John Day’s Spindrift
What young boy hasn’t imagined being six inches high, running through storm drains, battling giant obstacles, and getting into all sorts of adventures?
In the 1960s Irwin Allen, the nation’s oldest little boy, brought us that fantasy in a show called “Land of the Giants”. That unimaginative title was a foreboding of things to come. Let’s be honest. Land of the Giants was pretty much a one note show. It all revolved around little people (i.e. the humans) being threatened by the Giants – giant bugs, giant squirrels, giant people, giant pieces of scotch tape…. you get the idea. The most interesting thing in all of this was that the Giant’s planet didn’t seem to have anything on it that we don’t have on this planet… including corrupt policed officers and petty crooks. What are the odds against that?
Limited as it was in imagining an interesting alien world, Land of the Giants did have one really nice piece of hardware, the spaceliner “Spindrift”. Aurora came out with a great kit in 1/64 scale, including a full interior and three figures. Naturally, this particular ten year old snatched up that kit…. and proceeded to put it together in the slap happy way that all ten year olds do.
As an adult with better modeling skills I always wanted to do the Spindrift again, but the original kits were selling for 300 bucks! Lunar Models had a good kit of the Spindrift, but it was much larger, and frankly I didn’t have the shelf space. Eventually I found a recast kit at a model show. Oddly, it wasn’t a resin recast, but a vinyl recast. Still, it built up into a very nice model.
The original had a removable roof to see the interior, but the recast was slightly out of shape. I decided to put lights in the interior and seal it up to correct the problem. The interior had a few inacuracies, the most glaring having only four seats in the passenger cabin. Fortunately, I still parts from my orginal Spindrift kit in my parts box (30 years later!) I added the missing seats, and replaced the recast upper buckheads with my spares. The recast also was missing the figures, but I had those in my parts box also (ever beleive in divine intervention?).
My twelve year old nephew, in spite of being raised on Star Wars and Star Trek: The Next Generation, fell in love with the Spindrift the moment he laid eyes on it. Nice to know that the ship still has some class all these years later.
I never did get around to making a diorama base for the kit, even though it cries out for one. But Culttvman’s site is terribly short of Spindrift models, so I stuck mine out in the garden for a few quick shots. Boy did that bring back memories! Heaven only knows how many times my ten year old self crashed that ship into some giant plants.
John Day
