Nice model on ebay, Jtilley

Verrrry interesting. Looks like some remarkably skilled Vietnamese craftsman is managing to make a living building ship models.

Some things about it bother me a little in terms of accuracy. I really don't care for the sails, which just don't look right, and there's something odd about the proportions of the bow.

I also get uncomfortable when I read phrases like "built from blueprints just like the real ship" (seventeenth-century shipwrights didn't use anything that resembled modern blueprints), and "true museum-quality model." I really wish that phrase "museum-quality model" would get removed from the English language. It means absolutely nothing. Museums don't pick models on the basis of any standard of quality as a modern modeler would define it. A miserably-detailed, out-of-proportion model that can be proven to have been built by an honest-to-goodness sailor on board the ship will get snapped up by a museum, whereas a beautifully-executed model of a nineteenth-century ship built by a twenty-first-century modeler probably won't. Some of the awfullest models I've ever seen have been in museums; the institution had perfectly legitimate reasons for acquiring and exhibiting them, but nobody would consider them examples for modern scale modelers.

I do wonder how that Sovereign of the Seas is going to get from Vietnam to the U.S.A. The shipping cost may exceed the purchase price of the model.

I read a few of his auctions. You need to lease a shipping container that will be shipped to the Port of Los Angeles. About $600.00.

I think I'd just sail it over.

Although a nice model, I too think it was built for a commercial purpose and it shows.

Add in the expense of shipping it from Los Angeles to wherever the buyer happens to live, and it's hard to believe it would be a reasonable investment - unless the initial price is mind-bogglingly low. If that modeler is able to sell such things to Americans on a regular basis, he must be getting far, far less than our minimum wage. But in Vietnam that probably counts as a decent income.

I'm reminded of a book I reviewed a couple of years back about the models that were built for the "Horatio Hornblower" cable TV series. The British filmmakers couldn't afford British (or American) ship modelers, so they went to the former Soviet Union in search of people who would build models for something like $20 per week. The guys they found were good carpenters with no modeling experience - as is pretty obvious in the TV shows.

I guess one's reaction to such things depends on how one looks at them. On the one hand, those E-Bay models (and the ones made for the Hornblower series) provide work for skilled, decent, hard-working people who otherwise would have trouble making a living. On the other hand, there sure is a whiff of exploitation here. I'm a big C.S. Forester fan and I think the young actor who played Hornblower is terrific, but I haven't had much inclination to watch the shows.

So, you noticed too that the ships took on a Russian or Turkish appearance? Even the full sized ship they used to represent the Indefatigable, 5th rate I think, was built in the Black Sea and to my eye, does not look British or French, but Turkish.

To my eye it doesn't look particularly Turkish either. As I understand it, that ... thing ... was built by a movie company for use in an Arnold Schwarzenegar movie that never got made. When the Hornblower producers were looking for cheap, believable locations and cheap, believable ships, they wound up with that ... thing ... and then had their inexperienced Eastern European carpenters build a model of it for the long shots.

Like I said, I didn't enjoy those shows much. It's a shame they weren't done with the same care - and budget - as "Master and Commander." I'm a die-hard Hornblower fan; it bugs me that Patrick O'Brien has gotten so much better treatment from Hollywood.

Do you remember the HMS Lydia? The 1950's Version of Capt HH with Gregory Peck and V. Leigh. In one scene where hornblower tells Bush to so something, as bush turns and runs aft, he slips on a rope and starts to fall but the scene cuts and moves to something else. I always wondered it that was a power or sound cable in the wrong place. BTW The ceilings were just a little too tall you think? Overall it was a great movie. The first battle with the Nativadad (sp) was just perfect on how HH sailed the ship ( yeah I know it was just make believe) . Although I doubt that even the insane spanish Capt 'El Suprimo' would have been able to sail the ship with the gun ports underwater?

Also in the scene in M & C when the ship is sailing south and "going" around the horn? The camera scans from bow to stern and you can see a seaman sitting on the heads with ice ans snow all around. my wife asked me about that ans was shocked to learn how they went to the Bathroom. I can't even thing how nasty that was in the dead of winter!

Jake

I'm a big Gregory Peck fan, but I can't help thinking of his Hornblower effort as a piece of fifties schlock. It wasn't bad for its day, of course, and the ships were better than the ones in the cable TV series, but cramming those three wonderful books into one movie was a bit much. And Hornblower with an American accent?

Forester himself spent some time in Hollywood doing movie scripts, but to my notion only one movie has really done justice to him: "The African Queen."

Regarding your wife's query - what can one say except: when ya gotta go, ya gotta go....

The auction looks like a scam to me

I have no reason to doubt the integrity of the guy who built that model - but I can't resist passing on an item I saw today in the local paper. It seems sombody is trying to sell, on E-Bay, half of a ten-year-old grilled cheese sandwich that allegedly bears an image of the Virgin Mary. Current bid: $7,500.

QUOTE: Originally posted by jtilley I have no reason to doubt the integrity of the guy who built that model - but I can't resist passing on an item I saw today in the local paper. It seems sombody is trying to sell, on E-Bay, half of a ten-year-old grilled cheese sandwich that allegedly bears an image of the Virgin Mary. Current bid: $7,500.

Yeah, I've read that too. Afterwards I ran to the carbage-can to save that piece of Pizza that looked a little like Elvis. Gonna save that and make a fortune out of it some day

What is with the Colonel and General lines? Why don't they have a Captain line? Any navy officer should be shocked over this.......
Speaking of Hornblower, I assume everyone has seen the A&E series? Not to bad Tilley?

Well, I hesitate to respond to chrisstedt's query for fear of sending this thread even further off-track - but since he brought it up....

Fans of naval fiction (of whom I'm one) seem to divide themselves into two principal camps: the Foresterians and the O'Brianites. (There are also some fringe groups - Popites, Kentists, Lambdenites, Marryatites, Parkinsonians, etc.) I'm a Foresterian. I got hooked on the Hornblower books when I was in junior high school in about 1962, have read all of them at least ten times, and, though I acknowledge that they contain some historical inaccuracies, I still think Forester was the best of the twentieth-century naval novelists.

I've never cared a great deal for the Patrick O'Brian novels. He knew his subject (to be fair, he had many, many more conveniently-available sources than Forester did), but I find his plots labored and his use of the language so idiosyncratic that it's irritating. (I should acknowledge that I haven't read the whole series; I've only read three or four of them. One of these days I'll get to the others, and that may change my mind.) O'Brian's scenes occasionally really grab me (I recall a description of a storm off the Cape of Good Hope that had me glued to my chair), and once in a while he comes up with a truly memorable phrase. ("Jack, you have debauched my sloth" is a classic.) But I've just never been able to get as fascinated by those books as some folks have.

That said, in my personal opinion O'Brian got a far better deal from the movie-makers than Forester did. I watched the first couple of the Hornblower shows on A&E, and then gave up on them. In my personal opinion the young actor who played Hornblower was perfectly cast, the acting generally was excellent, the scenery was nice, the deviations from Forester's plots were stupid, and the ships were - well, pretty awful. I've commented earlier in this thread on the sad story of the models that were built for the series.

'Nuff said. Something tells me that won't be the last we hear on this topic. Maybe we should devote a separate thread to it, so the O'Brianites (I know they're out there) can have their turn.

I see, via CNN, that the E-bay bidding on the grilled cheese sandwich has now gone over $20,000. Makes me wonder why I bother working for a living.

PT barnum once said, you can fool all people some of the time and some people all of the time.

oops, is this even more off topic than it already is ? ah well

from holly very nice