2020 20/20 Reissue, Where are you????

[Dave W]

I will ask!!!

I don't seriously expect them to do it, but it's worth a try to ask.

If you do talk to them, please do ask them about the US Epiphone reissues they mentioned to you at last year's show.

[Chris P.]

I talked to a Dutch Gibson guy. He told me the Casino and a solid body guitar will appear soon, but no basses yet. Of course I will ask!

[4stringer77]

Could be a good time to plant a seed of thought towards a 50th anniversary bicentennial Thunderbird for 2026. Try to ask for more custom colors too. You could try asking for all kinds of things and just seeing what sticks. I could think of all kinds of stuff. New Grabbers in Grabber blue, triumph basses with bursts and flame tops and original spec reissue EBs with real mudbuckers. Any of that would be great.

[Grog]

Well here we are, officially 2020! Happy New year to everyone at the LBO......

[Rob]

And back to you as well!

[Dave W]

Happy New Year to all of you!

[doombass]

Happy 2020 !!

[uwe]

I'd buy one too, can I have it with a Luftwaffe Tarnanstrich-fin?

[wellREDman]

I'd buy one too, can I have it with a Luftwaffe Tarnanstrich-fin?

did you just find the picture randomly looking for the camo pattern  or do you have any idea what that plane is?
I like to think of myself as reasonably knowledgeable about warbirds and I've never seen one like that

[uwe]

Another German Wunderwaffe that never really was:  A Heinkel 177, you're forgiven for not knowing it, only a few were built and their operational record was lousy - engines would catch fire (crews bitterly nick-named it "Reichsfeuerzeug" - literally "cigarette lighter of the Reich"). It was the Reich's (yet again) failed attempt at a long range bomber; irrational things like making a plane of that size fit for dive bombing (a German obsession because we lacked the raw materials to produce enough bombs for carpet bombing) protracted its development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_He_177

It was kinda cool-looking though, but then a lot of Luftwaffe prototypes and limited production inventions were, adding to the popular Luftwaffe mystique and  the manifold "could have altered how the war went"-legends. The simple truth however is, you don't need smart and ahead-of-their-time inventions randomly scattered to win a war, but a reliable construction that can be mass produced easily. Liberty ships, Sherman tanks and B-17 Flying Fortresses win a war, just as long as there is enough of them. Ok, maybe the atom bomb was an exception to that rule! 

[wellREDman]

 someone once told me world war 2 wasn't won in Normandy, or even in  Stalingrad, it was won in Detroit
(i'm guessing there is a soviet equivalent)

[uwe]

Very true. Stalin was smart (and when it came to implementation: ruthless) enough to have Soviet production facilities moved into the  East of the huge country, the Urals and even farther away from endangered Moscow - well out of reach of the German aggressors (see, I told you that lack of long range bombers was dumb of the Luftwaffe!). And they were effective. Communism or not, the USSR could produce a T-34 or Stormovik by the end of the war at a fraction of the production hours (and the cost) they had to spend at the beginning of the war. In Germany, it was the other way around: Everything took longer and longer to produce, became more complicated (was either over-engineered by design or had to be over-engineered to compensate for lack of raw materials) and more expensive. One King Tiger tank took as long to produce as 10 T-34s (and probably 20 Sherman tanks).

Russia and the US kept rolling things out - with a focus on the no frills doable -  en masse to continuously feed their ever-hungry war machinery while the Reich was erratically scrambling for "inventions" and "quality over quantity" - with diminishing returns as the war progressed.

At no point in its short history was the Third Reich ever equipped to sustain a protracted war. Hitler himself pushed for an early start of WW II in the late  30ies - when Germany was not yet quite ready for it, it takes longer than six years to build a military might of the size a belligerent system like the Third Reich would require -, because he believed the forecasts of economists that within only a few years Allied war preparations and production would dwarf Germany's efforts. As such Blitzkrieg was not only a tactic, but an economic and strategic sheer necessity. And once the Blitzkrieg successes against more or less immediate geographic neighbors were over (yet the war still going on with other opponents well out of reach of Germany's military clout), so was the Reich's long term fate sealed.

So much the better for it! 

[Ken]

Could be a good time to plant a seed of thought towards a 50th anniversary bicentennial Thunderbird for 2026. Try to ask for more custom colors too. You could try asking for all kinds of things and just seeing what sticks. I could think of all kinds of stuff. New Grabbers in Grabber blue, triumph basses with bursts and flame tops and original spec reissue EBs with real mudbuckers. Any of that would be great.

I think the Grabber would have to be pink, if you want to keep up with the times.

[Basvarken]

Chris spoke with JC yesterday.
JC said it was a very good idea to do a 20/20 reissue in 2020.
But I don't think he was too serious, from what Chris told me.

[uwe]

It sure would be a marketing event. What probably kills it is that the 20/20 was just too obscure as a model, doesn't fit the mold of what people expect from Gibson und that paddle look instruments have not exactly seen a resurgence. Oh, und of course it's a bass.