DUNE BUGGIES (1970-73)
Lone Star’s Dune Buggies first appeared in the 1970 trade catalogue picking up on this latest craze from America. It had become popular to remove the bodywork from an old VW Beetle and replace it with a light-weight fibreglass body and large chunky tyres thus creating the perfect vehicle for off-roading on the beach.
Lone Star issued 6 models made by combining 3 different plastic body designs with 3 different plastic roof designs. Each component featured on 2 of the Dune Buggies and was available in 6 different colours. This gives quite a few potential variations to collect! With 3 bodies and 3 roofs there were of course 3 further combinations which could be produced and not surprisingly these ‘Friday afternoon’ specials do exist. Another ‘Friday special’ is the use of a seventh colour of plastic which has so far only been seen on the roof components. This colour is cream and is a rarity. A coloured plastic driver and ‘flower power’ stickers finished off the models.
Both styles of Flyers wheels were used during production which seems to have ended around 1972. The Dune Buggies featured a die-cast base plate which held the wheels in place and was a necessity to give the buggies some weight so they would run on Lone Star’s Flyway track. The baseplate was shared by all models and was usually painted silver although coloured versions exist. At least two different Dune Buggy Flyway Sets were produced.
The Dune Buggies were used in at least 2 different promotional giveaways. One was for Suncrush pop and involved collecting tokens from bottles and sending them away for your free model. These came in brown cardboard boxes. Another promotion was by Mars 'Fun Fair' who gave the buggies away in sets of 3, again packaged in a brown cardboard box.
