Saturday morning cartoons again meet the modeling bench in Round2’s resurrection of classic kits featuring Warner Brothers’ beloved Road Runner and his nemesis, Wile E. Coyote. Of the three newly re-released kits, this review focuses on Road Runner and The Rail Rider – a looney dragster embodying a steam engine theme.

The MPC-branded kit consists of 5 sprues of colored parts, including 1 chrome-plated, a set of peel-and-stick decals, and a pre-painted vinyl Road Runner figure. Construction is snap-together, but is well served by a few well-placed applications of liquid cement and superglue – especially if the finished product is to be subjected to the playful hands of a little one.

A big thank you goes to Yellow-Wings Decals for this review sample and IPMS/USA for allowing me to review it.

Aircraft design and development was changing rapidly in the 1930s. As the dark clouds of war were beginning to form in Europe, the effort to improve military aircraft quickened. A new era of low wing monoplanes with retractable landing gear and enclosed cockpits was dawning. The British Hurricane was ordered into production in June 1936 and the Messerschmitt 109 made its public debut during the 1936 Berlin Olympics. At the same time American's front line fighter was the open cockpit, fixed gear, wire-braced P-26. It would remain so until 1938 when America finally entered the new era with the Curtiss P-36A Hawk.

The very popular Concord Armor at War Series has now released PANZER VOR! Volume 5continuing the excellent combination of modeler/author par excellance, Frank V. DeSisto, with parent company Dragon Models as publisher. This edition doesn’t include the author’s bio, but Mr. DeSisto is one of the original founders of AMPS, has been published elsewhere, is a font of knowledge that he readily shares in his books, and as an advanced modeler and professional photographer, chooses photos that will offer great interest to the modeler. Following the format of the previous four volumes, there are 16 color platesby Laurent Lecocq and 175 black and white photos, all with high quality, detailed captions written by a modeler, for modelers.

The Albatross was to be a replacement for the Grumman Goose; it began life as the XJR2F-1 Pelican with a Navy designation as the PF-1 and an Air Force designation of SA -16A. The SA-16B – the subject of this kit – was an upgraded machine which had 100 inches added to each wing in two separate plugs. A seventy-inch extension was grafted outboard of each engine nacelle, with a thirty-inch one near the tip. It also had a slightly wider horizontal stabilizer and a taller vertical fin. The B model had a wingspan of 96 feet 8 inches and was 62 feet 10 inches long with an empty weight of 22,883 lbs. It was powered by two Wright 1820-76A-94 engines of 1425 horsepower each, and boasted a speed of 236 MPH, with a range of 3465 miles. At least 19 other countries operated the Albatross besides the United States.

Background

Land of The Giants was a science-fiction classic TV show from Irwin Allen, airing 51 episodes from 1968 until 1970. In the (then) far future of 1983, a crew takes off for a sub-orbital trip from LA to London when they are hit by a space storm and mysteriously transport to a world where everything is 12 times bigger than Earth, ala Gulliver’s Travels.

The Kit

Packaged in an Aurora-reminiscent box featuring an attractive painting of the Spindrift just entering space, and at 17 parts over several trees, the kit is simple enough in construction to have its instructions printed on the back of the box. In addition to the instructions, the back of the box also has paint call-outs for Testors Model Master Acryl and Enamel paint lines. The parts are molded in orange and clear plastic and include a free paper fold-up color interior from TSDS, and a decal sheet.