Borrowed from the instructions, with just with a few grammar corrections! “The Separatist movements make their presence felt throughout the galaxy. It is not only on Coruscant that it ends in conflict. The Republic uses on various planets machines specially designed for their particular environment. In order to defend Kashyyk, home planet of the Wookies and Chewbacca against the attack of the Confederate Droid Army, among other things, the Army of the Republic has recourse to AT-RTs with a weight of 400kg. Originally designed purely for reconnaissance, this 75km per hour transport proves to be extremely effective and useful against enemy infantry units, not least thanks to the cannon located in the front of the AT-RT.”

 By now, I’m pretty sure almost everyone will have at least heard of, if not seen the supposed last of the Star Wars films, “Revenge of the Sith”. Usually this would have prompted a bunch of kits from AMT/Ertl, but apparently, things are different this time. Whether they felt the licensing was too much for projected sales, who knows, but AMT/Ertl offered up no ‘Sith’ kits this time. Instead, Revell Germany acquired the license, and produced 6 kits, including this AT-RT that had a bit of screen time in the film.

 Unfortunately, apparently the license does not include North America, as there is no large importer for these kits here. That makes them rather expensive, and hard to find. The only places I’ve seen them for sale in the US are specialist websites like www.culttvman.com and www.starshipmodeler.com, from whose store I got this kit.

 So what do you get, then? Inside the somewhat oversized box are 4 sprues of light grey plastic, a vinyl clone trooper pilot, and a small instruction book with 18 assembly steps. No decals are included, as none are necessary for this kit. This is an ‘Easykit’ from Revell Germany, meaning that no glue is required; the parts snap together, and as you can see from the sprue photo, many of the parts are prepainted with various colors. Unlike Bandai’s Gundam kits, where the parts are molded in different colors, here paint has been sprayed, brushed, and perhaps even stamped onto the light grey plastic.

For what it is, the painting is pretty well done, but you will still need to do some touching up along cuts and joints, and that is always tough when trying to match the colors. The kit is also too ‘clean’ compared to the movie, and could use some weathering, like the one shown in the movie still on the box. The pilot figure is also decently painted, but like his mount, could definitely use to be dirtied up some. The kit is about 8” tall when assembled, and based on the around 4” pilot figure, the kit would be about 1/18 scale.

This kit is tough to pigeonhole. While it is easy enough for a beginner with a little help to assemble, and who will probably appreciate the prepainted parts, it is rather pricey. On the other hand, more experienced modelers will like the good detail, but probably want to touch up and weather, if not completely repaint it, making all the prepainting useless. From what I’ve seen and heard from other modelers, the kits in this series are a step up from the usually poor fitting and indifferently detailed Star Wars kits AMT/Ertl has offered in the past. The question will be whether they are worth the time and money to track down over here. I for one will be glad to assemble my AT-RT and have a pretty unique piece for my Star Wars collection!

July 2005