EDITORIAL
On our Facebook page, I came across the
notion that the Zero Zero Zero title of our
Limited Edition kit is nonsense for the
release, as it contains two complete kits
only, leading to a perceived incompatibility
between name and contents. In my view, this
is a question of the angle from which you
are looking at this from. For someone who
is immersed in the topic of the Zero and its
history up to their ears, like we are, the title
of the kit makes sense, and a pilot in the
Pacific in ’42 would not have an issue with
it either. In the heat of combat over the
Pacific and Indian Oceans , the sudden cry
of ‘Zero!’ was so common and had so many
forms that not all of them could be placed
on the box. At its height and in all its glory,
the Zero was ever present in the far east,
and this is the feeling that the title of the
kit is designed to convey. When you think
about it, there has generally been no deeper
meaning attached to the nomenclature of
kits in our industry, other than to convey the
box contents. If the need to be a little more
specific presented itself, then it was usually
labeled as “something over something”.
In this case, the obligatory Zeroes Over the
Pacific would have sufficed. In fact, it would
have been an excellent choice, at least locally, thanks to the Czech translation of the
book Samurai, about Saburo Sakai, to the
point of having a distinctly magical flavor.
But that would have been a somewhat common road to go down, and we actually do try
to put a slightly deeper, more original meaning into the names of our kits. This comes
with the risk that an intended meaning of
the title might be missed or misunderstood
by some. If you pay some attention to the
4
INFO Eduard
Limited Edition release Zero Zero Zero,
and study the marking options and their
descriptions provided therein, they may lead
you to the article penned by Jan Bobek, that
is an extension of the introductory section
of the kit instructions and offers a slightly
different perspective of the A6M2 Model 21
than that of the norm. That norm being that
the Zero Model 21 is basically an all-grey,
boring subject, one that attacked Pearl Harbor and cut like a hot knife through butter
from Clark Field to Darwin, only to slam
against the wall of its limitations at Midway
and over Guadalcanal, to be replaced by
more capable and more colorful models of
the type, the A6M3 and especially the more
popular A6M5. With the release of the kit
today, we are trying to illustrate that this is
not entirely accurate, that this version of the
Zero had a bigger significance than most of
us think, that the type remained in service longer than most of us are aware and
provided better results than are generally
perceived. In short, for us modelers, this
realization leads to the understanding that
this aircraft is much more interesting on all
levels than we thought. Last, but not least,
the stories that these aircraft can tell are
far more interesting than can generally be
imagined. We will hit on the classic tales in
the next issue of our newsletter, when Jan
Bobek will carry on from his article into the
history of the Model 21 in a two part article
about the life of Saburo Sakai.
Model Kits
There are a further three new kits for this
month. In the ProfiPack line, we have the
later variant of the Spitfire Mk.Vb , also the
1:48 scale F6F-5 Hellcat and the 1:72 scale
MiG-15bis, the latter two being Weekend
Edition kits. The F6F-5 release signals a return of the 48th scale Hellcat into our range.
Besides this Weekend release, there will
April 2022