Trips to grocery stores in my youth always included a visit to the toy aisle, pathetic limited as they were.  There you could always find cheap throwaway toys which sometimes featured non-licensed knockoffs of popular intellectual properties.  And there was no bigger target for knockoffs than Star Wars.

This Happy Toys Star Tanks toy's only connection to Star Wars is the word "Star" and the blatant theft of the Star Wars logo.


"The most powerful battle car all over the Galaxy" does not compute.  If it's a car, it's pretty much limited to the world it's on, unless they plan on shipping it all over the galaxy to different planets for death matches.

Not only did they steal the Star Wars logo, they also borrowed heavily from Frank Frazetta's 1966 painting "Against the Gods".


The image was used in another knockoff line, presumably a He-Man knockoff.


This second knockoff I picked up is Moto-Botz which is a Transformer knockoff.


So your choice of ways to play with it are "robot" (cool) or "train" (meh).  And don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of toy trains and have several.  But a robot that transforms into a train?  It kind of reminds me of that scene in "Big" where Tom Hanks questions the playability of a robot that changes into a building.

I couldn't find any marks on the package, but apparently these were put out by Zee Toys in 1984.

The interesting thing is, while searching for information on this toy, I found that it had been released as a train on the card as well. So I guess they were trying to visually appeal to kids that like robots and kids that like trains as well.