Alamy stock pix, cropped and straightened slightly, used respectfully. Which shows a scale mockup of the Convair LEM with see-through sides. Now, imagine the form without it's boom wing arms, its antennae stuck on top, cut-outs where the windows would be, the thrusters from the boom arms stuck in the cut-out nooks, and its landing leg struts meeting at the side so that the bottom (and insides) can be eliminated from the now less-complex two piece hollow casting.
That's what you'd get.
Cast the antennae bits etc with the gray astronaut figures, sell it in bulk for a quarter each and you're still making a handsome profit. Toss a couple of astronauts in a bag with it along with one of those US flags which've been going around since the fifties, and you have an inexpensive Space Toy Set kids can throw away in a month or love for the rest of their lives. Depends on the kid.
Someone else's stock pix, chosen because it's angular placement is about the same as the picture of the Hing Fat vehicle below. The triangular projection sticking out of the crew cabin was a docking guide. And since the toy lander wasn't going to be docking with anything was probably one of the first elements eliminated. Would have been an awkward mould form to say the least, and the boom arms would have needed to be a separate part likely pieced together before being pegged in place. Why bother? Chop em up, keeping only the parts you can stick onto the capsule section.
"Put a stick in & you got a lollipop."
Two images of its ascent stage separated from the descent stage, necessary to cut down on the weight of fuel needed to lift off from the moon after EVA. Looks even more like a Space Helicopter in simulated flight. But it never flew, its engines designed for coping with 1/6th Earth's gravity while operating in a vacuum.
The re-worked crew cabin. Now with Rabbit Ears and spokes for eyes.
Simulated flight in a hangar for promotional photos, using a scaffolding crane block tackle thingy. Still pretty impressive!
Hing Fat (or whoever did the design work, likely in Hong Kong somewhere's between 1969 and 1972) sliced off the bottom half of the crew cabin and the top projections of the descent stage. You would peg the half-round ascent stage onto a perfectly flat descent stage face plate. No engines depicted on the toy other than the maneuvering thrusters which were removed from the boom arms. Bottom of the descent stage is as hollow as the top part seen here.
So this design could have surfaced in someone's space toy design proposal book as early as 1963, though my guess is that it's an Apollo era creation, chosen for its relative simplicity in casting as opposed to the angular Grumman LEM shape, which we never saw with the "Space Astronaut" sets associated with Hing Fat. Nor do we see this form re-translated as other toys which are of commonplace enough to turn up during two weeks of web research by a seasoned search hound. It seems to be unique to these "Made In China" sets, which I think is a point of pride for those designers who first struck upon the form 50 (or more?) years ago -- Would love to know if any other toy or plastic model companies made versions of this contraption. Hit us up in Comments or email using the form provided!
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