Howdy! We’re here with another edition of… something? Listen… a while back I had one too many drinks and ordered myself a present – the Bandai Best Hit Chronicle Cup Noodle 1:1 model kit. This was a surprisingly tricky (but very satisfying) kit to build and it’s a delight to have on the shelf.
First off, the sheer amount of times that the packaging and instructions tell you not to eat this kept me in stitches nearly the entire time I was working on it. This kit cost roughly the same as a full case of cup noodle at my local grocery store, but definitely gets the edge in shelf life.
I had seen some images of the kit online but I was floored by the amount of sprues and detail elements in here: dried mystery meat, egg, and shrimp sprues… a leek sheet, and a concerning amount of slotted bits to build the main structure of the cup.
I’ve built my fair share of intricate plastic kits, and these instructions just felt more intimidating than others I had faced down in a long time. The exploded view here gives you an idea of what you are looking at:
The line and dash details are all made of dyed plastic rings that interlock. The longest and most involved modeling task with this kit was getting these to align correctly! I highly recommend dry fitting the entire groups of rings until you have the exact alignment you want.
The noodle brick was pretty simple to assemble, I really wish there was more of it.
After that, there were dried shrimp, meat, and egg bits to clip and clean.
You may notice the fancy details on the shrimps! This is the first place that a BUCK WILD STICKER comes into play. Each shrimp has two stickers to apply, that give them a frankly unsettlingly close resemblance to the real thing. You may notice a few gaps – these stickers are very difficult to seat exactly right and it took quite a bit of finagling (and smoothing out) to get them looking right. I briefly entertained the idea of freehand painting them (please email complaints of cowardice to Necromunday@Goonhammer.com), but the stickers actually looked pretty great already!
The middle cup details are where things really went off the rails. The outline and inside of the letters had separate pieces! There were NUTRITION INFORMATION STICKERS! Hell, there were tiny stickers that added a miniscule amount of definition to letters (like the break in the top of the U). Getting these on exactly right was touchy, but the end result was pretty wild.
My conclusion? I absolutely love this kit. Here’s a little secret – I actually built this over a year ago. It’s had a place of pride in my hobby room since then and I finally got around to giving it the review it deserves. If you survived college because of noodles from a styrofoam cup and now have the discretionary funds to spend roughly 20x the cost of one package to buy an inedible replica, I cannot recommend it strongly enough.
And that’s it! At least I think it is? I’ve definitely lost the plot here. Next week we will probably talk about Necromunda again… though my bud built the Best Hit 2/5 scale Sega Saturn kit and said it ruled so who knows! If you have Necro questions / hot tips for 1:1 scale model kits of mundane objects you can hit us up at Necromunday@Goonhammer.com. We always love to hear from you!
