Models on TV and in the movies

Oh and I forgot the most recent one:

Commander (before the promotion) Adama is building a large scale model of a Earth type sailing vessel, with full rig.  Several moments are spent as he uses (ghast!!) a big old clunky cheapo acid brush to "apply" either glue or paint.

 Got a whole new respect for Adama! (but I STILL think he's a Cylon!)

David

 

The CSI episode in question, where the new diorama is inside the box yet to be opened on Grishams desk, starts in 13 minutes :D

 

David 

I'm sitting here watching a re-run of Dharma and Greg (wife picked it- not me! I swear!) Greg is building a battleship. Got mad at his friend for assembling the main superstructure before Greg could put the captain in. LOL

Couple more really obscure ones:

In Living Color (sketch comedy that ran on Fox in the early 90's) - there was one sketch where Tommy Davidson's character brings a C-130 built out of popsicle sticks to school (if I recall correctly, it was an art project), and the principal hassles him about it and ends up destroying it.

And then there used to be a math-oriented show for kids on PBS called Square One.  At the end of most shows was 5-10 minute show-within-a-show called Mathnet, a takeoff on Dragnet where the two detectives used math to solve crimes.  During one interview, the witness spends a lot of time fiddling with a pair of tweezers and ship in the bottle.  As they're leaving, one of the detectives says something like "good luck with your model" and the guy replies something like "Oh, I don't put them in... I take them out", and just at that moment finally gets the ship to come out.

Star Trek TNG - Jordi builds a huge sailing ship model to present to the Captain of a starship they are scheduled to meet.

Futurama - In the episode spoofing Animal House, Dean Wormer is building a model which "Fat Bot" ends up eating. 

Also in "That 70's Show": In one epiosode, the guys rig the church raffle/carnival to win all the toys; one of the toys is the most recent release of the Monogram 1/48 scale B-17.  In another, Red gets back the toy train set from his childhood.

In Ronin, the doctor who Robert De Niro and the french guy go to after De Niro's character is shot has a huge diorama depicting an attack on a Japanese castle

Home Improvement - it's mentioned once or twice that the youngest son (Mark) builds model

Figure painting is featured in Three Days of the Condor and The 40 Year Old Virgin. Cllint's character in In the Line of Fire examines a real copy of Scale Auto Entusiast. In one of Steven Segal's movies, he helps the kid next door with his models. The father of one of the characters in The Black Dahlia is building a balsa P-47. In Murder at 1600 there's a large Gettysburg diorama. In this season's original CSI series, there's a character who builds dioramas of he crime he has commited.