Question to jtilley re. Revell ship kit release dates

I agree completely:  the Revell sailing ship kits of the late fifties through the mid-sixties show a level of detail and overall quality that, in many ways, neither Revell or anybody else has ever surpassed.

We sometimes forget that the parts in plastic kits are designed and created by human beings.  In those days Revell apparently had some people working for it who were excited by the potential of the injection molding process, and determined to stretch its capacity to the limit.  Their craftsmanship and aesthetic sense showed in lots of the company's products.  Take a look at the wonderful building kits in the Revell HO railroad line.  I'm pretty sure most model railroaders would agree that none of the hundreds of plastic building kits released since then has topped them for detail and sheer character.  That series of small horse-drawn vehicles really does deserve the label "miniature masterpieces."  (The figures riding on the English mail coach are a downright awe-inspiring demonstration of just what can be done with a two-piece, rigid mold.)  And take a close look at the old Buckley-class destroyer.  Get past the rather crude guns, and look at the detail on the superstructure bulkheads.  You'll see such things as fire extinguishers, a rack of deck swabs, and stowed helmets for the gunners - all on a scale of 1/249, and dating from 1958.  Surely those kits didn't have to be that good in order to make money.  We're looking at the work of some truly outstanding, and commited, artisans.

Another thing Revell had going for it in those days was an unbelievably precise pantograph machine.  (I'd love to see a picture of that thing, and an explanation of how it worked.)  The sculptors apparently were able to make their masters much, much larger than the finished products, and "pantograph them down."  (That's probably a partial explanation for the wide variety of "fit the box" scales.  I suspect the sculptors worked at standard, relatively large scales, and set the pantograph to whatever ratio would make the kit fit in the box.)  Close study of old models suggests that a few of the other companies had pantographs, but not like Revell's.  (If I remember correctly, Airfix didn't; its moldmakers carved their masters from wood, at the same scale as the finished model.  In some ways those people deserve even more credit than Revell's.)

The very first Revell sailing ship, the 1/192 Constitution, was pretty basic.  It scored over the wood competition in having full-length guns on its gundeck (the solid-hull wood kits had "dummy"guns that plugged into holes drilled in the hull), and all the basic shapes were right, but the level of detail was about what one would expect in a plastic kit of 1956.  The next kit in the series, H.M.S. Bounty, had a set of five 1/110 crew figures, who were downright mind-boggling.  They're slightly over half an inch tall, and magnification reveals that they have individual lips and eyelids.  After that, the Revell designers seemed to regard each new sailing ship kit as a challenge to show off what they could do.  The Flying Cloud has beautifully sculpted little coils of rope lying around on its decks. (Note the individual strands in the rope.)  The Victory, I believe, was the first attempt to represent wood grain in deck planking.  And the 1/96 Cutty Sark was for a long time the classic demonstration of just how sophisticated a plastic kit could be. 

All of those kits were far better than they needed to be in order to make money for the manufacturer.  (I suspect few purchasers looked at the parts closely enough to appreciate just how good they were.)  It takes only a cursory glance at the parts of any of them to establish that something beyond the profit motive was at work in the Revell plant in those days.

The quality of the sailing ship kits continued to go up fairly steadily through the mid-sixties (though the bean-counters apparently got their licks in with the spurious reissues, such as the "Thermopylae," "Stag Hound," "Seeadler," and "Beagle").  The Golden Hind (1965), Mayflower (1966), and Charles W. Morgan (1968) were among the company's finest kits.  In retrospect, the first hint that the golden age was coming to an end may have been in the yacht America kit (1969).  It's a fine model, but the copper sheathing on the hull is represented by raised outlines, rather than 3-D "plates" that appear to overlap.  A small point - but the Revell designers of the fifties wouldn't have tolerated it. 

In the seventies Revell fell on hard times economically.  The big "Spanish Galleon" and "Elizabethan Man-o-War" kits look like they're from a different planet; the company literature acknowledged that they were designed for interior decorators, and they aren't scale models.  The nice little Viking ship, from 1977, now looks like a "last hurrah."  (The planking detail on it also looks different from any other Revell kit - and remarkably like what Imai was producing at the same time.  I do wonder.)   Revell of the U.S. hasn't made a new sailing ship kit since. 

Revell sailing ships, like any other plastic kits, have their problems, and the company certainly made some wrong turns.  (The idea of making "shrouds and ratlines" out of plastic-coated thread just may have been the worst idea anybody ever had since the night Adolf Hitler's father said to Adolf Hitler's mother, "come on upstairs, Brunnhilde, I'm feeling frisky this evening."  And I'd be content if nobody had ever thought of making "sails" from vac-formed plastic.)  But in general they represented the state of the art when they were released - and they still come pretty close to it.

I agree with Honneamise:  Revell Germany has made some eminently respectable sailing ships since then, but the ones I've seen just don't reach the level of the Golden Hind or the Mayflower.  I'm afraid the reason may be the one that nostalgic phogies like me find themselves citing more and more often as they get older:  people capable of doing that sort of thing just aren't around any more.

I couldn´t get to sleep yesterday so instead of counting sheep, I tried to recall all the Revell ship kits I could remember (including the Revell Germany kits since this is where I live but NO repackaged stuff from other  brands) - at  a count of 195  I ran out of memories but I was aware of the fact that if I leave out all the variants and offsprings of the same mold, I probably end up with about 1/4th of that number.

Reading your post, I get the feeling that in fact there weren´t that many original sailing ship kits at all, just lots of marketing tricks to get the most of existing molds. Here in Germany we are quite lucky because Revell still continues to make new sailing ship molds every few years like the A.von Humboldt, 1/250 Pamir, the 1992 Columbus Set (old Santa Maria but new Nina and Pinta), Batavia, Vasco da Gama´s ship.... well, that´s it actually. Still, there SEEM to be lots of sailing ships in every new Revell Germany catalogue but if you get a closer look it is just a mixture of reissued old kits and kits from other sources like IMAI or Pyro. In the early 80s we got dozens of "new" Revell sailing ship kits - in fact it was almost the whole line of Pyro and Lindberg ships, but these had never been too present on Germany´s market so at least he younger modelers thought these were brand new.

Regarding the quality of the new kits, I sometimes wonder why I cannot see a definite progress over the old ones.. some of them even look simpler than the old Classics, e.g. the Batavia seems less detailed than the old Mayflower or, for a better comparison, the old Lindberg Wappen von Hamburg/Pirate ship kit even though there are decades between them. Today´s plane kits are in a completely diffrent league than their 50s counterparts - no such development in the sailing ship department. I wonder if it is too expensive to make really detailed and accurate sailing ships today, or have the old ones been so ahead of their days that it is still very hard to "top" them? 

Remembering Revell Model Kits.

If you go into Google search you will find there are several of these books available in the UK.

I don't have any secret or unusual sources of information about this sort of thing; I just have a copy of Dr. Thomas Graham's excellent book, Remembering Revell Model Kits.  The appendix is a list of all Revell kits manufactured in the U.S. from the beginning through 1979.  (It doesn't include those that originated with Revell GB or Revell Germany  - or anything that was released after 1979.)

To copy down all the original and re-release dates of all the Revell ships would make for an intolerably long post (and, I suppose, might get me in copyright trouble).  The list of original sailing ship release dates, though, is actually pretty short.  (Bear in mind that this does NOT include re-releases under original or spurious names, like "Spanish Galleon" or "Yankee Clipper."  I have, however, included the dates for modified reissues, like the "Stag Hound" and "Beagle.")

I have a great deal of faith in the accuracy of Dr. Graham's dates; I haven't found an incorrect one yet.  I have, however, found some minor errors in the stated scales.  In the list below I've only mentioned the scales when they're necessary to distinguish one kit from another.

Constitution (1/192) - 1956

Bounty - 1956

Santa Maria - 1957

Flying Cloud - 1957

Eagle - 1958

Victory - 1959

Cutty Sark (1/96) - 1959

Peter Pan Pirate Ship - 1960

Thermopylae (1/96) (modified Cutty Sark) - 1960

Seeadler (modified Eagle) - 1960

Kearsarge - 1961

Alabama (modified Kearsarge) - 1961

Beagle (modified Bounty) - 1961

Stag Hound (modified Flyig Cloud) - 1962

Great Eastern - 1963

Golden Hind - 1965

Constitution (1/96) - 1965

Mayflower (small) - 1966

Pedro Nunes (modified 1/96 Cutty Sark) - 1967

Charles W. Morgan - 1968

Cutty Sark (about 1/144; "quick build") - 1968

America - 1969

Constitution (about 1/159; "quick build") - 1969

Thermopylae (about 1/144; "quick build") - 1970

Mayflower (big; "quick built") 1970 (I think; this kit often gets confused with the smaller one)

"Spanish Galleon" (the big, ugly one) - 1970

"English Man o' War" (the big, even uglier one) - 1972

Cutty Sark (about 1/216) - 1977

Viking Ship - 1977

That's it.  There were, of course, a few additional original sailing ships from Revell Germany (e.g., the Batavia and Alexander von Humbolt).  And lots of the U.S. Revell kits got reissued under different labels and in slightly revised forms (e.g., the Golden Hind masquerading as a "Spanish Galleon," the "Museum Classics" series, and the "Wall Plaques").  But so far as I've been able to figure it out, the list above includes all the originally-American Revell sailing ships.

It's a rather thought-provoking list.  The big, three-foot series, which has dominated the top shelves of hobby shops and the dreams of young ship modelers for so long, actually consists of three genuinely different kits:  the Cutty Sark, Kearsarge, and Constitution.  (I don't count the big "Spanish Galleon" and its offspring; they aren't scale models.)  The rest of the Revell sailing ship range, stripped of the various spurious reissues, consists of thirteen kits:  Constitution, Bounty, Santa Maria, Flying Cloud, Eagle, Victory, Great Eastern (if you can call that a sailing ship), Golden Hind, Mayflower, Morgan, Cutty Sark, America, and Viking Ship.  (There's room for argument in how to make that count.  I included the smallest Cutty Sark and Constitution, but not the mid-sized, "quick-build" ones.)  The most recent, the excellent Viking Ship, was originally released in 1977 - almost thirty years ago.  Revell's entire production of new sailing ship kits lasted twenty-one years - from 1956 through 1977.  The company, in other words, has now been out of the sailing ship business longer than it was in it.  And only two of those kits - the largest and smallest versions of the Constitution - are in the current Revell-Monogram catalog.

Kind of makes one think, doesn't it?