There have been a lot of Star Trek model kits over the years, enough so that it seems like a producer would have to have something pretty unique to make their mark on the market. It seems that some years ago a project was started in Japan to market a truly unique model of the Enterprise-D. What the “Build The Enterprise” entailed was a “subscription” system where once a week or so the subscribers would receive a magazine with Technical Manual-type stuff and parts to continue the build. In this case, the build was a 1/900 scale cutaway model of the Enterprise, with each deck represented by a sheet of laser-etched plexiglass. “Build TheEnterprise” was aimed at and released solely in the Japanese market.
As anyone who has been reading this blog long enough knows, I’m intimately familiar with the concept of “boy howdy, this project I’ve embarked on is certainly cool and I have high hopes for it” transmogrifying into “well, that didn’t sell worth a damn.” Heck, that’s pretty much *every* project I’ve initiated (anybody want to prove me wrong and turn American Nuclear Explosive Devices into something so popular that I’ll get off my ass and finally finish issue#2?) Of course, I’m just one goober with no marketing department, no marketing *budget*, no interpersonal skills and more stubbornness than sense. So you’d expect that professionals, with access to the experts (in this case, the likes of Mike Okuda and Rick Sternbach and others who, if you know anything at all about Star Trek ship design and model making, are well-known names) and who have had considerable success in the past, would have another success with a project like this.
Ooops.
They had the bad luck of starting up right after the tsunami and Fukushima reactor meltdown. As a result the Japanese model building market wasn’t in the mood and the project failed. One hundred issues were projected… only four were actually released. One would hope that a project like this would be recoverable in some form… a Kickstarter or some such. Because from all appearances it was a heck of a thing. But it seems that it has been simply abandoned by those in power.
So, let that be a lesson to you: do your market research first, and think twice before doing your initial release just before a major earthquake right next to a nuclear reactor that has been hobbled by red tape and anti-nuclear activists. And you can add the failure of this innovative cutaway model to the list of things the anti-nuke Luddites have inflicted on mankind by making sure that old reactors can’t be replaced with new ones.