a blog by Peter Leonard
When I was a kid, I had a remote-controlled car called the “Frog,” made by a Japanese company called Tamiya. The company had their origins in scale modeling, and the Frog was actually a high-precision kit that you assembled out of dozens and dozens of small plastic and metal parts. Painting and decaling the model was just as important, and took just as much time, as putting the gears in the differential together, or assembling the oil-dampened shock absorbers.
That Frog is long gone now, but Tamiya has been re-releasing some of their classic R/C kits from the 1980s. Pictured above is the Grasshopper, which was a more basic buggy than the Frog I had as a kid. Still, it was a fun kit to build this month, partly because it provided some context to the design decisions in the more-sophisticated successor model, the Frog I used to own.
One thing that’s changed in 23 years: I now enough patience (if far less free time) to attempt to paint the optional driver figure. My guess is that most kids left these out in the 1980s, as they required extremely careful masking and painting. If you look carefully you’ll see that the figure’s eyes and pupils have to be painted in. As of yet, he doesn’t have any eyebrows — but a can of dark brown acrylic paint just arrived in the mail.