BANDAI'S S.H.A.D.O. INTERCEPTOR

Here are a few photos of a recently completed model, the Bandai S.H.A.D.O. Interceptor kit.

It’s around 8” long, about the same as the Dinky die-cast version, and a fair representation of what we see on screen.

It’s a fairly simple build, although I did alter a few aspects of it, in particular scratch-building a new cockpit.

The kit’s gimmick is its firing spring loaded missile, which I didn’t want, and the mechanism would have probably got in the way of the cockpit detail, so the slot underneath the hull for the firing lever was filled, along with the larger slot for the display stand which, again I preferred not to use. It also needed some additional detailing added to the hull, and the rocket exhaust blanking off inside.

For the nit pickers there are a couple of visual aspects wrong with the kit. One is the clear cockpit cover which has a curved middle strut rather than straight like the original props. The other is the missile tip which should be more pointed; however, as the missile is supposed to fire I imagine that’s down to a safety aspect. There’s a couple of other things, like the raised tail fin, and  a slightly thicker look to the landing gear part that joins to the wings.

Not that this spoils anything for me, rather it gives the Bandai its own unique look.

Another thing that is quite unique about the kit is the decals, which are bizarre, the hull decal wording makes no sense at all –‘Emergency Control System’ translates as ‘Daive Diana’, and ‘Keep Clear Platform’ becomes ‘Producer, Producer’. ‘English Communicator Intellectualize’ and ‘Stop Maturation’ are two more odd translations.   There are a couple of aftermarket fan outlets who still do more accurate decals for this kit which, if I make another I may invest in, but for this I chose to go with what’s supplied.

The stunning box art by Shigeru Komatsuzaki.

The box contents.

In the UFO TV series the three Moon-based SHADO Interceptors are housed in underground silos and emerge from three in-line craters on the Moon’s surface. Each carries a single nuclear missile. Some people have questioned why they only carry one missile. The simple explanation is that UFO’s are travelling at speeds approaching the speed of light, and are presumably invisible to the pilots. UFO’s are tracked by SHADO’s Space Intruder Detector (S.I.D) which gives the targeting co-ordinates  by way of SHADO’s Moonbase to the Interceptors in flight which predicts where the UFO’s should be in space.  In short, each Interceptor only gets one chance of hitting the target before the UFO is out of range of the Moonbase defences.

Occasionally, in some episodes this rule is bent of course. In the episode, ‘Conflict’, Commander Straker orders the three Moonbase Interceptors to destroy four pieces of space junk. How they do this is never fully explained!