Tractor Beam On!

These fabulous Explorer Cars have been seen several times on the blog before, most notably for their usage of the Lone Star rocket launcher and Minitanks Panzer chassis. Its interesting to note that on the card art, the painter had obviously positioned the rocket launcher upside down when he was drawing it!

There are times when Ebay is like a virtual Aladdins Lamp, rub it, make a wish and stuff appears! So it  seemed recently after the blog coverage of Apollo Moon Exploring toys showed some of these cool little tractors in amongst the contents of the boxed set. I had come across them earlier in individual boxes such as the version shown here from Will Osbornes personal collection, but it had been many years since I had seen them packed individually. The photo below shows the remnants of my original collection in various states of disrepair.

I was surprised to find a trio of the vehicles turn up on for sale recently in small bags with header cards in glorious lithoed colour. The tractors are clearly marked with an LP trademark, showing the monster figure clutching the letter LP in front of a sunrise. LP trademarks appear on many similar space toys, especially the 2 inch astronaut figures and lots of other Hong Kong toys, but what does LP actually stand for ? There are six in the full set, the crane and tipper versions as above and a bulldozer version of the streamlined crawler. These three bagged sets are currently available on ebay UK, grab a set while you can!