Japanese Items

Japan, while it had a wealth of licensed product, gave us some of the best knock offs of the vintage era, as far as package art and entertainment value. Most of their knock off toys are reasonably well made and seemed to function as intended, unlike many other countries knock off and bootleg items which were shoddy and either fell apart or just were bricks of plastic/rubber w. very little play value.

One of the stranger Japanese items is this cap gun sounding /saber type toy called "Stick Bang". Made by Tiger Toy Maker and featuring a heroic Luke mixed with anime character on the front, about to stick bang a Metropolis/C3PO looking robot. The logo is unmistakably Star Wars style lettering.

More creative changes to the Star Wars logo gives us these Space
chunks of rubber and plastic:

Wars items. The logo and X-Wings are the only SW thing about these

This is one of my favorite pieces of this type of Japanese knock off toy as it includes 2 of my favorite things Star Wars AND Grendizer. the package with Xwing and Star Destroyer are undeniably Star Wars and the UFO and robot toys inside are Grendizer knock offs.

Another great and early Japanese Star Wars knock off using the Space Wars moniker, is this R2-D2 which seems to be based more on the early McQuarrie designs for R2, than the movie used robot.

Even Japanese toy giants Bandai got a dig into the knock off market with their Juspion line. One of the villians named "Satan Gorth" has more than a small resemblance to a certain Sith Lord.

Satan Gorth was also available in this Juspion multipack:

Here's a loose Bandai Satan Gorth figure. He doesn't even remotely resemble Darth Vader in any way....Nope not at all.

While the robots inside are not SW in any way, Darth Vader seems to
5 colors of the same Robot, all with the same package art.

be looming in the background of the package art. They are available in

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Japanese Items