The reappearance of Revell's Viking ship is great news. For the benefit of anybody who's interested, and doesn't already know about it - it was originally issued in 1977, and was the last genuinely new sailing ship released by Revell of the U.S. (Revell Germany has done a few since, but all later sailing ships appearing under the U.S. Revell label have been reissues.) U.S. Revell, in other words, has been out of the sailing ship business for thirty years. The first Revell sailing ship, the old 1/192 Constitution (which is still on the market) appeared in 1956. (My source for all this is, of course, Dr. Graham's excellent book, Remembering Revell Model Kits.) Revell has been out of the sailing ship business longer than it was in it.
According to Dr. Graham, the kit was based on a full-size replica on exhibition in Lincoln Park, Chicago. I believe that replica was built in Scandinavia and crossed the Atlantic for one of the Chicago World's Fairs. It was, in turn, based on the Gokstad Ship, one of the two large surviving Norse vessels preserved at the Viking Ship Museum in Norway. For quite a long time lots of people associated that ship with Leif Ericsson and his voyage from Greenland to North America. That notion has been thoroughly discredited during the past few decades; by Ericsson's day (about 1000 A.D.) the fabled "Viking long ship" had given way to a beamier, tubbier, extremely seaworthy vessel called a "knarr," which actually didn't look much like the vessels associated with the Vikings in the popular imagination. (If I remember correctly, the marketing geniuses at Heller sold their "Viking ship" for a while with the name "Leif Ericsson" attached to it. That's even more ridiculous. The Heller kit is based - extremely inaccurately - on the Oseberg Ship, which is a ceremonial barge probably never intended to go to sea.)
It's been close to thirty years since I've had that Revell kit in my hands, but I remember it as an excellent one - accurate and beautifully detailed. (As I recall, the "wood grain" detail was remarkably similar to that on the superb Imai kits. Hmmmm.) The "dragon head and tail" ornaments on the bow and stern were a little suspect; the actual Gokstad Ship has no such decorations. (The ship was found in a burial mound, with the stem- and sternposts projecting into a higher, more acidic layer of soil that had rotted the ends away. Revell, to its credit, did base its reconstructed ornaments on other Norse artifacts.)
The kit is announced on the Revell Europe website - but not the U.S. Revell-Monogram one. I imagine we'll be able to find it in American hobby shops, though.
The Revell-Monogram website does include a list of the company's new releases, through May, 2007. (Only the names and release dates are included; no scales or other information. I imagine quite a few of the kits in question are reissues.) The distribution of subjects is thought-provoking:
Automobiles (including cars, pickup trucks, etc.) - 30.
Aircraft - 3.
Dinosaurs and other prehistoric critters - 5. (My nine-year-old grandson will be thrilled.)
Ships - 0.
I guess that tells us where the money is in the American plastic model industry these days.