The Immortal Classics: Polar Lights’ Seaview

There are always kits we remember from childhood, or kits we never knew when they were available but heard about long after. Aurora’s Seaview, from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, is one of those for me.

I only heard about it 15 years after the molds were lost in the neo-legendary Amtrak wreck that destroyed so many of the old classics, when it was featured as the very first instalment in the “Classic Kits” series in FineScale Modeler. I checked around to see if anyone had one and located one at Hobby Bounties in Singapore: if I remember correctly, the price was equivalent to $1000 Australian dollars in the early 1990s, the highest price I personally have ever seen on a classic kit. Needless to say, I didn’t buy it! My memory may be playing tricks, but I remember it being a three-figure sum of some sort.

Imagine my excitement when I heard several years later that Aurora-retool firm Polar Lights, in the course of recreating many of the lost classics, were resurrecting the Seaview!

I determined to have one at once, but it never happened. The kit was ‘new stock’ and thus ‘around’ and there was no urgency to buying it if dollars were tight for other reasons. In the odd way things happen, the retool has itself become a traded commodity and I recently picked one up on eBay for a good price. The precise recreation of the original is amazing, the actual box art and design from 1967, the identical plans with a few extras to denote the 2002 issue. 

Here’s a piece of history brought back to life and itself now a thoroughgoing legend in its genre, something few would have ever expected to happen, the remanufacture of a classic. Of course, there are many who would point out that in regenerating a classic product one regenerates all the shortcomings of that product. It’s the 1961 movie version of the sub, not the configuration of the series (which itself varied in detail between the 110 episodes), the detail level is sparse, and at around 13” long she’s not very big. A resin update set was made for it to build the series window configuration and the Flying Sub hangar: the AM guys will always ride to the rescue! There have of course been plenty of much larger versions produced in resin in the last decade and a half, and we now have Moebius’s ultimate kit, injection molded and nearly 40” long, for which a plethora of after market add-ons have been produced – even including complete radio control and power system to build a sea-going Seaview that will dive in your swimming pool!

Next to that, the old classic pales to insignificance, but you know what? Nobody will build the operational boat, or even the 40-inch display masterpiece, in a weekend, and have it on shelf or desk, beautifully airbrushed and weathered, by Sunday night. And there’s the fun part: there are many small scale submarine kits and this one falls right in to that range as a science fiction classic that has sailed on in the hearts of it’s fans for all 45 years since the series premiered (on September 14, 1964, at 7:30 PM, EDT, on the ABC Network, for those who like their facts - with thanks to those who keep track of such things!) So there’s room for all the versions and all the kits.  

I have only one criticism: Polar Lights molded it in black plastic. Maybe they were being true to the original, but black is very difficult to work with, and I find it rather depressing. It’s a good job she’ll be a quick build, I can get her into some nice grey primer, and relax into painting and weathering thereafter.

I finally have that Seaview I always wanted! The companion piece to the Aurora 1:64th scale Flying Sub that was reissued by Monogram in the late 1990s and which has been part of my stash ever since. And … I guess it’ll tide me over until I can assemble the big bucks to tackle the Moebius masterpiece. So keep watch and I’ll post a review when I build her.

Accuracy, Out of Inaccuracy

Aurora -- the name brings back rosey-eyed memories of many an afternoon spent with glue and paint as a child, not that I could afford many Auroras. I remember a shop that stocked them in the early 1970s, the square-box edition with those imposing paintings, their movie monsters series in particular. I bought their King Kong and was very impressed by that powerful figure. I’ve often wondered what I could do with that kit with my current techniques.

 

 But the Aurora I’m thinking of is somewhat different. It was said by a reviewer that Aurora’s aircraft were always suspect, and the older the kits the more likely they were to be suspicious as to their accuracy and fit. Aurora’s B-58 Bomber (#375) was tooled in 1958, I managed to find an unmade 1958 example (long box) on eBay, for a reasonable price (some parts had been assembled, several were painted, and they were detached from their sprues). I needed it to mold off some parts to build some SF studio replicas -- TV FX miniatures built in the 60s which used B-58 parts from this kit -- and in that much it will suit its purpose perfectly. But the kit itself is a...disaster!

It’s the wrong shape. Not one single part of it is accurate. Not the proportional sizes, not the contours. The engines are way too fat, the tailplane is all over the map, the wings are the wrong size. There are raised decal guides on the surface... How this model could have remained in production for so long is a total amazement. Revell’s and Monogram’s early offerings may not have been up to scratch by modern standards but they were rather better than this. Italeri’s #1142 is by far the best B-58 in the scale, no wonder it fetches the prices it does on eBay these days: maybe Italeri will take notice of this and reissue the kit again, as they did about five (?) years ago.

 

 Here’s a comparison, the Aurora (top) and Italeri (bottom) engines, the latter being accurate and in fact the larger scale!

 And here are the fuselages and tails, Aurora at the top, then Lindberg and Italeri at the bottom. They seem like three different aircraft.

And on the subject of scale -- the classic Aurora is always reputed to be 1:64th, but the stated scale is ‘5/32nd” (to the foot)’, which goes through the calculator thus: 12” x 1/32nd” = 384/32nds, divided by 5 = 76.8th scale. This is almost the same as Lindberg’s (somewhat better) kit, which compared to the real aircraft scales out at 1/78th, and accounts for why the parts are smaller than Italeri’s (which is a -- more accurate -- 1:72). Unless Aurora tooled a larger B-58 (as they tooled a much smaller one at 1:180th, released these days by Addar), I’m mystified at the general air of confusion surrounding this kit.

 

 Incidentally, Lindberg’s has also been deemed 1:64, which it isn’t. The stated scale is 3/16th”=1’, which calculates out at 1/64th okay, but when you measure the components and compare them to the real aircraft, it’s noticeably the smallest of the three.

Will I ever assemble the Aurora Hustler? No. But I’ll use plenty of castings from those components to build entirely accurate replicas of the science fiction craft which used its parts: therein lies actual accuracy, which, ironically, stems from inaccuracy as its basis!