Exploring the Explorers

I'm always on the lookout for unusual vehicles, especially those with all terrain features or tracks. Its clearly an obsession which originated in Thunderbirds wide variety of pod vehicles and supporting models. Back in the 1980's British Home Stores jumped on the burgeoning space bandwagon and released a line of space toys. Oddly though, the line shared a lot of similarities with SWORD and Thunderbirds, but whether this was intentional in some ways, i'm unsure. BHS took a couple of basic battery operated vehicles, which had appeared in many guises around the late seventies, but usually in unbranded impulse buy packaging. These toys were the usual Hong Kong fare and borrowed heavily from other similar toys. They then expanded the range into a series of Rescue vehicles called Explorer 12 and gave five lead vehicles a 'theme' - Space, Ocean, Arctic, Terrain and Rescue. Fellow blogger Joe Lang has an exhaustive and great site devoted to E12 here, so I wont go into too much detail here!

 Here are two examples of the Ocean and Terrain vehicles, the basic chassis is unchanged and the dozer blade is identical. BHS added a line of tiny 1 inch driver figures too.

The basic concept of the multi wheel vehicle was used again and again in the rush to produce futuristic toys, Schaper Stomper toys were probably the earliest and most successful of the big toymakers to exploit the idea.

Here we have the E12 precursor vehicle, a larger non-branded HK version and a Stomper Amphibious vehicle.

Finally, a comparison with the classic Tractor T5 all terrain vehicle.