I’m Stunned

I could say I’m disgusted, bemused or distressed, just the same. Even naïve… I read on a net forum last night that there was never a business agreement between Tamiya and Academy…

I flipped through an Academy catalogue in the early 90s and nodded with a certain boredom at the time as I recognised item after item as being Tamiya, 1:350 battleships, tanks I’d already built… I assumed, and of course that’s always a bad thing. It may be something to do with the Western mindset that can’t comprehend thieving on this scale, that twenty years later it comes as an amazement.

The discrepancy I noticed and wrote up last time but one is symptomatic, perhaps. Was it a change instituted to get around some aspect of copyright? Or some mysterious feature added in? Who knows, the only thing for certain is that copyright in Asia, certainly in the late 1980s, was so nebulous a thing that one major company could establish itself by stealing the product line from another. That’s cut-throat…

My respect for Academy just went down a notch, but hopefully their business practice had more integrity once they were up and running. Mr Tamiya must have had some deep discussions with his legal team at the time, but I doubt he ever stooped to stealing back from Academy. (Personally I’m amazed he ever reboxed Italeri and Monogram, the Tamiya name is associated with another class of product.)

The knock-off product certainly was not pantographed, there is none of the characteristic softness. My guess is that laser inferometery was up to the job, and Tamiya sprues were scanned into a 3D model and output through a CAD/CAM process to cut new moulds. This process was in use in the early 90s in film-making, to translate a sculpted miniature into a 3D model, so in industrial terms it might have been around as early as ’87… Switching out the part numbers and rearranging the plan drawings might have instituted just enough difference for them to call it a new kit.

I guess the collector can only shrug and accept a good deal when it comes along. The Academy knock-offs were not much cheaper than their identical cousins, but you can pick them up on eBay for a decent price these days, a fair few dollars less than originals. That StuG is ready for paint, but it will always carry a mental tang, for me, that the Tamiya original does not, and it’s all about the notion of legitimacy.