Why are Moebius’ 2001 kits so disappointing?

When US-based Moebius Models announced a new series of styrene model kits based on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey, I was initially pretty pleased. After all, it’s a 55+ year old movie, so it’s pretty great that new products are coming out related to it. And for the first time since the 1960s, there would be easy to assemble plastic model kits on the market, not just homemade garage kits. So I bought some of their new products.

But the successive kits they’ve released have been a cumulative disappointment and a real waste of potential. And the latest ones I simply didn’t bother picking up.

There are several reasons why. Here beginneth the rant.

Mediocre tooling

The injection tooling and resultant sprues, produced by a subcontractor in China, are not great. They don’t come close to the standard of quality from decent manufacturers of serious (ie: non-toy) model kits today. Here are some of the things I've seen.

It feels like the kits emerged from a time machine from some decades ago, when plastic model tooling was always toylike and cheap.

* Draft refers to the angle between the sides and the bottom of an injection mould. A 90° draft makes it difficult to extract a part from the mould, so injection parts are always slightly tapered in. But really cheap moulding makes things that should look like rectangles taper in like trapezoids.

** Sink marks are depressions in the surface of a plastic part, caused where the overall part is thicker. This type of factory defect is annoying to have to fix, especially on prominent parts of a model, such as the lower front of the EVA pod.

*** Some early buyers of the Space Station V kit report that the fine struts on the arms are arriving short shot, suggesting that the manufacturer is working at the edge of its capabilities. “Short shot” means that molten plastic hasn't flowed fully into the mould during the injection process, resulting in missing sections. Either using a more capable manufacturer, or having simple holes in the arms and including some thin metal rods, would have been a much better approach! (the latter would've yielded finer cable details, looked a zillion times better, and been a great marketing point!) And the QA at the factory is clearly not great.

Look at this detail from the EVA pod. Did their factory even bother to polish the moulds? Can you imagine Tamiya putting something like that out the door with a straight face?

Note that those marks aren’t all smudges in the plastic: they're mostly irregular surfaces.

The main recess is roughly 20mm by 35mm.

Maybe some people enjoy spending a ton of time cleaning up and reworking all the parts before assembly, just like in the bad old days. Sharpening edges and puttying/filing down crummy seams separates the kids from the grownups! But I’d much rather get a nice sharp Bandai kit and put my energy into something else.

Obviously Bandai are top-flight Japanese kit manufacturers, but even the better kits from Round2 and Meng, also made in China, have vastly superior moulds. And when you start at a higher level of quality your finished model will look even better!

Design compromises for injection moulding

There are often noticeable strange features and distorted parts in their products, brought about by the cheap tooling. By contrast, higher-end models from other makers either break their designs into more detail parts, or use side-sliding tools, or both.

This is 1980s-style kit design on the part of Moebius here.

The red and black part on the right is a 3D print that I made. It’s fairly accurate to the film. The part on the left is the same detail from the Moebius EVA kit.

Note how the Moebius details have edges that are all at a weird diagonal angle. This is because the detail is on the side of a hemisphere, so the factory designed it so that the part could be pulled straight out of the mould. Had they made the detail a separate insert then it could have had sides perpendicular to the surface of the sphere.

Overall details are also rudimentary and incorrectly scaled, especially the bizarrely undersized pyramid section.

Inconsistent, erratically researched Products

On the whole the general proportions of their kits are reasonably close to the ships seen in the film. But when it comes to details they're all over the map.

There are many features on their kits which never existed on the original models, but which they duplicated from fan-made models. Seriously. This is a typical example of the sloppy and uneven research they did for their kits.

For instance their EVA pod has features, like a pointy top camera cone, which are directly copied from the Scott Alexander garage kits, and which are wrong. Or take their 1:72 Orion, which has two large strips running around the whole body. These are copied from a hobbyist's model build, and only exist because he glued two styrene strips on his model to conceal a join on his garage kit. None of these things are on the real models and sets.

And don’t get me wrong - I’m not criticizing them for failing to implement every single model detail that existed on the original models. They probably didn’t have access to the high-resolution photos in the Kubrick Archives, and fine details do bump up against the limits of injection moulding. But confusing a fan model from, say, an image taken off the 4K Blu-Ray disc of the movie? Not particularly impressive!

Not only are those panels raised ten feet off the surface, like a toy, but the two ridges marked with arrows shouldn't be there. Those are  the lines copied from a hobbyist build of a garage kit!

By comparison the Moebius Aries 1B kit is considerably more accurate in most areas, presumably because the original Aries model is on exhibit in Los Angeles and lots of good photos exist.

It's also quite strange, since a number of their 2001 kits were made with input from well-known 2001 hobbyist model makers. Did Moebius get proper research advice from these experts, then throw it in the garbage and just let the factory do whatever the hell they wanted to keep costs down, or something?

Not designed for painting

While the 2001 ships are mostly pale grey or white, there are still details and other bits which are different in colour. The smart way to handle these is to mould those bits separately. You then paint them up separately and assemble. Done. Not only is that quick and easy, but it almost always yields great results.

The Round2 “studio series” TIE fighter, for example, has the black wing panels as separate parts from the grey frame and star parts. No masking required! Paint, then assemble.

To save money many parts on Moebius kits are all one big piece, so you have to mask areas off and paint them. Bleah. In the case of the EVA pod this is actually quite a hassle to do well and get a good finished model.

Another nuisance from the EVA pod. This ribbed wedge detail should be black and the rest of the kit white. Look at the way the fins intersect with the curved section. Not only is that not movie accurate (the whole wedges went into a slot in the sphere in the full-sized movie pods), but each raised fin is a huge pain in the ass to mask off for painting purposes.

All of that crap (multiplied by 7 since that's how many wedges there are with ridges) would have been eliminated had they designed the pieces as separate components.

The window recess, not shown here, is another nuisance area to mask off cleanly.

Not designed for lighting

The Space Station V model in the film is famous for its illuminated windows, shining as it spins gracefully through the permanent night of space. But the Moebius kit? The windows are all solid plastic.

So either you have to laboriously cut out each window with a knife, or else you have to laboriously cut out bits of masking tape and cover each window before painting on thick layers of light-blocking paint. And backlit milky plastic with painted surrounds never looks good.

I’m not a model manufacturer, but I doubt it would have been cost-prohibitive to have deeper window moulds that went all the way through. Then you’d have nice clean holes you could simply back with tracing paper. (and throw a sheet of paper in the box at almost zero extra cost!) If the builder wanted to stick LEDs back there, then they could. If they don't want to light it, the openings still look like windows.

Solid windows are a fucking waste of customer time and kind of insulting. Yes, it’s possible to cut out each window hole, but why force people to do that? They seem to be confusing pointless busywork with the fun of model making.

Kits with solid opaque windows are toys, not models. Even if you don't feel like illuminating your model, solid windows are unconvincing and look like garbage.

Another example: Moebius spent a surprising amount of effort on the EVA pod interior, getting quite a bit of it right. But the pushbuttons are just raised projections, again in thick milky-white plastic.

That does make for brisk business in aftermarket brass etched pieces and vinyl stickers, to make masking these panels easier – but they could have made holes in the panel with separate buttons.

Money saving measures

I can only presume that Moebius made these dubious decisions purely as cost-saving measures. I doubt that the market for 2001 model kits is particularly huge, and they obviously need to recoup their investment in each one. Every product is a careful balance between development costs and sales margins.

That’s clearly true. But I also think that some careful planning, detailed and thoughtful design, and assistance from an enthusiastic 2001 fan base, could have yielded much higher quality end products. Not to mention employing a more upmarket factory and tool maker, rather than using a mediocre one that clearly doesn't understand the finer points of the models they're being asked to produce.

After all, why wouldn’t any company want to improve their product quality? Why wouldn’t you want to help bring up standards of contemporary model making, rather than just turning out products that feel like junk manufactured decades ago? Especially since other companies out there do produce way better shit than Moebius does.

Their priorities in this respect also feel a bit odd. For example, on the Aries they expended a huge amount of work in making the leg mechanisms movable, which is arguably a toylike feature, and adding a ton of detail on the underside. Yet their next product, the space station, has no freakin’ windows.

Who buys 2001 stuff anyway?

The market for 2001 isn't just small, it's discerning. It's not like building model kits with a big casual or youth market, where “good enough” toys are adequate. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd think that the majority of customers for 2001 kits are going to be older, detail-oriented builders, not young children. 2001 was one of the first genuinely serious science fiction films, and its director and designers treated its spaceship designs with enormous care. So why not produce something accurate and decent? This isn't GI Joe or My Little Pony product manufacturing here.

This is something that German and Japanese manufacturers seem to understand. They get that if you produce something accurate, detailed, and of high quality then you’re not only satisfying the higher end of the market, but you’re raising the low end as well. You’re not condescending to your customers the way Moebius does. Even Chinese makers, traditionally focused at the low end of the market, are getting this. Look at the quality of the Dune vehicle kits that Meng have put out – they’ve got a lot of problems with misplaced seam lines, but the overall design and texturing vastly exceeds the Moebius 2001 kits.

So it goes

Oh, well. Since there's no competition out there for 2001 stuff, I guess most people are happy with something rather than nothing. And the fact that Moebius are still producing new 2001 kits clearly shows that each one is sufficiently profitable for them. And their stuff isn't dire – it's just mediocre.

It's such a terrible shame. No other manufacturer is likely to ever make licensed kits of these subjects ever again. So for these products to be so utterly flawed, and cheaply made with such a big emphasis on their enormous size, is kinda tragic.