KRAKEN II from ‘Innerspace’ directed by JOE DANTE (1987)

Innerspace is real gem of a film. But few people saw it upon release. The film stars Martin Short as Jack Putter a neurotic shop assistant loser and Dennis Quaid as Tuck Pendleton, a test pilot with is working for a lab who have developed a miniaturization process. During the first experiment, Tuck, at the controls of the Kraken II is accidently injected into Putter. It’s a really funny film, with its heart in the right place.

The Kraken II is a small one person submersible about teh size of a small-midsize car. It is very functional in design, like a deep sea subamrine of the day. It has mechanical arms for performing operations and has clusters of lights fore and aft and four shrouded propellors in manoeuverable pods.

The film has similarities to ‘fantastic voyage’ - made 20 year before - in that both feature a story taking place inside the human body. But in Innerspace (Putter) is awake and running around and can communicate with Tuck leading to several comic moments.

The look of ‘fantastic voyage’ was very stylized, even from what was known at that time. when Innerspace was made we were starting to see medical photography on TV featuring footage from tiny cameras sent inside people’s bodies, so this film had to look real. And it does. The shots of the Kraken II zooming around the various parts of the human body are terrific and the film was awarded an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. In the credits of the film the credit for ‘special visual effects by Industrial Light & Magic’ actually raeds ‘Martin Short’s Interiors by Industrial Light & Magic’. Great fun.

A model in 1/24th scale would be 10” (20cm) long and the mechanical arms and propellor pods would be moveable parts. And you’d get a pilot figure of Pendleton. The ship is a sort of steely grey colour and would have to be made in the classic silver swirly plastic still being used in the late 1980s.

As the film is about miniaturisation and the ship is miniaturised to a tiny size for the bulk of the film, I have shown the scale as 24/1… meaning this kit would be 24 times larger than the ship’s appearance in the bulk of the film :)

Designed by Bill George with interiors designed by James H Spencer

You can see more about this kit in ‘What If Fantasy Model Kits #22 on my YouTube channel.