Pimp My Batmobile!

Posts Tagged ‘1966’

Thanks to our friend and UK Correspondent Ken Partridge, we received the new Eaglemoss 1966 1:43 diecast Batmobile from their Batman Automobilia series of magazines that come with vehicle premium dioramas included. Here’s a first video look at it. Yes, as we reported here weeks ago, it is a completely different model than the Hot Wheels 1:43 car.  It is  smaller than the HW 1:43 but larger than their 1:50. Once the Hallmark ornament comes out next Christmas, we will have quite the little growing garage of little-mid scale Batmobiles. I think it’s ironic that of all the officially released Batmobiles in the past 3 years, arguably the worst of them all has been the 1:24 DC Direct statue version which I got to finally see in person a while ago and was NOT impressed. Who would have thought, a few years back that we’d be actually passing up officially released Batmobile models?!  Thankfully – this isn’t one of them. This is a MUST-have. The detail and professionalism is top notch. Accuracy wise – it shares about the same percentage as the Hot Wheels car – but with a few different areas that they got more right or wrong. Note that in the video I mention the cardboard bottom – I have not removed the whole display case from its blister pack at this time. This is still just outer packaging. The inner hard shell case, along with the lenticular grid cave background and the diorama are all safely packed inside this form-fitted blister pack. I didn’t have a lot of time this weekend so I just did a quick phone vid. In Part II, I’ll take it out and compare it to other similarly-sized Batmobiles a little closer. I did talk to Eaglemoss directly last week and there may be some light coming at the end of the US distribution tunnel, but not for a while.

Well, the R2 boys have done it again. The 1966 TV Batcycle kit, due out in November, completes their triumvirate of 60′s Aurora Bat-Reissues this season. (Batmobile and Batboat are currently out in the market) And again they’ve upped the ante by improving the decal sheet!

As with the Batboat, I’m disappointed only in the fact that they chose to do the square, newer model kit boxes rather than the old Aurora longboxes like they did with the car, but – in their favor, they DID redo that box last time they reissued the bike and hey -  the decals more than make up for it. Slightly tweaked original artwork finishes it off nicely.

Looks like I’m going to have to get the Batboat now and rebuild all 3!

Editor’s Note: Recently I was talking on another forum about my ongoing 1:25 Batcave diorama project and the person had not seen or heard of it before. I realized that the original blog articles had crashed when I took down the Scooter’s Custom Works website. (That website will be back up soon, by the way.) Even though that website content is gone, I found access in to the original Batcave blog articles and so I’m reposting them here, chronologically at PMB! Hopefully this will kick me into gear and my son Alex and I will get back on finishing the diorama up soon. The following post is from August, 2005.

For years, I had mused about creating a full-on, Batcave diorama in my favorite scale – 1:25. It seemed like  a great idea to house some of the many models I had created and also for a fun, large-scale project all  its own. I had been inspired by my friend Mike Stutelberg, whose own Batcave diorama is nothing short of breathtaking. It always seemed like a huge project and so years later, I still had not started it. Then, in 2004 a few things happened to kick-start my gumption. 1. My (then) 4 year old son had acquired a model railroading video that he watched over and over again, as 4 year olds do. And I watched it with him and soaked up some great fabrication tips. 2. Over the Christmas break, I noticed an eBay auction offering a custom 1:25 Atomic Pile model.

I thought it looked great and was amazed to see the Atomic Pile modeled in 1:25 scale and actually ON eBay for sale! I won the auction and when the model arrived I was amazed by the build-quality: Welded metal struts, cast resin panels, multi-media textures – it was very well done. I then realized that here was my answer. This was how the diorama model could get built – by supplementing our own work with pieces by other craftsmen. It would still be a huge, time-consuming folly, but it just might work!

I decided that I wanted to get an Atomic Pile model that was NOT anchored to a smaller cave setting like this one was, so I contacted the builder, Jim Graham and asked him to make me another one.

The new Atomic Pile would be freestanding and able to be utilized in my larger planned cave diorama. Now, how to house it, and what it would actually entail were the next questions I had to tackle.

Luckily, having a 4-year old telling you that anything, no matter how ambitious, is just what has to happen – is all you need to shame you into taking any project on.

And so, a Batcave – That’s it. It’s an omen. We shall model – a Batcave!