I’ve always felt that Gorgo was the British attempt at cashing in on the success of Godzilla. And that’s fine because it certainly didn’t keep me from loving the movie when I saw it as a kid. Another big lizard/dino monster tearing up stuff – COOL!!!

Joe Laudati’s rendering of this creature is excellent. The likeness is spot on and the overall design of the kit is great. He chose a great scene from the film to recreate in 3D. My only complaint would be the connection of the hands to the sphere and of the feet to the base. Neither area seemed to be designed or sculpted to fit together. It was almost as if someone else sculpted these parts without referencing the creature so they just don’t fit well. The monster’s claws don’t really wrap around the sphere and the toes don’t really sit well on the base.

The kit itself was a fairly clean casting but did require some prep work. I got this kit back in the late 90s as I recall so the casting was actually pretty good for that time. There were some pinholes and offset seams but nothing too terrible. The worst thing was the teeth. Many of them did not come out in the casting. Air bubbles were trapped at the tips of the teeth and therefore they were missing. So, after studying them for some time, I decided to play dentist.  Instead of trying to fill in or recreate each tooth tip, I decide to just remove them completely and start over. I Dremeled out almost all the teeth and took old pieces of styrene sprue and carved/sanded it down to create new teeth one at a time. It was tedious and time consuming but in the end, I was very pleased with the result. The new teeth looked much better than the old ones. They were irregular lengths and sharp.

The other issue I decide to tackle was trying to figure out how to light up the bathysphere. It just NEEDED to be lit up. So, I broke out my drill and went at it. The power supply and switch are in the base. The wiring runs from there up through the base of his foot. I hid the wiring in Gorgo’s body by running it through the leg, torso, arm and out the palm of one of his hands into the sphere. The arm and leg were solid cast so I had to drill perpendicular channels through those parts, run the wiring and then putty up the holes. The torso was hollow so all I had to there was feed the wire through. The sphere was hollow cast but the walls were very thick, not like most hollow cast pieces.  I cut the sphere open with a Dremel cutting blade, drilled out the windows and bored out a lot of the excess thickness to make more even if you were to look in the windows. The glass panes were old auto headlight lenses from my parts box. I added an antenna and an air hose made of twisted metal rod.

The base had to be modified because the original was just a rocky slab about ¾” thick. I needed somewhere to hide the battery box so I took the original piece and raised it up on a wood frame and expanded it by adding styrofoam covered with Durham’s Water Putty. The switch is hidden on the backside under a ledge of rock.

The kit is painted entirely in acrylics. I airbrushed Gorgo and punched up his highlights with dry brushing. The base was hand painted and is covered in several layers of varying washes.