I hope Al Ross and the other good folks at Bluejacket won’t take issue with the comment I’m about to make; it’s not intended to be critical. The kit is, as the company clearly states, an updated version of a kit that Bluejacket’s predecessor, Boucher Models, originally produced in the 1930s. My immediate reaction when I saw the picture: I do believe we now know the origins of Aurora’s old “Black Falcon” from the 1950s. Most interesting.
It actually looks like a nicely-made, reasonably believable kit. (I’m not entirely comfortable with the bow structure, but in a kit like this that sort of thing can easily originate with the builder rather than the designers.)
That brings back memories of my first Black Falcon. It had masts that were anything but vertical, lots of glue outside of the seams, and no paint. It was cool!
It seems that there was more than one “Plastic Pirate” in the 1950’s basing their plastic kits on other companies wood kits.
In some respects it makes sense, producing a new plastic version of an existing wood kit taps into an existing market and expands it by providing a crude (Aurora’s Black Falcon) kit that can be built by younger modelers and mass produced.
It has been a very long time since I built the Aurora kit, but it seems to me that the cannons on the Bluejacket kit are smaller in proportion than their plastic counterparts (and probably more in keeping with a pirate ship).
I see that an original Aurora kit is being advertised for $175 on oldmodelkits.com, so $345 for the re-engineered Bluejacket kit doesn’t seem that bad…
I’m pretty sure the old Lifelike (ex-Pyro) “Brig of War” was copied from Model Shipways’ original, solid hull Fair American kit (which was, in turn, based on an old model in the Naval Academy Museum). Pyro was notorious for such deeds. The two gentlemen who ran Model Shipways for many years referred to it as “Pirate Plastics.”