So I was looking at the Dune action figure line and on the site I was looking at they had a Dune model kit of the Sandworm created by Jeff Yeagher. http://www.arrakis.co.uk/action.html Then I notice the shape and design of the Spice Ship looks an aweful lot like Wet-Suits underwater sled.

I knew the early Joe vehicles used parts from model kits but I assumed that had stopped once the line really took off and especially by 86. Anyway judge for yourself based on the enlarged pic. I tried to find a better pic of just the ship but no luck. I also included the space on the model's base where the ship goes so you can get a better idea of the shape.

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Oh, designers will use kibble wherever they can get away with it. It probably is less commonplace later in the line, but we may just not have found it yet. I still get a kick out of the rather obvious TIE Fighter canopy on the Batman Forever Batcave. Very cool find, and a rather more blatant reuse than I'd have expected to see. A portion of a large vehicle or playset, sure, but taking one discrete component and then just reusing it wholesale? Brazen.

Isn't it a common urban legend that the original HISS Tank was basically kibbled together from various model kits, and you can actually build your own HISS tank if you know which model kits were used?

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I don't know about the HISS Tank but the original TV model of the 70's Battlestar Galactica was made from several different model kits.

The one pluv posted looks like a dead-ringer for Wet-suits sled. Now the question becomes... which came first?

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Seeing as that Duke Worm is a "Garage Kit" I would suspect that it's the Wetsuit wing that was used to make the ship, and not the other way around.




Yes, I believe it's Tamiya's Russian T-60...but don't quote me on it. If you can find Kevin Watts' Battle Damaged Hiss tank Custom, he used the wheels to make one missing it's treads.

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The turret on the Rage is straight off of an M60A2 tank model kit. They just cut the top off of it, and stuck different guns in the front. It even still has the gunner's and loader's hatches on either side.

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Heh, I always thought that thing looked like a mini-spceship.

Well if anyone's familiar with Dune, that "Wet-Suit sled" thing is supposed to be a spice-carrying ship in the model kit, so... do those ships in the movie look like that?

All I've been able to find of that garage kit is that one picture Pluv linked, except sometimes it's smaller with the background cropped out... so it's hard to tell for certain, but it certainly looks like it has the sled's handle, which makes less sense on a spice-carrying ship...

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That's cool.
With a buddy of mine we used to use various Joe accessories as mini space ships and the sled was one of them. If only we knew.

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I neve thought the sculptor might have used the Joe accessory. That would make sense though.

Not exactly. The Ornithopter does have a rear stabilizing bar in the movie version and inverted expanding wings. However, the front design is way different. But Dune has a pretty extensive Expanded Universe with tv specials, comics, and tons of additional novels. I'm not familiar enough with those to rule out the design being form any of them.

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More shots on another site:



http://www.bucwheat.com/sl/dune/d05.jpg

It looks like that's what they did. As Jay suggested, it's probably Wet Suit's sled that was modified and used as the base for them to sculpt onto.

Oh and here's the ship it's suppose to be:

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