VS Tanks - I love Shermans!

I love Sherman tanks. I love the shape and cut of them, the mean bull-dog look, the no-nonsense, get things done attitude the tank seems to have.

Sure the 75mm gun sucked a bit near the end of WWII and the Nazis' all had bigger , more cutting edge complicated tanks, but the fact that the Sherman was a simple mass produced standardized platform and you never just saw one of the damned things, always a big pile of them on any battlefield certainly proved that back then, multiple medium heavy tanks would do the job over a few supertanks (which were so fancy they tended to break a lot)

When I was a kid I got this big set of army men, a big plastic Nazi castle with 88mm guns and a whole load of attacking Allied forces with plastic half-tracks and one Sherman tank for Christmas. I'd set all the stuff up and knock them over with whatever projectile was handy. My best friend back in the 70's then was a war buff and had plastic models galore and we'd conduct massive war games in his basement or better yet, extended trench warfare campaigns at his cottage in Nova Scotia!
He also turned me onto war comics, especially "The Haunted Tank" which featured a Sherman tank flying a confederate army flag (long story).

So, fast forward to today. I'm working on the script of the Bigfoot 3 movie and I decided last year that I wanted to have a tank in the story (what better to hunt Bigfoot with, an old WWI Sherman tank!) so I've been scouring the Internet for the right RC model. The best one hands down is the Tamiya 1/16th scale M4 Sherman. Look at the thing (pictured right)! Tell me that's not the real thing! It's also REAL EXPENSIVE! SRP is $899 CDN, you can get it for $447 US on Ebay from Hong Kong with $99 US Shipping but then you gotta buy some custom batteries and a 4 channel RC controller. You're still looking at over a grand for this thing. And you have to completely build and paint it - which is going to be a lot of fun (some day)!

So I had to look around a bit more, and I found a page on these cool VS IR Tanks (pictured top left). They are 1/25th scale, come assembled and painted (awww) with an RC controller (yay!) and the cool thing is, they have Infrared sensors that let you shoot other VS tanks and have tank battles! In the US you can get ones that fire freakin BB's! Imagine the fun you can have with that and the family cat!
These ones look almost as good if you weather them up a bit and cost $109US. Done deal. I bought two so I could play with the kids! A Sherman and a Tiger! The classic confrontation (ok not really, I'd need like 4 Shermans and one Tiger and the Tiger'd get at least 2 of the Shermans before one managed to sneak up behind it and hit it in the ass).

Youtube is full of tank battles with these things, check them out!

I'm looking forward to putting this thing onscreen with us hanging off of it next year!