Have you every
watched a movie and said to yourself, "Hey! I could build a model of
that!" Well, it happened to me when I got the DVD of the Beatles'
"Hard Day's Night". Once I realized that Italeri made a nice
1/72nd scale H-19/S-55 then I was off. But I needed to know a bit of
history about the actual airframe first. Turns out that the British
version of the H-19 is known as the Westland Whirlwind, and the the Whirlwind in
question had the civil code G-ANFH. Several inquiries on the web provided
color pictures of G-ANFH from 1964.
Click on
images below to see larger images
"A Hard Day's
Night" was shot in black and white and I would have never guessed from
those images that G-ANFH was primarily Orange. I built the kit straight out of
the box with one exception. A friend vacuformed a dome for me to represent
the perspex bubble fitted to one of the left window ports. This was
intended for movie cameras. In fact, G-ANFH was also used as a platform
for aerial camera work during the film. Some of the scenes from the
"Can't Buy Me Love" sequence was shot from G-ANFH on a camera with low
battery power. The cameraman thought the film was wasted, but director
Richard Lester loved the sped up action and used it in the final cut (which
spawned the "Monkees" romps and other countless music videos).
G-ANFH was owned by British European Airways (BEA) and it was a simple task to
make the BEA logo read BEATLES on one side of the airframe. (Another
friend made the BEA and TLES decals for me.)
Thanks to Bill
Bosworth and William Everhart for their help with this model.
Jonathan
Strickland
Click on
images below to see larger images
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