Bandai’s 1:350 Millennium Falcon: a model kit review
In December 2016 Japanese toy and model kit maker Bandai released a new model of Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon – Vehicle Model 006.
No, it's not the great big 1:72 model that every nerd in the land lunged for a year later. Instead, it’s a tiny palm-sized “box” kit. It’s so-called because it’s designed to fit inside a standardized small box, rather than being accurate to a particular scale. The model appears to be about 1:350 in scale, or roughly half the size of the previous Bandai Falcon, which clocked in at 1:144.
This thing is small! From mandible tip to the back of the saucer, it’s 98mm long. That's about 3 7/8 inches, for people in Liberia and Myanmar. And it’s super cheap, too. Costs about as much to ship it from Japan as it costs to buy it.
A new hopefulness
Interestingly, unlike the 1:144 Falcon, which is modeled directly on the Falcon as seen in The Force Awakens (TFA), the 1:350 Falcon is like the 1:72 Falcon, and is actually based on the original Millennium Falcon model made for 1977’s Star Wars; the film later subtitled A New Hope (ANH).
How do we know that it’s a Star Wars Falcon and not, say, an Empire Strikes Back Falcon? Well, for ESB two additional landing gear boxes were added to the underside of the model. And the 1:350 Falcon lacks these features.
It's also a modestly faithful replica of the original 5 foot filming miniature. It's not modeled after the flatter 32" model introduced in ESB for shooting the action scenes. (the De Agostini and Fine Molds models of the Falcon are based around the 32" model, hence the subtle differences in appearance)
NOTE: As of 2017 it seems that there are now two versions of this model. First, Bandai has mysteriously altered the original 006 Falcon to have five landing gear boxes, rather than the ANH era three boxes. Sadly this involves replacing part A4 (below). Technically this lower hull is not an ESB/ROTJ hull, since the underside maintenance pits are TFA/TLJ era pits. Though it's similar enough to the ESB/ROTJ look you could get away with it.
Second, they've released "Resistance" box set which includes the 1:350 Falcon – but a Force Awakens/Last Jedi era Falcon. This version has the rectangular dish rather than the round dish.
Easy to assemble
A tiny little kit, this thing is only made of a handful of snap-together parts. Components have incredible levels of detail molded in, and paint up really well. Given the minute size of this model, it's impressive work!
Other points of note
Here are a few extremely picky detail points about the 1:350 model.
Round dish
Yes, the 006 kit has a round radar dish. Lovers of the original trilogy rejoice!
It doesn’t have the more rectangular dish seen in TFA – for that you want the "Resistance" version of this kit. Unfortunately the dish's mount is a pair of solid V-shaped brackets, because it wouldn't be possible to mold the tiny struts at this small scale. Same with the cannons, incidentally – because they’re so tiny they’ve been molded together.
Fewer mirrored parts
The previous 1:144 Bandai Falcon was designed around unfinished digital data from the TFA movie model, and so many components are simply mirrored or invented by Bandai's designers. The top and bottom halves of the 144 saucer are pretty well dead-on, but the sidewalls contain a lot of errors, and one underside maintenance pit is mirrored.
By contrast, the original release of the 1:350 Falcon (see photo above) is an amazingly accurate rendition of the 1977 movie’s five foot model. There are only a few mirrored parts on the 1:350: the inner sidewall for the mandibles (these weren't identical on the movie model), and the inner upper/lower surfaces of the jaws (nobody cares about these since they’re basically impossible to see anyway).
But given how tiny this thing is I doubt anyone will notice such fiddly details.
Wrong docking rings, rear sidewalls, and cockpit tunnel
I'm afraid to report that, although Bandai got the ANH look almost perfectly correct, even going to the trouble of making the underside pits wider and thus more accurate for the ANH era, there are four awful errors for the completist geek.
First, the two docking rings (the protruding cone-like things on either side of the ship) have the extra greeblies that were added for TFA (see above). This is so annoying, since it must have been a simple error during the production – someone accidentally left a part on. This is the most obvious and visible mistake by far.
Second, the 1:144 model has a fictitious (relative to the films!) design for the ridge that runs along the cockpit tunnel. This is loosely based on the 32" model, protrudes much too far, is twice as wide as it should be, and doesn't look anything seen on any movie Falcon. And unfortunately this erroneous design has made it to the 1:350 model (see photo right). The 1:72 Falcon does not have this error.
Third, as noted above the curved (saucer) sidewalls are based on the ones for the 1:144 TFA model, and all are wrong for ANH. Only the straight (mandible) sidewalls were corrected for this model.
Fourth, some of the round maintenance pits contain TFA details and pipework.
If you get a current production version of this kit, you may get a five landing gear box lower hull rather than the three landing gear box lower hull which originally shipped with it. Oh well.
Sadly these problems are difficult to repair. Simply slicing off the offending parts leaves blank areas for a super-tiny model that's hard to work on. However, you sort of need a magnifying glass to see most of these errors. I’m sure most modelmakers won’t know or care about them. But if they really bug you, I've designed 3D printed replacement parts to fix most of the problems.
These additional parts include external bits like an open cockpit and radar dish mount, corrected sidewalls and maintenance pits, and landing gear and a boarding ramp. I've also made internal parts - cockpit and gunbay interiors.
No lighting options
The engine grille is solid white plastic, and too thick and opaque to be easily backlit. Still, at 1:350 you can't easily make out the grille details, and if you were to stick a bit of diffuser plastic in there instead it’d be easy enough to illuminate. Besides, the original ANH model had little more than a blank piece of milky white plastic back there anyway, so you’d technically be more accurate. You could take Dorobou Hige’s (see below) approach and use a ziptie! Or you could use a 3D printed replacement.
Solid windows
Sadly, because it's such a small model, the cockpit and gunbay windows are solid opaque plastic. The kit includes black stickers to place over the areas that would be glassed over. I ended up making my own 3D printed open cockpit for this.
Stickers
No decals. The 1:144 kit comes with both adhesive stickers and waterslide decals, giving you the choice. The 1:350 is stickers all the way.
No figurines
Unlike the 1:144 model, which ships with seated and standing figurines of TFA characters, none are included with the 1:350 model. They’d be impossibly tiny anyway.
ANH landing gear boxes
As noted above, this is not the Falcon from ESB or Return of the Jedi. Those movies, and indeed TFA, featured five landing gear boxes on the underside. The 1:350 model has three. It also has the original larger-sized maintenance pits on the underside.
No landing gear
The model is to be displayed in-flight only, via an included stand that slots into a bottom connector. The stand is simply a plain black rectangle. It needs painting, though, as injection mold flow lines are visible.
Docking Bay 94
For a remarkable build of this craft, check out the work of Japanese modeller Dorobou Hige.
I'm also working on replacement parts for the 350, to bring it closer in line to the original trilogy model. Need to finish those up...