Keyword Issues with Ecommerce SEO

I've got a small ecommerce site I'm working on atm. I'm writing 500 word unique articles for each product because I intend to rank number one for all of them.

The issue lies in the fact its an ecommerce site which makes onpage factors a bit tricky.

Basically pretend my store is selling Simpsons Lunch Boxes. And the keywords I'm trying to rank for are:

"homer steel lunch box"
"bart simpson steel lunch box"
"maggie steel lunch box"
"marge simpson steel lunch box"

Each of these keywords gets 500 searches so its imperative I rank for all of them.

Now because the keywords are so similar, an up to date well versed seo would know your better off putting this all into one big article with appropriate h2-h4 tags for homer, bart, maggie, marge, etc rather than building individual pages for each keyword.

However with ecommerce you cannot do that. And are limited to either trying to rank a content-less category page for all of these keywords at once; or rank each product page individually.

I am just wondering if I were to go the route of no-indexing category pages and try to rank each product page for its keyword, would google see too much similarity between the keywords and basically rank only one product page in the SERPs?

Hope that made sense. Thanks.

Why not make a topical page about the Simpsons, in depth as you can, and make any merchandise being sold, child pages with their own article of content? This seems logical. Build some Simpsons themed links to the large article and it will pass juice to your product pages, and also build some to your product pages to rank them for your desired terms. Good luck.