I just took a look at the Revell Germany website, where I found some announcements that may be of interest to ship modelers - especially those who, like me, can remember the jurassic period of the hobby.
It seems that, in conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of the company's European operations, Revell is going to reissue several "classic" kits from the fifties and sixties. One is the "Sport Fisherman," a modified version of the Chris Craft cabin cruiser that originally appeared in 1954; the modified version with the fishing gear dates from 1961. (My source, as always, is Thomas Graham's excellent book, Remembering Revell Model Kits.) I believe it was also part of the Revell/Monogram "Special Subjects Program" of reissues back in the mid-eighties.
Also on the list is the P&O liner Oriana, from 1961 - though this time it appears to be molded in white, rather than the original P&O beige. This one will be warmly welcomed by ocean liner enthusiasts, whom the plastic kit companies have virtually ignored recently.
The most interesting reissue, perhaps, is the "Guided Missile Fleet Gift Set." This one, according to Dr. Graham, originally appeared in 1956, and is one of the rarest of Revell kits. He estimates its value on the collector's market at $500-600.
Here's the link to the Revell Germany ad:
http://www.revell.de/en/company/50_years_of_revell/anniversary_kits/index.html?&L=1
This should be a fun exercise in nostalgia for us Olde Phogies. A couple of curmudgeonly caveats, however, seem to be in order.
The "gift set" originally consisted of three kits: the Nautilus, Boston, and Norton Sound.
The Boston was a modification of Revell's earlier (and, by modern standards, incredibly primitive) Baltimore-class heavy cruiser, which originally appeared under the name Los Angeles in 1954. Presumably the kit in the new box will be just a reissue of the first Boston.
When the original Revell Nautilus originally appeared, in 1953, the plans of the real ship were highly classified. Revell's designers, wanting to beat the real ship into the water (and the competition from Aurora and Lindberg into the hobby shops), took some rather wild guesses about what she might look like, based (according to Dr. Graham) on some vague drawings in a magazine article. Unfortunately the result they produced was far wide of the mark. The hull form and overall proportions of the kit bore little resemblance to the real ship. Since the public didn't know that, the kit sold well. In 1955 Revell produced a modified reissue of it with a "Loon" missile and the cylindrical hangar for it on the deck aft of the conning tower. (That, presumably, was the justification for putting the kit in the original "Guided Missile Fleet" set.) In fact, though the Navy did experiment with Loons mounted on several submarines, the Nautilus wasn't one of them. The kit is, in other words, complete and total fiction in just about every respect.
The U.S.S. Norton Sound was a seaplane tender launched during World War II. After the war, presumably because of the abundance of flat, open deck space aft of her superstructure, she was used as a test bed for several experimental missiles. The Revell kit appeared originally in 1956, and was reissued once under its original name a year later. Then things got a little complicated.
In 1958, Revell modified the Norton Sound kit and reissued it as the seaplane tender Pine Island. I was eight years old at the time, and I vividly remember being fascinated by the wonderful PBM Mariner aircraft - complete with with tiny decals and rivets the size of prize-winning watermelons. Three cheers to Revell for making the modeling public conscious of the important role played by such auxiliaries in the U.S. Navy. In its seaplane tender form the kit got reissued several times, as the Pine Island and the Currituck, which was indeed a near-identical sister ship. (I'm pretty sure it was part of the "Special Subjects Program" too.)
Apparently the molds got modified permanently to change the ship from a guided missile test ship to a seaplane tender. That's a guess on my part - but it would explain why (a) the Norton Sound kit in its original configuration never appeared again, and (b) the new version of the "Guided Missile Fleet" just announced by Revell Germany includes not the Norton Sound but the Currituck. The box art appears to be a reproduction of the 1956 original (minus the ABC /CBS TV logos, but still with the reference to the TV series "Navy Log"), but, if the photo on the Revell Germany website is to be believed, the kit in the box is the Currituck - complete with PBM. What a seaplane tender, with no visible connection to guided missiles, is doing in a box labeled "Guided Missile Fleet" is unexplained.
Anway, of the three kits in the box the Currituck, though obviously not twenty-first-century state-of-the-art, comes closest to meeting any definition of the term "scale model." (Besides, where else can you find a styrene kit that represents an American seaplane tender?) Kit collectors and nostalgia buffs undoubtedly will find this kit fascinating. Those (if any) who actually did pay $500 or $600 for it needn't feel obliged to disembowel themselves; the new version doesn't really duplicate the old one. But serious scale modelers would be best advised to give it a pass.
Several other kits on Revell Germany's fiftieth anniversary reissue list also are of interest. I'm particularly attracted to the 105 mm howitzer and the Jupiter C missile.