Movie Mania! Star Trek budget ships

 

It's another day off, and once again, I'm telling myself I can get a quick post in. This time around, I at least have a new acquisition lined up, to go with one I have thought of covering sooner or later. To start things off, here's a pic of the one I already had, a Johnny Lightning Romulan bird of prey from ca. 2005.

For the backstory, this is part of a line first released in 2004.  Per Memory Alpha, the first wave consisted of 6 ships, including four from the original series. This, needless to say, is the Romulan ship from the classis episode "Balance of Terror", which is permanently tied with "The Doomsday Machine" for my favorite original Trek episode (see my Galaxy Quest review). I picked this particular ship at a Walmart in Flagstaff. I don't recall what if any other ships might have been there, which I now suspect means the racks were already a bit picked over. It has the simple, streamlined look of original-series ships. It's also a good size, though it's hollow so it feels kind of cheap and a bit too light. Here's a couple more pics.

What will stand out from this line is the display stand (honestly not a pun...) It's made of metal for extra class. Then there's a quite odd ball and socket joint that has always made me uneasy. If you're a collector, you'll already know that a bad stand can do a lot of damage to a good model, and this one is nothing but alarm bells. At face value, it's handy to be able to swivel and tilt a ship smoothly. However, I have continually worried that leaving it too far back will mark up the model. I'm downright jittery about removing the ship from the stand, which takes a good deal of force and makes a loud noise to boot. Still, the ship had stayed in very good condition, enough that it's hard to say if I was wrong or if my reluctance to handle it made the difference. Here's a pic of the underbelly to show what I mean. So beautiful, so scratchable!

Fast forward, and I was looking for a good representation of the Reliant from Wrath of Khan. Like many things from the first batch of Trek movies, I have a blind spot in my memory for this one that's like a reverse Mandela effect. I certainly saw the movie during elementary school, along with Search For Spock (see also my "Trek 1" review), and I now know I would also have seen the same model featured on Next Gen and the pilot of Deep Space 9. However, the first time I really remember it is when I saw a model kit on sale in junior high or later, and I think even then I had to take a closer look to figure out what it was. It gets my vote for the best Federation ship in the whole Trek franchise. It's like the Enterprise's cool little brother, compact, fast and well-armed. I find myself further envisioning the Star Fleet ship yards churning out scores and hundreds the ship and its successors while the Enterprises their expensive ships came out in dribs and drabs. It's a polite explanation why we keep seeing them get shot up. At any rate, the cheapest example I could find anywhere was the Johnny Lightning ship, so I put a bid for this one, unfortunately before I figured out it was a "battle damage" gimmick. Here's a couple pics.

And here's the packaging, which came with the ship but already opened.

Like most of these things, the battle damage looks hideous yet unconvincing. That's really a shame, because a model that actually looked the way the ship does at the end of the final battle would have been awesome. The fairly obvious reason they didn't do it was that it would have meant new molds for things like the severed moorings of the nacelle, which might well have cost as much or more than using the existing parts. (They did do a custom mold for the genuinely freaky "damaged" Enterprise, which looks more like it was chomped by the Star Wars space slug.) It's my further suspicion that at least a good part of this run were unsold units that got repainted. That brings us straight to the big problem with this specimen: The ship came with the roll bar  completely out of place, which I quickly decided was a factory defect. When I ventured to try to snap it in place, it came off entirely and by all indications won't reattach without glue. For the moment, I've tried taking it on and off (which per the lore is what the effects guys did more than once with the original screen model), and if anything, it looks a bit better without it, if only because the "battle damage" is concentrated on the superstructure. Here's a few closeups, most of which required taking the damn thing off.

As a bonus, here's the stand with the ball and socket.

And for one more pic, here's the pair with the Executor for a little scale. I realized this was the only one I took with the top of the Reliant visible without the bar.

With that, I'm wrapping this up. These are good ships that have stood the test of time, well enough that I might get more. The fact that they can still be had for a decent price further shows that they came from a time when collectibles could still be bought cheaply without going straight to the scalper market. (Or, the scalpers' bubble already burst...) If you don't have one, or for that matter if you do, they're worth another look. That's all for now, more to come!