Model making companies - who makes what?

No easy answer here. This seems like a soap opera called "How the Plastic Turns."

Tamiya is the distributer for Italeri in Japan. You will see Italeri kits in Tamiya boxes there. Tamiya's original M242 Hummer was an Italeri kit.

Italeri provided parts of kits (M4A1 Sherman lower hull and running gear) to Dragon/DML/Shanghai Dragon Sherman kits.

Revell of Germany sells Dragon/DML/Shanghai kits in RoG boxes.
Revell of Germany sells Italeri kits in RoG boxes (sometimes adding German specific fitting on a separate sprue and Diehl tracks).
Revell of Germany boxes the AFV Club M88A1 with German specific fittings.
Revell of Germany reboxes the old Monogram M34 and Willys MB Jeep kits.
Revell of Germany reboxes the old Esci M60A3 kit.

Italeri reboxes the old Esci M60A1 and M60 Blazer kits as well as the old Esci 1/72 scale kits.
Italeri and Zvezda box one another's kits in each other's boxes.

Zvezda reboxes old Dragon/DML/Shanghai modern Soviet kits.

Academy used to copy Tamiya kits but now do their own decent kits.

Trumpeter used to copy Tamiya and Academy kits but now do their own kits.

AMT/Ertl did rebox Esci kits, but now Italeri owns the Esci armor molds.

Revell and Monogram have merged and are now Revell-Monogram. The old kits pop up in the other's box to make folks think they are new. Revell has the old Renwal kits and releases them on occasion. Some (M41, M42 and M47) have popped up in Matchbox as well as Revell of Germany boxes. Monogram has the old Aurora molds and has released the old 1/48 scale Aurora M4A3E8 and Panther at least once.

There is some Matchbox-Revell of Germany-Airfix connection where these kits pop up in one another's boxes.

You don't even want to try to figure out the Eastern European companies like Techmod, Alan, Mirage, RPM, Toga, AER....it'll make your head spin.

Since it appears everyone is making or distributing everyone else's stuff, maybe we oughta start combining names. For instance,
"Wow, that must be the new Revellogramawafixiyademy kit!"

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Gip Winecoff

Zvezda and Italeri are now releasing old DML modern soviet armor kits under their own labels.
Italeri is also releasing old Esci 1/72nd kits under thier label.
I have the AFV Club Aussie FSV which has sprues from the Academy M113.
The Revell-Germany Ural 4320 was previously released by Omega-k and a couple of other eastern european companies. The plastic on some of Revell-Germany's newer releases (Marder 1a3, Fuchs, Luchs, PZH 2000 etc) is the same that is used by eastern european companies.

i know this is to do with aircraft but in the 2003 Tamiya catalogue there are 1.72nd aircraft that have just appeared where have they come from?

Thanks for the replies.

Rob - Thanks for the info. I didn't know Revell was still trying to stay in the armor game - I thought they had all but vanished - staying with their bread & butter - The "57 Chevy" & the "Dukes of Hazard Charger". So you're saying you probably aren't buying a Revell made armor model and it might not be a bad one at that.

Kaleu - Thanks for the info -I'll put that in the memory bank

Caveman - You're right - It's like buying appliances - there's only two or three companies making them but there's forty companies with their name on them.

But to make things more interesting - On the Italeri website, if you click on distributors - then click on the US (on a little map) the US distributor for Italeri is Testors - who definetly have been disapearing from the armor business.

But what with this Italeri -Dragon combo. There's two ways to look at it:
Someone could be making out well buying an Italeri - and ending up with a Dragon
But someone could be disappointed buying a Dragon & getting an Italeri