After seeing the new Disney pirate movie with my son, I came home to my Internet mail to find that Revell/Monogram had just announced the release of their "new' 1/72nd scale Caribbean pirate ship. Wow! I had finally finished constructing their type VII U-boat in 1/72nd scale, so I was more than enthusiastic about building a same scale replica of the ships we'd just seen being devoured by the Kraken monster. While the price seemed just too good to be true, nevertheless I immediately went down to my hobby shop and bought one.
I should have been suspicious at the small size of the box, but I bought it anyway. I wasn't halfway through building it, when I realized that something was definitely strange about the scale of this kit. I grabbed a CMK figure, who had been only casually scanning the skies for Allied aircraft from the conning tower of his U-boat, and placed him on the deck of the Pirate ship. Well, he fit...sort of. My first thought was that Revell must have made an incredible scale mistake. They were surely mistaken to label this a 1/72nd scale model. Even though I recalled having been aboard the life sized replica of Columbus' sailing ship in Columbus, Ohio, and being astounded at how small it really was, this model was surely way too small to be in scale.
Still, it seemed like there were some elements of the model that were in the right scale. The ship's wheel, some of the doors and the stairs were just possibly in scale. Then came my epiphany. This was indeed a 1/72nd scale pirate ship. It was a scale model of the Captain Hook Pirate ship on exhibit at Disneyland. It is a model of a pirate ship that is itself a 3/4 scale model of a real ship! Finally my long term memory clicked into gear. I felt that I had built this ship somewhere in the past. Was this the beloved Pirate ship of my childhood?
Yes, once I looked more closely at the tiny, but well proportioned cannons, and the base that was all but impossible to glue together with 1950's glue, I was certain. This was a reissue of the Pirate ship of my youth.
I was more surprised than disappointed at this discovery. I would have preferred a model that was more faithfully rendered in 1/72nd scale and closer to the ships in the Johnny Depp film.
But, looking at the model closely and with a more informed eye, I soon came to appreciate not only the skill of the Disney designers who had initially decided on the proportions of the ship, but also the original Revell artisans who had faithfully replicated it. In the same exhilarating way that the real ship in Disneyland never ceases to amaze, so too the model maintains that same magic. While not a literal translation of any specific Caribbean Pirate ship, both model and ship manage successfully to convey much of the feeling of being aboard a real Pirate ship.
Even though the dies must be quite old, there is not too much flash. The worst sinkholes are those that are placed unfortunately right on the simulated wooden decking flanking the masts. There is some fiddling and adjusting to be done before joining the stern to the upper quarter deck, but nothing else major comes to mind. Positioning of the precast ratlines should be done before permanantly attaching the masts to the deck. This is particularly crucial concerning the mizzen mast, which needs to be raked considerably to conform to the ratline's precast shape.
An advantage to modeling this ship is that once committed to the fantasy, the modeler can feel free to rig and paint it as whimsically as desired. This is what I have done. I've made it more of a freelanced Pirate ship rather than adhering to the specific Disneyland model. The finished ship now holds a small but respectable space on our fireplace mantle.