OLD First Gundam 1/144 Rick Dom

Release 1981.6

Price ¥500

BANDAI BANDAI Japan product info

Runners

Parts diagram

Manual

Size comparison with a cigarette pack

Some runners come without individual plastic packaging.

A unique construction where a separate ankle joint plate is glued between the feet.

Cross-section of the arms and legs.

The head is fixed to the torso with no articulation.

OLD 1/144 Rick Dom - The hip joints use separate left/right pivot pins so you can bring the legs together or spread them apar

The hip joints use separate left/right pivot pins so you can bring the legs together or spread them apart, but the soles of both feet don't sit flat on the ground, so the standing pose is a bit wobbly.

OLD 1/144 Rick Dom - The shoulders move with a crisp octagonal T-bar joint, just like the 1/144 GM, though the T-bar itself i

The shoulders move with a crisp octagonal T-bar joint, just like the 1/144 GM, though the T-bar itself is relatively small.

OLD 1/144 Rick Dom - The sole of the foot has verniers molded as separate parts, but there's no surface detail, so it looks p

The sole of the foot has verniers molded as separate parts, but there's no surface detail, so it looks pretty bare.

Backpack verniers.

The right hand can be swapped between a bazooka-integrated hand and a standard open hand.

There are two heat sabers included for some reason — seems like overkill.

Articulation is roughly this much... at least the elbows bend quite a bit.

Bazooka pose. It's a bit of a struggle, but you can just about get both hands on it.

One-handed shooting pose

Heat saber pose

With the HGUC Dom.

With the 1/144 Mass Production Zaku and Char's Gelgoog. The Dom is definitely the biggest of the bunch.

With the 1/144 First Gundam.

This kit is the sturdy, bulky 1/144 Rick Dom from the Zeon forces — and it's one of the rare old 1/144 kits to be molded in two colors, much like the Zeong.

First off, it's bigger than the Zaku and Gelgoog among the One Year War Zeon suits. It actually feels even larger than the HGUC Dom, so the sheer presence of this thing is impressive. Compared to the previous Gogg and Gelgoog kits that came out smaller than expected, this is a bit of a surprise — though it seems like scale consistency was all over the place in the early days of Gunpla.

The most unique part of the build is the ankle joint construction. A part with pins on both sides is glued between the feet with cement to hold it in place. I'm not entirely sure why they went with such an awkward joint structure, but I'd guess it was a limitation of mold design technology at the time. Along with the ankle pivot pins, there are also separate vernier parts for the soles of the feet — making this the first 1/144 kit to include verniers on the soles — but there's no surface detail on the underside, so it ends up looking pretty bare.

The bazooka is molded as one piece with the hand, just like the earlier kits, so you can't adjust the angle at all, which makes it hard to pull off a convincing pose. The classic shoulder-mount or underarm-cradle firing stances you'd normally expect are completely out of the question — you're limited to roughly the angles you can see in the review photos above.

Heat sabers are also included, and you can either store them on the back or plug them into the hand. For some reason, two heat sabers are provided. You'd really only ever need one, so it seems like there was some extra space on the runner and they just threw in a bonus one.

The biggest disappointment is that, probably due to the Dom's characteristically large feet, even when you bring the legs all the way together, both soles still don't sit flat on the ground. Like the previous 1/144 Char's Gelgoog, the hip joint pins on each side move independently — but the legs are so chunky that they just don't come together properly, which is what causes the problem. Bandai was probably working through some trial and error designing a kit with legs this thick for the first time.

All in all, this is a fairly premium old 1/144 kit thanks to its two-tone color molding, and it stands out a bit more than the Gelgoog or Gogg for how well it captures that chunky, hefty Dom proportions. :-) [ Updated at 2016.1.27 ]

AIThis page was translated by Claude Sonnet.