Kei trucks, or kei-tora, are cute, stunted vehicles found only in Japan. So it’s natural that every year the the Japan Federation of Landscape Contractors would host a competition for the best kei truck mini-garden. View these stunningly cute kei truck gardens!
The Land of the Giants television show from 1969 was pure visual candy. It had to be, since the plots were thin and often ridiculous, even by the standards of this outlandish world. Episodes each cost a reported $250,000 to produce. Giant props were built that simulated an oversized world that the travelers in the spacecraft Spindrift encountered. In one episode, the crew devise a plot to steal a revolver–a prop that, according to producer Irwin Allen, cost $9,200 to create. No CGI here, everything was accomplished with mattes, wide angle lenses, camera angles, and those giant props. Liberal use was made of the giant telephone, books, beaker, safety pin (which the crew used as a grappling hook), pencil, sardine can, bottle caps, and fire hydrant. It’s interesting to note, too, that so many of those items are quaint antiques today.
Irwin Allen told reporters that he conceived of Land of the Giants after having a nightmare where he was chased around by giants. This unnamed world was supposed to be twelve times larger than Earth, with cars 60 feet long and pencils 8 feet long. When Clay Gowran, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, visited Allen at 20th Century Fox in August 1968, he had to use a 14-foot stepladder to reach the top of the 35 mm camera prop.
Large scale models are simply diabolical. Models of any scale can play with your imagination, but you always know what’s real and what’s fake. When that train, plane, or car model is, say, 14 inches long–normal scale model size, more or less–your mind quickly adapts to the concept because it knows this is a model. And your mind deposits what you’re seeing into its familiar, convenient file folder called “scale models.”
But when the scale is large, your cognition wavers on the real vs. fake question. When your logical mind and eye look at a 1:2 (or 1/2, half) scale model, it will register the model as fake–but not as rapidly as with smaller scale models. It takes a second, and in that second your mind falls into an uncanny valley of questioning.
Half scale models of large objects like tanks, trucks, and cars are not common, as Fred Heim himself admits. Full scale (1:1) is common, but only with small items like guns.
This half-scale Peterbilt truck was Fred Heim’s first large scale model. Frame is aluminum, sides are powder coated mahogany. Since half-sized truck parts are in short supply (as in: non-existent), Heim had to make practically everything by scratch.
Without Heim and the garage acting as measuring devices, this Peterbilt could easily be mistaken for the real thing.
Like Fred Heim, Ernie Adams is amazingly prolific. For the rest of us, if we were inclined to build a large scale model, it might take us a lifetime. For kick-ass modelers like Ernie Adams, it’s all in a day’s work. His Dwarf Car Museum in Maricopa, AZ displays working 5/8 scale models of hot rods and sedans and all sorts of other working vehicular transport.
According to Model Airplane News:
[From] Dave and Greg Hayfield, this monster 300+ (!) pound aircraft is powered by a 650cc Hirth engine spinning a 68-inch, 3-blade carbon-fiber prop.
At 87% of the scale of the original, it begs the question: is this a model or a drone?
Movie makers have long used large scale models to substitute for the real thing, and they are perfect for the job because scale is more difficult to detect in the skies.
In the Bond film Man With the Golden Gun, an RC scale model substitutes for the “real” AMC Gremlin flying car driven (or flown?) by Scaramanga and Knicknack.
