The first Toyota Land Cruiser went on sale in August 1, 1951. This year, they celebrated 70 years of the well-traveled beast by not only launching the all-new J300 Land Cruiser, but announcing that the FJ40 would be the first Land Cruiser to join Toyota’s Heritage Parts Program of reproduction parts. More recently, Toyota has released a couple of videos thanking Land Cruiser fans for 70 years of support.
The first one gathers every generation of Land Cruiser, including even the very rare original BJ and FJ20 models that started it all. There’s 14 models in total, counting the Prados and 70-series that we don’t get in the States. The cool part is, there is nothing computer-generated about this lineup. The vehicles are all there, lined up together in the dirt, even the examples from Toyota’s own museum collection.
A second video is a stop-motion animation of Land Cruiser photos submitted by fans. The photos “drive” across a house, whose rooms and objects double as off-road terrain and obstacles for the Land Cruiser photographs. The photos show a wide range of generations and modification styles, making for a fun tour of the Land Cruiser enthusiast community.
The videos are short, but the effort put into them is substantial. It’s almost as if they looked at Nissan’s terrible 70th anniversary of the Patrol video and tried to avoid it at all costs.
