I vaguely remember a
Cutty Sark knocking around in a UPC box many years ago. I have no idea what its origins may have been, but if I'm not mistaken only the big Revell one and the Aurora one, among the American kits, had been released at that time.
It's entirely possible that it originated in Japan. There were quite a few Japanese companies in those days (the late sixties, I think) that made brief appearances on the scene and vanished. Some of them made their own sailing ships - sort of.
I vividly recall getting really excited (I was in high school at the time) when I discovered a UPC box labeled "H.M.S. Prince" in a hobby shop in Washington. The most remarkable feature of it was the painting on the box. Apparently the Japanese artist had worked from a photo of the Admiralty model of the
Prince in the Science Museum. That model, of course, has no planking on its bottom. The painting showed the real vessel in all her glory, sitting in a harbor with all her flags flying - and the unplanked frames sticking out of the water with daylight showing between them. Oooooops.
The contents of the kit turned out to be two new hull halves (with wide grooves representing the spaces between the unplanked frames below the wales) surrounding a set of deck and rigging components that had been pirated from the Revell
Victory. Ugh.
I think maybe the dumbest ship model kit I've ever seen, though, was a
Victory that some Japanese company - I think it may have been Bandai, but I'm not sure - made in the mid- or late seventies. It was in most respects a simplified ripoff of the Revell kit, on the same scale, but it differed from any other sailing ship kit in that its hull halves were cast in white metal. The rest of the parts were plastic. Why anybody would think that was a good idea is utterly beyond my comprehension.
I don't have any idea what's inside that UPC
Cutty Sark box. My guess, though, is that the contents are (a) interesting, (b) slightly disgusting, and (c) almost unrelated by any reasonable definition to scale ship modeling.