Hollywood jets: Top Gun vs. The Final Countdown vs. Iron Eagle

I had so much fun painting my little MIG’s and Sabres that I wanted to do a couple more. I thought it would be a neat idea to recreate the famous ‘Because I was inverted’ scene from Top Gun, which meant that I would need an F-14 Tomcat and an F-5 Tiger, which was used in the movie to represent a non-existent MIG-28. After a bit of searching online I found a nice lot of second-hand kits, all by Revell. The lot consisted of two F-5 Tigers, an F-14 Tomcat and an F-16 Viper.

Of course, I knew that the decals of the F-14 wouldn’t match the markings on Maverick’s jet. I hadn’t expected, though, that they would match those of the Tomcats featured in 1980’s The Final Countdown. I’ve never seen the movie, apart from some clips on Youtube, but apparently it’s about an aircraft carrier travelling back in time to World War II.

Sounds rather silly, but the Tomcats in it look pretty cool. I didn’t paint my F-14 to be exactly like the one from the movie. I didn’t have the correct grey and only realised during painting that I didn't assemble the wings entirely correctly. Oh, well...

The paint job on the ‘MIG-28’ was as straightforward as could be: black on black. The movie’s jet has no markings apart from a red star in a yellow circle on the tail. I had some spare red stars left from my MIG-15’s, so decided to use those. I thought this looked a bit too plain, though, so I added matching stars to the wings, as well as the number 28 on the nose. The mock MIG, therefore, is more ‘inspired by’ the movie than an exact replica.

Maverick and Goose 'keeping up foreign relations'

Finally, what to do with the F-16? Well, paint it like those seen in 1986’s Iron Eagle, of course! The US Air Force didn’t want to be involved in the production of this continuity-error filled cheese fest, so the jets shown are actually Israeli F-16’s with American markings. I didn’t have the correct colours for the three-tone Israeli camouflage, so I mixed my own. I don’t think I got them quite right - especially the green -, but they are close enough for me. The second-hand kit did not come with any decals, so I had to make do with spares from the other kits.

So, now I have one unbuilt F-5 left. Are there any other famous Hollywood F-5’s I could recreate?

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Little Tanks & Tiny People

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