Some while ago I found myself wandering around a parked Tornado in a HAS at Marham while scouting locations for a film production. As a cameraman, my reaction was "there is no way to make this thing look like anything other than a bruiser."
Blunt nose, huge tail fin, bulbous fuel tanks, and a general aesthetic of chipped and filthy metal with prominent drip trays underneath. I mean, seriously: soot? On a fighter jet? This thing is supposed to be the zenith of technology, for crying out loud! But it wasn't.
There were the prints of those aircrew boots with the circular patterned soles all over the seats. I didn't want to sit in it, in case it wouldn't wash out, and when I did sit in it, I was reminded immediately of the vintage of the design. Big clunky pushbuttons! Latching toggle switches! CRT displays! It looked like something out of a particularly convincing 1960s sci-fi movie, and it smelled of partially-burned paraffin.
If I hadn't been able to recognise it, I'd have assumed it was something recovered from a hangar in an ex-Soviet client state where it had been sitting since the end of the cold war, and that's without any weapons hanging on it. Pretty it definitely ain't. I assumed the nickname "Tonka" was because it looked like a toy in the Japanese super-deformed style. Which it sort of does.
P
PS - Gotta love 'em, my formative memories are of the 1991 gulf war.