Scotland Police, Fine Young Cannibals

I picked up a Heller 1/43 scale plastic model of a Leyland Rover SD1 3500. The Rover SD1 was the archetypal British police car of the 1980s, and was one of the vehicles featured in the climactic chase scene in Doomsday, one of my very favorite movies.

The Doomsday car was actually a ’78 Rover SDX 2600, a smaller engined South African version that is visually almost identical to the Heller model. It was decked out with a yellow and red “jam sandwich” stripe with a dull yellow heptagram insignia centered on the door. A number of viewings and copious frame advancing lead to the digital recreation seen below. The center featured the typical Scottish police crest of the thistle topped with a crown in a wreath with a scroll at the bottom. Around this was a band of text that was very difficult to decipher. It was three words, one at top separated from the two on the bottom by two dots. I’m very confident that the last word is “POLICE” and rather sure that “SCOTLAND” rounded out the bottom… the top word however was rather tricky. At first I assumed it was “CENTRAL”, the Central Scotland Police being a real police force. However some digging proved the heptagram to be unlike any insignia used by any Scottish police. I returned to the frame advance and was able to determine that there were eight characters in the word in question – something like “CANNIBAL.” I have no idea if this is really what the crest reads – but it makes for a rather good in-joke by the production crew, so I whipped up a graphic in GIMP to make into a decal. The idea here is for a Doomsday inspired Combat Zone force…

♫Good thing, where have you gone?♫