious’ modeling was that I put in some semblance of semi-‘realistic’ cockpit detail, bringing in a pilot figure, seat, control consoles, and various other bits and pieces from my spares box. So this could be seen, I replaced the kit’s bottle-glasslike injection-molded windows with thin clear ABS plastic sheet.
The whole exercise took only a few hours away from more serious projects…in keeping with our philosophy here:
Build what you want, the way you want to, and above all have fun!
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