Tamiya has unveiled a French Light Tank H39 at 1/35 escale

This is partial text from the full article (usually with photos) at https://armorama.com/news/tamiya-french-light-tank-h39
Tamiya has unveiled a French Light Tank H39 at 1/35 escale
At last! A logical companion to the R35 and the inclusion of the German cupola bits is great. Tamiya are ticking a few boxes in the 1940 period with the panzer 1 released last year. Any chance of a Matilda 1 Mr T?
But I already have the Heller and Trumpeter Hotchkiss H-35/39 kits…
What a pleasant surprise!!
Good old unpredictable Tamiya. They never fail to surprise us.
Yeah. This one will go straight to the want list.
Definitely want but do I need……who am I kidding. stuff it! Want and need!
I have the Trumpeter as well. Unless they decide to challenge Hasegawa and finally start producing more WWII Japanese aircraft to go along with the rest of their 1/32 line Tamiya hasn’t been releasing anything that I have need of except paint.
I will be buying this. Right up my rue.
It’s guaranteed to be a sweet kit. I already tackled the Trumpeter one but I’ll be [secretly] getting one of these.
Not long ago, I went looking for H39 based vehicles. According to reviews, Bronco and Trumpeter H39s are too narrow by a significant amount and have shape problems up front. It seems very likely the people at Tamiya will provide us with a fundamentally better model.
Finally what looks to be a good Hotchkiss!!! Good job Tamiya!
Hmmm. First, what’s wrong with the Bronco H39? I thought it was already good.
Yeah, but all French tankers dressed and stood like that.
Could it be that pose is based on a well known photo and both companies just reproduced it ?
Hahaha!
Tamiya has some explaining to do. It smells fishy sushi to me.
They could have picked from any of these:
That reminds me the old story that for years there were no Bergpanther kits because Italeri had the copyright… As long as they do it from scratch, it is perfectly legal to do a similar figure. You can not reproduce Alpine’s figure, but nothing prevents you to make your own. See the dozens of similar German or US figures.
A different thing is if you create an original, fictional, character like Chewbacca, Harry Potter or Lara Croft.