Capturing the X-Bomber

Those of us who are of a certain vintage will fondly remember enjoying Saturday morning kids TV in the UK. For me, the golden age was when I was around 7 or 8 years old - you'd get the early morning cartoons of course, before the main magazine program - Going Live or The 8:15 From Manchester which would take you to around 11am with pop star interviews, call-ins and game shows getting in the way of more cartoons and then it would be all over by lunchtime - but for a while, there was a little extra. On Central television, you had a strange Sci Fi puppet show called Star Fleet.

The series follows the crew of the experimental X-Bomber - Dr Benn, pilots Shiro, Barry Hercules and John Lee, the android PPA and Lamia, a mysterious and beautiful girl who is protected by the fearsome monster Kirara. They're all great characters, but let's be clear - it couldn't be a more blatant Star Wars rip-off visually if it tried. Dr Benn is clearly the wise and beardy Alec Guinness analogue, Shiro's outfit, sans daft perma-helmet, is a close match to Luke's, while Lamia is a more demure Leia, with Kirara's grunting and violent manner aping the famous Wookie. "Inspired by" would be generous. 

Stunning puppets, if not entirely without inspiration from a galaxy far, far away...

I fell in love with this show. Sadly my parents would drag me out to the shops every Saturday so I only got to see a few episodes, but I distinctly remember the episode Farewell the Eternal Battlefield, set on a doomed planet to which the crew of EX-Bomber are lured with a distress signal. Landing, they find Princess Keeli. She explains that the Imperial Alliance devastated her planet, leaving her the only survivor. Warning the team that the war is not yet over, fighting machines buried in the rubble emerge and start attacking once again. Shiro, Barry and Lee engage the armada in the Dai-X, their heroic onslaught bringing an end to the planet's suffering. At the close, the Princess declares  that peace has finally found her world and that, one day, flowers would  bloom and life would return to the planet. Then she closes her eyes and turns into a rose.

God, that's haunting.

It was many years before I learned that Star Fleet was a Go Nagai (Devilman, Cutey Honey) creation, or that it originally aired in the UK in 1982. Since I was in Oxfordshire when I saw it and we moved there in '87, I know it was a rerun when Central played it at lunchtimes. It was shown around the same time as Gerry Anderson's Terrahawks (which first aired in 1983) and there was a little rivalry between the two productions. As much as I enjoy Terrahawks, there's no denying it was far less mature, employing comedic Carry On actor Windsor Davies to voice the spherical droid Sergeant Major Zero and employing more camp than Glastonbury, with it's candy-floss haired songstress and borderline racist depiction of it's Japanese cast member Hiro, a nervous and absent-minded scientist with a penchant for botany and mis-pronouncing words. I liked the ships and the Spheroids but the story left me cold. Despite this, I have Bandai's POPY Terrahawk and Treehawk ships, as well as a couple of the Spheroids, which I think are wonderful. Certainly Terrahawks was winning on the toy aisles.

Terrahawks was developed at a similar time, but never had the same epic scope.

But for Star Fleet, a show that shook me as a child and became a much loved part of my DVD collection, there was nothing. This may be because the show was not a hit in its native Japan, and sadly a fire took out all the puppets and major props which is just a tragedy considering how beautiful they are. The puppets were stylised but full of personality, with distinctive costumes and wonderful designs. And the ships - oh, Dai X, the huge red combining robot, was a fantastically realised piece of mecha design, looking downright demonic in combat, but it was the X-Bomber itself that stole my heart.

Looking like a turkey, with its long neck and oddly protruding engines looking like little legs, it still somehow managed to be awesome. It was lo-fi futuristic design, clearly influenced by the worn technology of Star Wars, but very much its own design. Seeing the mighty engines roar to life was always a thrill, even more so when that gangly neck lifted to deploy it's major cannon. So impractical! And slow! But still amazing to a child watching what was - to me - a huge fighter deploying its major artillery.

It's not like the ship had it easy either - it's maiden flight saw it taken down and crash on the moon on its very first episode, sacrificing its dignity in order to service the plot and allow Lamia to find and board the downed vessel. It was always under heavy fire, trapped by vines or stuck in a gravity well, it certainly had a rough time of it. 

So, put-upon as the old girl was, and magnificent as the show could be at its best, merchandise was pretty limited, especially if you wanted something accurate. No, you were limited to toys like the Takatoku X-Bomber:

The shapes are all there, but the gaudy colours do it no favours. You have to work the ol' imagination pretty hard. Picture courtesy of Mandarake.

When Evolution released their Chogokin Big Dai-X back in 2014, I had hoped that an X-Bomber would follow, but alas, 12 years later and no sign of it. I knew there had been some Lego concepts and even 3D printed models, but I'd held out for years, would a 3D printed X-Bomber work? And did they have to come in the reddy/brown colour scheme that I'd seen banded around? Yes, it's based on some stills in the Star Fleet annual, but look at the show and whether it's a filter or the lighting, that's not the right colour scheme - it's not a ruddy X-Wing!

A 3D printed X-Bomber courtesy of Mini Arts on Ebay

But I did like the print. Still, I shelved the idea, it wasn't quite right and close just wasn't good enough. It wasn't until I saw the Forbes report by Ollie Barder showcasing the salvaged and reconstructed props from the X-Bomber exhibition in Japan from 2022, which showed the ship in the greys and blacks I remembered, that I decided something had to be done. Besides, Big Dai-X was getting lonely.

The exhibition showcased a restored X-Bomber (official promo shot above) which shows an alternative colour scheme that felt far more accurate

Now, I'd fallen across an Ebay seller called Mini Arts who offered a number of impressive 3D printed ships from the likes of Babylon 5, Starship Troopers and Battlestar Galactica, but no X-Bomber. I decided to reach out and ask them if they might consider adding one, only to be told it was something they had in their catalogue but it just wasn't live at the moment.

Cue unbridled joy.

So we got talking, I supplied the pictures of the exhibition X-Bomber for reference and 10 days later, it was done.

Swoon.

And there she is, the X-Bomber of my childhood dreams given form at last, a beautiful rendering with (as far as I'm concerned) the correct colours. Honestly, every time I've walked past this beast I've just been grinning. It's perfect. A second model was popped on Ebay and sold within a few days, so clearly I'm not the only one who wanted this ship (whoever bagged the other, you're welcome!) So now I've been able to replicate the shot of X-Bomber flying over the series' beautiful moonbase (as seeen at the head of this article and in more detail below) and give the magnificent Dai X a partner truly worthy of the series' legacy.  

I think the only issue now is that Mini Arts has added the Odyssey from Ulysses 31 to their listings *bites fist*. A new article there perhaps...