For All Your Land Raiding Needs...

Time for another toy from the vaults, and this one's pretty commonplace. Hands up who can name this?

Yep, it's the Matchbox Adventure 2000 Raider Command model, or as 2000AD readers of the time may have known it, Judge Dredd's Land-Raider from Pat Mills' first great Dredd epic The Cursed Earth, itself a Dreddworld riff on Damnation Alley.

The toy was a deliberate tie-in, the first and only one I can think of with 2000AD. Yes, there was at least one serialised video game comic ad in the 90s, but this one is a legit 'canon' appearance, and boy did Judges Dredd, Jack and press-ganged biker punk Spikes Harvey Rotten make good use of the Land-Raider's various features, including of course its unique ability to shoot the raider vehicle from the Command Module or, as it was dubbed in the strip in typical Mills patois, the Killdozer.

"The Killdozer links up with the Land-Raider to form a MODULAR FIGHTING UNIT - capable of covering any terrain and giving battle under all combat conditions. Ooh! I get all EXCITED just looking at its Multi-Level Kill Power!" 

"Calm down, McArthur. This is unseemly behaviour for a Judge... 

and kindly remove your hand from my uniform."

My friend Derek and I certainly made good use of ours, as the wear and tear above shows (the fact that you could launch the Raider off any elevated surface may have contributed to that), although the years have been a little unkind to the model. I've lost all the rockets and the spring-loaded missile launcher may have seized up.

Gone too are the three-man crew in grey plastic. But, miraculously, both tracks on the Command Module survive and are in pretty god nick, having not been left to perish in the sun. And I think I could restore most of it to its former glory. And I might do it - after all, it's collectible, but not in a collect-able condition. There are plenty around, as seen on other, better blogs here and here. One modeller even started making a larger one to scale with his Dredd figures.

So, readers - should I restore this beauty or keep it with its battle scars?

[BTW, I swiped the strip pic from the rather splendid page on Cyber-Wizard's blog, which has more of the beauties)