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Paper models, photos and musings of a Paper Kosmonaut

22 September 2012

What to do when one is bored of rockets?

...Then you build something non-rockety.




What is it? Where does this lead to? Is it a leprechaun's hat? Perhaps a weird tower? Nope.
Well then, what is it?

When I was a little boy and just getting into spaceflight, there was this animated series on Dutch television called "Battle of the Planets", a series which I now know was a tuned-down version of "Gatchaman", an intriguing early anime/manga animation from Japan. It all must have been somewhere in 1978.

Whee! Nice uniforms, guys. Must be really practical when fighting off space aliens with metal tentacles...


I found it very exciting then. I started reading SF short stories when I was 8 or 9 and this was my first encounter with Sf on film. I loved their near future environment, their machinery and especially their big red and blue spacecraft that also was able to go under water and change itself into a fire bird.

Impossible plane but I think it has something supercool.
Only very much later I found out about the intrigues and complexity of the original Japanese series from 1972. It explained why some sequences were very poorly animated while most of the rest was impressive in its depth and lines. Why 'Colonel Cronus' kept returning to 'Mark', 'Zoltar' had these cherry lips and why 'Jason' was the rogue figure in the team.
But I degress.
The GodPhoenix it is. Don't know yet whether I'll document this build, whether I'll post it and whether I'll finish it at all. It gives me something to do in the time to get me inspired again for a new realspace model.

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