“Hey! What about Major Kong?”
By Mike Smolek
I’ve wanted for some time to make a model of actor Slim Pickens riding a nuclear bomb as seen in the movie “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” To begin work on the model, I watched the scene from the movie several times collecting details and estimating dimensions. I was also able to find several studio photographs taken during filming, which filled in many important details. I even researched the dimensions of the bomb bay on a B-52D.
While the movie bomb could probably fit in length, it seems a bit too large in width for two of them to fit into a real B-52. Also note that Slim enters from the rear of the bomb bay, which apparently was done solely to establish the ‘Hi There!’ and ‘Dear John’ writing on the front of each bomb.
I used my Elegoo Mars 3 resin printer to make a pilot figure out of several pieces, a cowboy hat, and three bomb sections in 1/24th scale. 3D Builder and Blender software along with old-fashioned modeling skills were used to design and fit all of the pieces. The model is suspended above a wooden base with a clear piece of acrylic supporting the back of the bomb. The decals were designed in Photoshop and printed on decal transfer film using a Canon Pixma inkjet printer.
Tamiya bottle paints were used. As I built the model, I realized that the nose of the bomb was created with unusual radial fins and handles in order to provide Slim with places to position his feet and grab onto the bomb as he rode it. He and the bomb were suspended high off the studio floor by wires during filming in order to physically simulate dropping from the bomb bay. My finished model has a few design errors, but this first attempt was a lot of fun to research and build.