Strangely absent from recent printed works on the subject, these are not too rare, you just need to get to the shows and ferret about a bit!
The important one - from a Toy Soldier collectors point of view - is set
3022-29; 'Combat Group Soldiers', it is - like the rest of the range - a straight copy of the
Roco Minitanks set 'U.S. Soldiers Combat Group'. The 29 being the US price in cents, a suffix shared by the whole range.
The box states "Litho in the U.S.A.", I suspect however that the contents came from Japan, where a dozen or so companies were producing this 1:87/1:100 stuff, most of it copied either from
Roco or
Roskopf.
Shots of the figures, with comparison close-ups of the
Roco originals. Pantographing has reduced them from the already quite small
Roco's to even smaller, however they still look OK and painted-up the size differential would be even less noticeable.
Study of the
Roco sWS (schwerer Wehrmachtsschlepper), in front of the
UPC copy, the copy is quite good size-wise having lost less than a millimeter, however it looses heavily on the detail, note the 'washed' effect on the bonnet (hood) side plate. Piracy extends to the small hole-filler used by
Roco for the GS/Cargo variant, where it fills the mounting hole used to locate the hardware of the other versions, UPC copied them also!!
One fundamental fault I forgot to mention, they have managed to get the mounting slots on the running gear reversed from the Roco original, so the drive wheels are at the wrong end!