Is this a Rexim-Favor?

[SethS]

Forgive me for the non-Star Wars post, but this is where the expert eyes are.

As a life long DEVO fan I only recently thought of recreating the gun from this video to go with my energy dome hat… and in rewatching the video for Through Being Cool for the 836465th time, but maybe the first since becoming a SW prop nerd, I couldn’t help but notice the gun resembles the Rexim.

I think the design is too small to actually be one, and there are at least a dozen in the video, but I need better eyes than mine to tell me what I’m looking at…

 

[eethan]

cool it's not a Rexim though, too small and too different. It could be a number of things! Like they did in Alien with the small webley for the "child version" of the blaster.
I have seen some kind of rivet guns and things like this that have slightly similar proportions. they look gun like but are tools.

 

[eethan]

found a photo of my "rivet gun", I'm not sure what it is exactly. And I'm not saying it's something similar, but there are stuff like this out there:

 

[SethS]

Thank you for agreeing they were too small! That rivet gun is a great death ray!

 

[Vagabond Elf]

In the mid 90s I bought a bunch of toy guns from the dollar store for blaster props for a LARP, and they looked a lot like that. Clearly inspired by one of the various "tube with a magazine in it" SMGs out there, but so generic I couldn't say it was meant to be any particular one.

Anyway, if these were in Canadian dollar stores in the 90s its not unreasonable they were in American toy stores in 1981, and if the production team needed something that looked right in a kid's hand without being dangerous - and using actual firearms seems a bit much, even for American tolerance of firearms risk and even for the 80s tolerance of workplace risk- then a toy would make sense. Especially if they wanted to quickly and affordably turn it into a "ray gun."