Is (was) there just one Revell HMS Victory model kit?

Looks like it's not a bad little kit.  Quite a few of the major details have been simplified, of course, but it seems to have the general shape of the real thing.

This kit doesn't look like any Victory kit I've ever seen before.  It isn't a reissue of the old Lindberg one; this Revell product has all three rows of windows in the transom and quarter galleries. 

I has the general feel of having been copied from the other, slightly larger Revell kit - by somebody who almost, but not quite, knew what he was doing.  Take a look at the forecastle timberheads on the hull halves.  On the bigger kit they're shaped right - as tapered wedges.  The person who made the master for the smaller kit figured round blobs would be good enough.  The "shroud-and-ratline" assemblies are among the sillier ones I've ever seen.  The way the lower and topmast shrouds are connected to each other is downright irrational.

On the other hand, take a look at the coils of "rope" molded into the upper deck.  If I'm not mistaken, those ropes are lying in exactly - or almost exactly - the same places as the ones on the larger Revell kit.  That can't possibly be a coincidence.  The designer of this kit was looking at the Revell one. 

This is a strange, convoluted story.  It would be interesting to know what happened - but I strongly doubt that anybody at Revell would give a straight answer about it.  We do, however, now have a definitive straightforward answer to the question with which Michel started this fascinating thread:  "Is (was) there just one Revell HMS Victory model kit?"  The answer clearly is - yes.

Thank you John.

yesterday I received the old Entex HMS Victory model kit.

You can see pictures here :

http://www.hmsvictoryscalemodels.be/EntexMichelvrtg/index.html

This must be the model you were talking about, the Lindberg one.

But there must be some differences : the sails seem to be different, I'll be back with another question, this time about the Lindberg HMS Victory.

Michel

Those pictures look familiar.  Beware my memory of the Lindberg kit, though; said memory is at least thirty years old.  Today I was five minutes late to class because I couldn't remember where I'd put either my glasses or my car keys.

I vaguely remember buying a Victory in an Entex box, and I'm beginning to think I may have confused the Lindberg and Entex kits.  The one in this set of pictures is, in some (not many) respects, a little better than the small Revell one we were discussing the other day.  (The Entex one has separate parts for the head rail assemblies; on the Revell one they're molded integrally with the hull halves.)  In most other respects, the Entex one looks pretty awful.  The hull halves are downright crude (out-of-scale planking, no copper sheathing, and no gunports).  The stern is missing one row of windows (as I thought I remembered the Lindberg version was).  And those vac-formed "sails" just may be the most laughably awful ones I've ever seen.

The small Revell kit obviously has some sort of family relationship with the larger Revell one.  (There's no other explanation for those coils of rope - which aren't on the Entex one.)  I'm beginning to wonder if the small Revell one is in fact the old Lindberg one, and the Entex one has a completely independent history.

There are, however, some faint hints of a relationship between the Entex kit and the larger Revell one.  The parts breakdown is similar (though simplified in the case of the Entex one).  Those "sails" look like incompetent copies of the ones that came with the large Revell kit - at least in its original incarnation.  The Revell fore and main topsails made a reasonable attempt (when viewed from the front, at least) at looking like they were in the process of being furled or set, with the buntlines making bundles at their feet.  The Entex versions give the impression that somebody with no understanding of sails in the Western tradition was trying to copy the Revell ones.  The subtle "seam" detail of the Revell ones apparently eluded him completely.  Those enormous, 3-dimensional grids are pretty funny.

I don't trust my memory any farther than I could throw it, but it does seem like if I'd ever seen such a ridiculous set of sails before I'd remember it.  I have a faint recollection of buying a kit that contained a sheet of highly flexible white plastic - almost like latex rubber, but not as stretchy - with vague instructions to make sails out of it.  I wonder if that might have been an earlier issue of this Entex kit.

Another point:  if memory serves (as it frequently doesn't these days) the flagsheet is a direct copy of the Revell one.  I think I remember the pattern of the phony wrinkles in the Revell ensign and jack.  (Why in the world did manufacturers ever get the idea of drawing flags with wrinkles in two dimensions?  It surely would be easier do draw the flags as rectangles, and any modeler with sufficient manual dexterity to dress himself can put genuine, 3-dimensional wrinkles in a flag in a matter of seconds.)  And the "England Expects..." signal flags drawn in hoists, to be fastened to the halyards as groups and separated afterward, are right out of the Revell kit.

It looks to me like this Entex thing is the work of some Japanese manufacturer whose designer had no idea of what the real Victory (or any other Western sailing ship) looked like and whose only source of reference was the Revell kit.  My recollection is that the Lindberg one was a little better than this; in asserting that the Lindberg one suffered from the lack of stern windows I may have been in error.  But I'm afraid this strange story can't be sorted out until somebody finds one of the old Lindberg kits - if any still exist. 

I think, this could be interesting, a picture from the 1972-1973 Revell catalogue (Dutch edition here), as you can see, the scale of the "1/146" Revell model has become 1/222.

Michel