My mate WOTAN has written this really wonderful piece with superb pictures on the recent blog thread of CRICKETS:'Ever since I got my first Cricket P1 from the Spacex series way backin the seventies, i've loved this little space jeep. When I came across the Army version around that time, I was fascinated to see a larger version of one of my favourite toys. This was one of the earliest experiences I had of seeing 'clones' of well known toys appear in different guises and with the advent of ebay some decades later, the flood gates really opened wide. The Hamilton Invaders Mosquito Jeep (see earlier in the blog) could well be the source of all Crickets (theres the insectoid connection as well) but there could also be an actual military vehicle design for some Atomic War machine in the fifties. It seems to have a Forbidden Planet, super streamlined feel to it and the design was obviously so popular it was used later in the Spacex series as the Apollo Tracker (pictured is a scratch built conversion and actual card back - real Tracker to follow).
Army versions of the vehicle abound and I have the small Hong Kong version and two larger (Hamilton scale) trucks made by Codeg and another maker. Closer to the space theme, I found a set of interchangeable vehicles on ebay with a motorised base shaped like a lego brick and several components that clip on to build different vehicles. These included, besides a dayglo red Cricket, a Nuclear Freighter and Tractor T5 again from Spacex, as well as a space tank and something similar to the Captain Scarlet MSV. The MSV parts and one or two bits, including the blue fins for the NF2 were missing, but luckily all the major spacex parts were there!'
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