Are you obsessing over the same thing as everone else these days?
Are you looking at West Hempstead, Long Island, NY in 1970 compared to Lawrenceville, GA in 2024?
Is your breathing short and shallow and yet your heart is racing?
Are you taking out your micrometer and comparing?
Are you freaking out that after 54 years there is finally a new tooling and box kit of plastic styrene in the shape of a US Navy Sealab?
Oh good, then I'M NOT ALONE!!!
August 6, 2025: Christmas came EARLY this year!
A closer look:
At IPMS Nationals in Virginia Beach, these puppies are going for $65 for the weekend only. After that, you'll be spending MSRP of $89 per kit.
Here's the comparison of the two kit bottoms:
Opening up the Doll & Hobby Sealab:
The first thing you notice is a.) the color, b.) the layout on new sprues, and c.) the 9 separate elements inside the box:
Most of the bags contain two sprues each, plus the base (unbagged), the instructions (unbagged), and the decals (bagged).
Then you start comparing things sprue by sprue, and then piece by piece...
And the very first thing, despite the less-than-ideal lighting and the less-than-perfectly illustrated photographs on my cheap digital camera, is the fact that the original Aurora Sealab is ORANGE while the new Doll & Hobby Sealab is YELLOW. This, in my humble opinion, was the right thing to do, as it prevents scammers from being able to sell the new tooling pieces as originals and trying to get the "vintage, original" prices.
At $500, the original Sealab's 160 parts costs about $3.13 each if you distribute the value evenly across the parts, which nobody does, simply because for kitbashers you need 11 Sealabs to build a Falcon, but that's because you need 8 pieces of part X of which there is only 1 per kit, and 11 pieces of part Y of which there is only 1 per kit, etc. But, by comparison, at $89, each piece is worth $0.56, and buying 11 Sealabs costs only $979 which would only get you two Aurora Sealabs at 2020-2024 prices, and is a LOT cheaper than the $5500 you'd pay if you paid a full $500 for each of them. Roughly 82% cheaper, if you're doing the math.
Now let's look at some individual greeblies -- I didn't analyze and compare every single greeblie, only a few of the key pieces I thought were the most significant, most of which I chose because they are used on the Falcon:
This is my personal favorite piece that gets used on the Falcon, 8 times, and you can see that it lines up and is a perfect match in almost every respect except for one: the four surface holes are shallower in the Aurora Sealab than they are in the Doll & Hobby Sealab. This is detectable to the naked eye. Ejector pin marks are also not the same on any of the greeblies, which was an impossible ask in the first place, and I can't believe you're that obsessive as to need it, but it is also detectable to the naked eye.
Here's another comparison of the same two pieces:
Pretty impressive, no?
And here's the backs of the two pieces, taken at an angle in which I'm attempting to let you see the ejector pin marks and manufacturing ripples and striations -- to the naked eye, this is pretty dang faithful reproduction!
See the three slight indentations on the backside just opposite the sections where the three ridges lie on the front side? That's two-part-casting-level impressive reproduction in my book. So then I wondered if the thickness was the same, and here is the answer:
Now here is my terrible confession. I don't know about you, but my eye doesn't get naked all that often, what with living in the midwest and all, so I had to have some help from my technological eyes to see if these things really were identical.
Here is the Aurora Sealab greeblie:
Here is the Doll & Hobby Sealab greeblie:
Well cover your eyes and hush your mouth -- is it possible that the new one is 1/10 of a millimeter OFF from the original? A WHOLE TENTH OF A MILLIMETER???
Well don't get your panties in a wad, honeybunch. Not gist yet...
Let's look at another greeblie that gets used on the Falcon:
The above is the original Aurora Sealab greeblie.
This one (above) is the new Doll & Hobby Sealab greeblie. TWO TENTHS of a MILLIMETER difference!!
Lawdy be!!!
Now, a note on measurements. ALL my comparisons err in the 100ths of a millimeter category, between 2 and 9 one-hundredths of a millimeter, as each time I measured a piece, the variability would span that gap. So I don't take the 100ths of a millimeter category to be a real difference.
What surprised me, and I think will surprise you, is how many of the original-to-new comparisons will show 10ths of a millimeter difference that seem mathematically significant, but really are not at all visible to the nekkid eye.
Original ORANGE Sealab greeblie at 31.09mm
New YELLOW Doll & Hobby Sealab greeblie at 30.97mm
That's a .12mm difference. But look at them from the top -- you CAN'T TELL them apart (original on top, new on bottom)
So one thing I've concluded, based on these comparisons, is that maybe we're being a little "too" fastidious in trying to build replicas to within a tenth of a millimeter of accuracy. I mean, I think it's a noble ideal that you should aim for, so that if you miss it by 10x, you're still just a millimeter off, which no one will reasonably notice, but I think it's equally important to remember that prop building for the film industry was always a form of "rough carpentry" compared to the fine "trim carpentry" of static model building, which is to say that the object visualized at 24 frames per second does not need to be super-accurate or super-detailed simply because it was never meant to be seen up close in a static environment.
The above is my personal overall all-time favorite greeblie, the "Crane" part or piece #59, of which there is only one and for which you need FOUR to build an accurate Y-Wing fighter, which was my first studio-scale build. I have personally paid up to $50 just for this one piece!
One thing I really like, and really appreciated about the new Doll & Hobby Sealab is that it uses the same parts numbers as the original kit. That's a nice touch, and helps kitbashers not get confused over having to try and figure which is which and what is what so much.
Some differences are more noticeable:
The decals are noticeably different, and since I'm not a US Navy equipment expert, for all I know the Doll & Hobby decals may be more accurate to the historical vessel, but either way they are significantly different than the Aurora version:
Original Aurora Sealab decals on bottom of this picture, with new Doll & Hobby decals on top: major differences in fonts, thickness, size, and letter placement, most noticeable with the capital S on the word Sealab itself. Of this difference, I could care less, as I don't intend to use the decals anywhere unless it's for an Easter egg that gets mostly covered up with paint and weathering.
Another interesting difference is that the new kit gives you only 2 of the DSSP decals whereas the original gave you four. And there is a solid full 1mm difference in width between these decals between the old (fatter) and the new (skinnier).
Probably the greeblie that will get most obsessed over are the cables, which would be almost impossible to completely faithfully reproduce, and yet, in my humble opinion, Doll & Hobby did a very decent job of it:
These greeblies get used on the Escape Pod, and so it matters that they work, and I think they do, though others may differ.
Personally, the difference that annoyed me the most was simply the choice of plastic color difference between the two base pieces, which to my knowledge matters not one wit because it gets used exactly nowhere in the ILM universe (though I do expect Shamon to prove me wrong within 24 hours on this, and most things):
The new one I call the Yellow Blob. The original one I call the Poo Splatter.
On the back, you see some injection-molding differences between 1970 and 2024 technology:
If you look close, on the back of these you see the provenance, and the delight of what being patient for 54 years can mean:
Back of the Poo Splatter.
Back of the Yellow Blob.
One last difference, and that is the area just to the left of the logo on the box art, in the section where the logo is on the lower right corner of the box. Can you notice a difference, and possibly an Easter egg, between these two areas:
To the left of the Aurora logo there is just blue sea and aquatic algae, moss, etc.
But on the new one...
... to the left of the Doll & Hobby logo there lurks a graphic design...
something... -- Easter egg? Roboterkampf logo? Bad "smudge" job in Photoshop while trying to fill in space previously unseen on the old box art? I don't know what it is, but it's there, and your guess is probably better than mine. You can tell it's there because the two horizontal white lines, which are continuous on the Aurora box art, are interrupted on the D&H box art.
In 1970, when it first came out, the Aurora Sealab sold for MSRP of $3.99. Adjusted for inflation, that's $33.17 in 2025 dollars. The new Doll & Hobby Sealab is roughly three times that cost, but that's a heck-of-a-lot less than FIFTEEN times that cost if you were so foolish as to buy all original Sealabs between 2020 and 2024.
Oh, wait... that fool may be someone I know, someone quite close to me...
So one thing you can expect, in the coming years, is to find on Ebay a series of "mixed" media Sealabs, in original Aurora boxes, with original Aurora decals, and original Aurora instructions, and with 50-70 percent original Aurora ORANGE parts, but with all the missing/harvested ILM donors replaced by new Doll & Hobby YELLOW parts. If this appeals to you (and let's face it: it should), then PM me, because a few of these I am ready to part with already.
Long pause.
Deep breath.
Exhale.
Make eye contact with key audience members...
All in all, I'd say the new YELLOW Doll & Hobby US Navy Sealab is absolutely wonderful, and you should buy at least 22 of them so that you can build your 5-Foot Millennium Falcon in all styrene, and then have enough left over to build it again ten years from now when you realize how many mistakes you made on it the first time around. By which I mean, rebuild it immediately after finishing it, since it takes about ten years to build one if you're still obsessing over 100ths of a millimeter measurements... ; )
Happy Modeling!
