C is for Canoes - 4 - Star Toys

Possibly the most amusing of the Hong Kong copy canoes, is the Star Toys effort . . . 

. . . as they copied the Timpo design with the 'stitching', but the material and style of the Herald with marbled polystyrene, in similar colour palates. Brian's is the light/dark-grey one and mine the sand/dun one, I seem to have taken a few shots trying to get some without too much reflection!

 

And while the boat is all Timpo in design, the crew are all Herald! So it's a fifty-fifty split on donors with no cut-n-shutting! The crew on the instruction diagrams bear no relationship to the actual figures. Like a lot of Star's production, they are both soft, PVC copies of the Britains men.

 

The bits in the background are too mixed to attribute, there are what look to be three Star bases, but there were dozens of issuers of these Timpo, Britains Swoppet and/or Lone Star copies and with the fourth base not Star, we have to assume they have/might have - all been mucked about with!

 

Mint sets are the only way to attribute all these properly, and that's a big job for another day, although we looked at a small import/jobber's set by Benkson, not that long ago - Britains and Lone Star poses if I recall correctly?

However, the boat and paddlers are the Star Toys one, in the same colourway as my carded example, but courtesy of Brian Berke, I think (it may be a feeBay image?). That's Star, a bit of a brief box-ticker, but most of these canoe-posts will be!