Blue Willys Jeep (Destination Moon)
Destination Moon (French: Objectif Lune) is the sixteenth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The story was initially serialised weekly in Belgium’s Tintin magazine from March to September 1950 before being published in a collected volume by Casterman in 1953. The plot tells of young reporter Tintin and his friend Captain Haddock who receive an invitation from Professor Calculus to come to Syldavia, where Calculus is working on a top-secret project in a secure government facility to plan a manned mission to the Moon.
– courtesy of Wikipedia
The finished model:
The story:
For me, the two-part Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon were perhaps second only to The Blue Lotus and Cigars of the Pharaoh as my earliest favourites. Imagine that, Tintin, Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus and even Snowy… on the Moon! Talk about exciting. Of course growing up in the 1970/80s, the Moon was already covered in foot prints, so I can’t even imagine how exciting it would’ve seemed to the original readers in the early 1950s. I do think that knowing it could be (and already had been) done in real life helped my enjoyment of it. Hergé’s tale was so well thought out and scientifically sound that it seemed totally legitimate to my young mind.
Of course, it also doesn’t hurt to have a cover like that… a blue jeep… the orange spacesuits, and that glorious red and white checkerboard rocket.
It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to get out of this portion of my Tintin build project. I mean, the moon rocket is so overpowering and classic, it blocks out some of the other options. The problem for me though, was one of scale. Everyone wants to do the rocket… and so did I… but a 1/72 scale Moon Rocket will take up a pretty significant portion of your living room.
Instead, I decided that the next best thing would be to do that equally iconic blue jeep – at least until I remembered there were two rockets. Anyway, It was just different enough from the red Jeep Cj2A as seen on the cover to the Land of Black Gold as to keep it interesting. So I decided to do both of them in tandem.
The build:
The build itself was pretty straightforward – more or less out of the box using the Academy 1/72 scale “Light Vehicles” set. I’m happy with the result as there was only a slight amount of scratch building required for the rear of the jeep and moving the spare tire from the back to the right side. What I’m most proud of though is the headlights. I drilled out the moulded lights on the kit and then swapped in some stretched clear sprue.
I think it turned out alright, but let me know what you think:
