djrost2000's story about the Revell Type VII (alias Type IX) U-boat is a rather interesting one. It's a rare instance of a model manufacturer backing off from an unethical marketing ploy.
The stunt occurred, if I remember correctly, in the very late seventies or the early eighties - a rough time for Revell, and most other manufacturers. I was working in a hobby shop at the time, and it was generally assumed that the days of the American scale plastic model kit were numbered. Aurora had gone out of business, Monogram had been bought out by Mattel (and was releasing things like Snoopy and His Sopwith Camel), and Revell seemed to be on the ropes. It was releasing scarcely any new scale models other than cars.
That Type VII U-boat never was a state-of-the-art kit; in terms of detail it didn't match stuff Revell had produced ten or fifteen years earlier. I suspect many of the people in the company management didn't know anything about ships. (The CEO at the time was the widow of one of Revell's founders; it's pretty clear from the documentation of the time that she knew virtually nothing about scale modeling.) If we want to be charitable we can call it a more-or-less honest mistake: to the average person, there is little if any difference between a Type VII U-boat and a Type IX. Revell was looking desperately for ways to marke its kits, and apparently hoped to capitalize on the fame of U-505, which is seen by tens of thousands of people every year at the Science Museum in Chicago.
The trouble, if I have the story straight, started when the museum's gift shop started selling the "U-505" kits. Most people probably can't tell the difference between a Type VII and a Type IX, but thousands of people can - and a high percentage of them make it to that museum eventually. Customers screamed at the museum, the museum screamed at Revell, and Revell, to its credit, took the kit off the market. Since then, to my knowledge, in all its incarnations it's been labeled a Type VII.
Would that things like that happened more often. The plastic ship model market is full of deceptive stunts like that. I don't know of another instance in which the modelers fought back - and won.
Youth, talent, hard work, and enthusiasm are no match for old age and treachery.