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.

• Edges are always soft

• There’s massive draft* and thus 90° corners are noticeably flared out

• Fine details are missing altogether or are grossly simplified

• Raised panels are thick and tall

• Panel lines are deep soft-sided

• There’s sometimes dark and greasy mould release agent on the parts, especially on ejector pin witness marks

• Surface textures are crude and rough

• Visible sink marks**, usually where the reverse side has a peg

• Incredibly, some people report short shot+ parts

• Transparent parts are wavy and uneven

It feels like the kits emerged from a time machine from some decades ago, when plastic model tooling was always toylike and cheap. (I’m not going to take a cheap shot about using 1960s-era plastic moulding technology for a 1960s movie, because to be fair it's more like 1980s era plastic moulding tech...)

* 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.

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 many Chinese manufacturers are putitng out excellent products now. Consider how the better kits from Round2 and Meng, also made in China, have vastly superior moulds. Take a look at the Round2 “studio” TIE fighter kit, or the Meng Dune kits, to see what I mean. 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 old-skool kit design on the part of Moebius here.

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.

The Discovery model’s details are a random mix of details from the 2001 model and the 2010 model.

And don’t get me wrong - I’m not criticizing them for failing to implement every single model detail that existed on the original miniatures. 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? Come on.

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.

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 layers of light-blocking paint. Backlit milky plastic with painted surrounds never looks good, and tons of extra light-blocking on the exterior will inevitably reduce the sharpness of any details.

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. Look at all the extra work that Lou Dalmaso had to do to mask and paint his Space Station V model.

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. So, for example, the space station kit simply duplicates one of the main sprues, making half of the model inaccurate to the film, as an obvious cost-cutting measure.

I get why they do things like that. 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.

Why couldn't they have made things just a bit better?