The Money Programme tonight on BBC 2 had a report about the relaunch of Airfix by Hornby and about the new Doctor Who kits they're making. What was a bit of a joke was that Airfix got access to the Tardis prop so they could measure and photograph it for making the kit, but the BBC took over 5 weeks to even send through pictures of the Doctor and Martha for the sculptors to use as reference, then they boxed up the figures to get the approval off the BBC and it took over a month before they turned around and said they wanted changes making to the sculpts, and here's Airfix trying to get these kits produced before Christmas, it turns out that although some will hit the stores this year most won't be available to the other shops until the New Year, it seems the BBC really put a spanner in the works at what should have been a big relaunch for the Airfix brand.
Airfix - Britain's Next Top Model?
Airfix say they are trying to rebuild the brand by making new kits that will appeal to the new generation of model maker. When I grew up in the 70's even though the 2nd World War had been finished for 30 years or more there was a huge intrest in Tanks and Planes etc... Me and my brother used to get the Dogfight Doubles sets with our pocket money. It seems around the time that Action Man disappeared of the shelves that kids interest in the WW2 had gone and Star Wars and Computer Games were what they were interested in, I must say that I used to know most tanks and planes off the top of my head but now I'd be hard pushed to name many. I'm not too sure just how many of today's kids will be interested in the back catalogue that Airfix has to offer, rather it'll be more my generation and older who'll buy these kits. But if they are looking for newer kits Doctor Who might be a great start but what else could they do ? They did a few Wallace and Gromit kits but most of the types of things I'd love to see in kit form are 70's and 80's stuff, it'll be interesting to see where Airfix go with their relaunch.
Kits I'd love to see them do are the Mig-31 Firefox from the movie Firefox, the Scorpio from Blake's 7, Deep Core from The Abyss.
A while back whilst working on BBC 2's Hyperdrive I mocked up this box which I posted on my Art Blog This was sent to the writers who loved it, they even make mention of it during the series 2 commentary on the DVD box set. :)
