MOON CRAWLING WITH THE SURVEYOR 2

Some recent photos I’ve taken of the Surveyor 2, one of the few later additions to the Rovex /Tri-ang  Spacex range I own.

Part of the attraction for me in collecting the Spacex toys during the early seventies was I immediately recognized them from various illustrations I already had in my TV21 comics and specials, and even today I’m happy to consider Spacex a distant cousin to mainstream Gerry Anderson toys, and don't simply dismiss them as knock-offs.

When it comes to the Surveyor2, that was a toy I never saw at the time, In fact I don’t recall ever seeing any of the later Spacex toys on sale anywhere at the time.

This illustration by an uncredited artist (I'm thinking it might have beeen John Cooper, who did draw strips for TV21 at the time, but I'm certainly open to suggestions) in the 1968 Project SWORD annual shows the Moon Crawler, a possible future SWORD toy bearing many similarities to the later Spacex Surveyor 2.

However, as was uncovered by our Woodsy in relatively recent times it was found that a feature illustration in the Project SWORD annual showing a SWORD Moon Crawler drew it’s inspiration from a painting by artist, John Schoenherr .

This painting was used for a 1962 Analog magazine cover and later a 1964 book, Men on the Moon (published in the USA in 1963 under the title We Land on the Moon - ref: John Sisson’s Dreams of Space blog)

Although the Moon Crawler never made it as a full size Project SWORD toy, I imagine the people at Rovex/Tri-ang obviously liked what they saw in both illustrations and decided to make their own version.

The SWORD Moon Crawler did eventually make it as a tiny Japanese kit which came as one of several additional vehicles in the Imai UFO Moonbase sets.