Face-Palm/Cringe-Worthy/Played-Out model scenes and concepts

[chutton01]

Hunting Around for info on old Bachmann Kits, I stumbled across this Bachmann Train Town Building Kit page. OK, setting aside the fact that these cardboard blasts from the past (early 1980s) aren't quite Clever Model level quality (all things considered, they wouldn't have been all that bad as background structures), look at the figures - I'd recognize those 1950's style Bachman/Plasticville figures anywhere (I had the set, and still have a few).
The face-palming part comes from the juxtaposition of the figures with their environment - the ABC* Freight Station has the hat raising commuter, the waving housewife, the woman with groceries, the commuter guy with briefcase, and the other 1950s-style Donna Reed knock-off interspersed with piles of freight on the platform (oddly, the once-ubiquitous overweight bald guy figure - as boss-man he's not out of place). The next building, the G&R LCL depot, has a similar bizarre population of figures.
The Poultry Warehouse further down the page is even more amusing - on its loading platform it has the traffic cop, the preacher, and the newspaper boy (those newsies were everywhere back them!) - the farmer with the bucket, while a stretch, is at least plausible. Refardless, those images with such sloppy figure placement really made me shake my head (my equivalent of face-palming because I hate smacking myself).
*BTW, the name "ABC Freight station" is face-palm worthy by itself

OK, so I know we've done "humor on the layout" threads before, and that you can buy flying saucers, car-shoving ex-motorists and mooning by-standers, but being a cynical guy I wanted to invert the premise - what about our hobby makes you face-palm ("Man, those idiots, how lame") or cringe ("Groan, I can't believe they did THAT") or...you feel is just plain played out (this is limited to physical items only and concrete concepts only). Please keep away from the nit-picky "that's a 1957 Chevy on a layout set in April 1956!" kinda stuff.

And remember, no matter how silly, distasteful, or groan inducing, Miniatur Wunderland probably has it...

[Milepost 266.2]

The thing that makes me shake my head is corny business names.  Nothing pulls me out of a scene more than companies like Leaky Faucet, Lousy Lumber, or Miracle Chair Company (you don't want to ask me what I think their advertising slogan should be).  These names were lame 40 years ago.  

Additionally, even though it's an excellent kit and very prototypical, I'm really tired of seeing the Walthers New River Mine.  No matter how much you kitbash is, it's heritage is obvious.  The only saving grace is that a lot of real structures in the modern age are just as boring as this kit.

[Semper Vaporo]

I don't mind the "punny" names for businesses.  I had some mines on my outdoor layout for extracting "Unobtanium" from the Eyeshudmowsoon jungle under the elevated mainline.  There was the "Dissis Mine", and the two claims by Wharten O. Dat, "Dat's Mine" and "Dat's Mine 2".   (He always signed his name, "Wh.o. Dat".)  There was also the mine for extracting one of the specific ingredients for a popular Mexican-American food, namely the "Nauchos Ore Mine".

What turns me off is the people that put scenes in their layout for the "shock" or titillation factor; scenes of immoral activity, (rape, prostitution, bondage, etc.) or blood and gore (wrecked school busses with dead children in the bus and strewn along a grade crossing, or decapitated bodies of Hobos along the ROW).

I know of one very fine HO layout that had a prostitution scene supposedly high in a building where where children could not see it, but in the one short visit I had there I saw many children in their parent's arms and the kids pointing in the apartment building window at the naked men and women posed in the room.  I did not see it until after I saw children pointing it out to their parents!  I then left and have not been back.

Yes, those are all "real life" things, but there is realy no need to "model" them, other than the perverse desire to cause upset in the viewer..."TEE HEE HEE, Watch what people do when they look in there!" 

5th grade bathroom humor and wasted talent!

 

[vsmith]

I think it really depends on how you do some of the things mentioned above, I went thru a lot of effort (OK a prolonged Google Search) looking for humorous but real life potential business names for places on my layout (Juan Last Taco, Boris' Car Loft, and Luft-Waffles among my favorites) but I admit there is a fine line between subtlety and just plain kitsch. As for inappropriate scenes that's kinda in the eye of the beholder. I would offer though that it's generally a good idea that if its something you wouldn't want your own wife, girlfriend, kids, grandkids, niece, nephews etc etc to see, why would you put there in the first place? I have on my HO micro two small scenes, one a guy chasing trespassing teenagers off his yard brandishing a rusty shotgun and a not so lucky hunter with a rather large bear near him, no blood but that wasn't the point was it.

Only one truely kitsche thing that used to always bug me, it was when figures were added to a layout that were never posed like they were actually doing something, instead thay would always be arrainged so that they were looking straight at you like they were practically waving at you.

[tomikawaTT]

A few comments about some of the above:

• The advertising slogan for Earl Smallshaw's original Miracle Chair Company was, If it's a good chair, it's a Miracle.
• Real businesses had punny names.  Some still do.  Watts Up Electrical Contractors installed a couple of 220 circuits for me.
• Granted that the Edna Mine (Walthers' New River Mine, which is nowhere near a New River in any state) has been overworked.  Jack Work's old coal mine suffers from equal or greater overexposure.  BTW, the latter, built from the available kit, looks as if it has been abandoned for half a century.  Jack's original (article published in MR) was nowhere near as deteriorated as the kit.
• Just because the company photographer was careless about oddly-placed figures doesn't mean that we, as modelers, have to copy his mistakes.
• Maybe all those little people had noticed the photographer and wanted their `pitcher took.'  Remember, in the heyday of steam, cameras weren't cell phone size.  Those Shorpy photos were probably taken with 5x7 or 8x10 glass plate boxes mounted on tripods, definitely not `point and shoot.'
• While I'm using the Edna Mine kit (and the Glacier Gravel kit) as starting points, my end result will closely approximate the Japanese mine complex at Shime, Fukuoka-ken.  The latter had wooden bins on concrete underpinnings below the crusher-sorter, which I will be selectively compressing lengthwise.  The model will also be able to live load the open-tops the colliery switcher will be pushing under it - something the Edna Mine isn't designed to do.

Then, too, every cliche was original once, and some of the things modelers are doing for the first time on their layouts today may well become cliches.  I wonder how many other modelers will make their pile drivers appear to operate, or will put a TBM in a fascia window as part of a modeled realignment project.

Someplace in my junque is a photo of a street sign - Kno Place, in Rapid City, SD.  The next street north is Sum Place.  And at various places along the I40/BNSF corridor across Northern Arizona were/are places named Two Guns, Show Low, Rimmy Jims and the Hashknife Ranch.  (If they needed a knife, it must have been some mighty tough hash!)

So, what makes me zip my lips and put my hands in my pockets?  Other folks trains that derail on every curve, humongulocos pulling six cars on 18 inch radius curves, cabooses behind fourth generation diesels on mainline freight, engine sheds with no fuel/water/sand servicing facilities, PRR waycars lettered ATSF behind Big Boys, Big Boys...  I don't count rivets, but I DO recognize mis-matched socks!

Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)

[chutton01]

Hey Folks - for a while I couldn't find my own thread, and figured I must have deleted it. But that's because instead of the Model Railroad forum, I put it in this trains.com forum - face-palm for me!

I agree with most of the comments, with my usual caveats (I mentioned I was cynical)

Punny Business names - I understand that real (small) businesses sometimes have catchy names, so I don't freak out (and overly cutesy names of real business can be just as cringe-level) - but the example of "Miracle Chair" (for what would normally be a medium to large size business - it has rail service after all) is a bit cringey -and worse, to see the same punny names over and over (since they were on the decals that came with the model), that's a face-palm. (First time I encountered this, "W.E. Snatchem, Undertakers"...it took me a while to get it, but hey, I was 8 or so and not used to bad puns yet).

Chuck's and Milepost's complaint about seeing the New River Mine overused - I guess I was inured to that as a kid in the 1970s, when by law all HO layouts were required to have the Revell passenger station, the Atlas crossing shanty, and some derivation of the Revell Engine House/Bakery/Weekly Herald. Oh, and a fully active small town freight house (think Tyco), even if you modeled the then current late-70s era when your prototypical small town freight station would be boarded up or repurposed for storage, if it still was standing.  Of course, for a while in the 1990s, it was "guess which DPM model this is" time on most layouts...

I fear that Miniatur Wunderland, as I mentioned above, being on the cutting edge I feel, may drive a trend toward more risque and violent mini-scenes (I know they listed several sex scenes and disaster scenes, although I can't vouch for Semper's orgy scene). Plenty of kids visit that layout. I guess they have to make use of Noch's bedroom scene kits somehow. Expect more of this, witness the new figure kits coming out w/ Strippers, Street-walkers and Graffitti artists.

"humongulocos pulling six cars"
If they don't start making new prototype 4-axle switchers in any great number soon, you may very well see this all over North America in a decade or so.  I'm placing my bet on trackmobiles on steriods or beefy hi-railers (Brandt?) for branch purposes by then.

Some of the pre-packaged humourous mini-scenes make me cringe, particular with people pooping (that's the hunter with the bear, IIRC, or the people mooning - one trick pony kits, while I'm not offended,
they get an eye-roll (less severe than a face-palm).