80s Kids Loved These Low-Speed, High-Torque 4X4s That Made Slow Cool

You’re sitting in front of the 15-inch Trinitron on a Saturday morning in 1980, chowing down on a bowl of Count Chocula to top off the sugar intake you had the night before at the monster truck rally you went to with your friend Jimmy. This was a near-religious experience for you, almost on par with seeing The Empire Strikes Back a few weeks earlier.

Your ears are still ringing from the awesome assault on your senses by the real Bigfoot when a commercial interrupts Thundarr the Barbarian. You gasp at what rolls across the screen: tiny battery-powered trucks with working headlights that appear to be able to climb over everything in sight. Dear God, were all four wheels spinning? Did those exhaust fumes at the MegaDome mess with your head? No, Stomper 4X4s were the real deal, and we’re gonna revisit them now. Everybody take it to the top, we’re gonna Stomp!

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!

It was impossible to ignore the popularity of lifted off-road vehicles and monster trucks at the dawn of the 1980s. Bigfoot was built in 1975, but fully captured the kid-culture zeitgeist when it crushed cars for the first time in 1981. On television that same year, Colt Seavers regularly took flight in his lifted GMC K-2500 Sierra Grande as the titular fall guy in The Fall Guy. And on streets all over America, lifted pickups were a common sight.

Toy designer Eddy Goldfarb recognized the big-truck trend as a golden opportunity for a new kind of action toy. Goldfarb was already a seasoned toy designer with a few hits under his belt, including well-known gems like KerPlunk, Battling Tops, Yakity-Yak Talking Teeth, and Brunswick Air Hockey. Goldfarb clearly had a knack for clever toy ideas, and toymaker Schaper (best known at the time for games such as Ants In The Pants, Cootie, and Don’t Break The Ice, as well as the Super Jock line – which were toy athletes, not the other thing) bought Goldfarb’s toy 4X4 concept.

Stompers initial offerings included a Chevy K-10 Scottsdale, K5 Blazer, Bronco, Dodge Warlock, and David’s favorite Jeep, the SJ Honcho. Wow, with that lineup, you could recreate the scene in No Country For Old Men where the drug deal went bad.

Stomper’s plastic bodies were each unique and faithful in detail if not proportions to their full-size counterparts, but they all snapped over the same Stomper chassis. It was sized just large enough to house a single AA battery, and a center-mounted motor hidden beneath a cover powered all four wheels. Big warnings of DO NOT REMOVE on motor cover did little to discourage curious young Autopians from exploring the mechanical magic within.

As shown below, the motor’s output shaft extended from both ends of the motor to hold a pair of pinion gears that interfaced with worm gears to drive the front and rear axles simultaneously, giving the toys full-time four-wheel drive.

A later innovation was the “Stomper II,” which featured two forward speeds and a “freewheeling” mode for unpowered play when the battery ran out. The switch beneath the chassis moved the motor laterally to contact one of the two worm drives, or you could leave it in the middle position to disengage the drivetrain.

Stompers were geared for torque, not speed, and challenging the trucks’ ability to power over or through obstacles was the source of their immense play value. With their gear-shaped tires, the little trucks could climb any grade as long as it wasn’t so steep that the truck flipped over backward. The icing on the cake was a tiny light bulb (with a filament and all, not an LED) mounted to the front of the chassis, shining through “headlights” – translucent windows in the grille.

As was seemingly the case with so many toys Gen-Xers remember, Stompers could impart some real pain if their power was not respected. Playfully using your napping sister as Stomper terrain seemed like it would be both fun and hilarious, right up until her hair wrapped around the axles and your Stomper climbed onto her scalp to the tune of a parent-alerting scream.

Configurations of couch cushions, books, and blankets (among other household items) were excellent fodder for Stompers, not to mention whatever challenges the outdoor world offered. Still, Schaper also offered play sets with simulated off-road situations. These were essentially just a bunch of injection-molded plastic terrain bits, but they fit into a large box that looked imposing when wrapped and under the tree in December 1981.

Stompers initially offered both foam tires and rubber tires to optimize indoor or outdoor use. These rubber tires, by the way, were very similar in size and shape to the ones that came with Lego, which meant that if you left them sitting out, they often got tossed into the box with all the bricks and took forever for you to find again. Why, Mom?

Hey, look, it’s been forty years, so we’ve forgiven Mom. Maybe. Let’s talk about the actual car bodies you could put on these capable little chassis.

No, The A-Team Van Was A Rough Riders Ripoff, Not A Stomper

Later, the Stompers line expanded into other vehicle bodies, including some really fun ones like a fifties Chevy Nomad.

It got even better. How about a Subaru BRAT?

Or maybe a Subaru (Leone) Hatchback with 4WD?

Small Japanese pickup favorites were also represented, like the Lil Hustler:

A personal favorite? An AMC Eagle SX4 coupe: the Dollar General Quattro!

A young Torch could go for a Baja bug, especially with the available “stunt wheel.”

The instructions show you could place the stunt wheel on the bottom of your Stomper to do wheelies and other tricks with just two of the driven wheels.

Things eventually went kind of nuts with Stompers becoming almost any kind of vehicle, including ten-wheel-drive tractor-trailer trucks.

Tractor pull fan? Well, it was 1981, so I can see that, and here you go. Note the front counterweight.

Larger Stompers saw the light of day, as well as even amphibious ones, and a short-lived series based on those three-wheeled ATVs that subtracted ten years from your lifespan if you rode them slowly, and if you cornered on them too quickly, subtracted your lifespan from your lifespan.

Honestly, there were so many Stompers spin-offs that it takes a full fifteen-minute video to explain them all. Nerd out, why don’t you?

As with all fads, there were numerous knock-offs (particularly Rough Riders that some would argue were better) until the entire genre slowly diminished as kids got older and younger children simply became interested in other toys; a familiar story.

Stomped Out

Eventually, the inevitable happened. Independent toy firms like Schaper were swallowed up by mega corporations; in Schaper’s case, it was by Tyco in late 1986. Stompers only lasted two more years until 1988, then reappeared under the Dreamworks brand and again from 1997 to 1999 as a Peachtree Playthings product. Tinco Toys was the last to offer Stompers, from 2001 to 2002.

I was rather astonished by some of the prices on eBay for some decent-condition Stomper toys. Non-functional parts or display examples can be had for cheap, but even a reasonably decent running Stomper can command anywhere from $80 to $100. Mint and in-box examples might fetch $400 or more; even $1000 in rare cases. There’s a price to be paid for nostalgia, and it can be a steep one.

Still, why not find a Stomper for yourself? They’re fun, well-crafted toys from a different time when we were awed by much simpler things. Even at those inflated prices, a Jeep Honcho Stomper would be a lot easier to keep around than a real one, and unlike David Tracy’s, there’s no chance of a tree falling on it.

Top graphic images: Etsy; Schaper Toys