3H Enterprises at Wizard World East
BotCon Facts, Hints and Miscellanea

By Graham Weaver

• This year's BotCon 2002 exclusives will be Cyclonus and three new "good guy" characters. The smallest "add-on" exclusive will be bagged. One of the three will feature glow-in-the-dark details.

• Toy exclusives for BotCon '03 and beyond are hoped to feature some remolding.

• Several abortive exclusive ideas were discussed. One previously-mentioned idea was the planned repaint of OpOp as Rodimus Prime, who would have been a BC01 exclusive and the leader of the Wreckers. There were also several unused ideas from this year brought up. One was a repaint of Super RID Prime as Hot Spot, which was discarded because 3H didn't want to sell a mold that's still readily available on shelves at retail. Another was a repaint of Strika as the G1 Micromaster Countdown. Finally, if K-B Toys had decided against distributing Megabolt Megatron, 3H was planning to repaint him as a drone from Cryotek in the style of the scarabs from The Mummy.

• The green Ramulus toy will not be produced as an exclusive, and in fact Ramulus will be returning to his mass-release color scheme in the comic itself.

• The Wreckers catalog was originally desgined as an insert for one of the exclusives, but Hasbro blocked its production as an actual hardcopy. Since 3H had not produced and has no plans to produce all of the Wreckers as toys, there was concern that it constituted false advertising.

• There will be two convention shirts this year, an Optimus-themed one and a Megatron-themed one (the art for which was provided by Guido Guidi). Which shirt is provided with your preregistration material is random, but enough shirts are being produced so that convention-goers can buy the other if they so desire.

• One of the non-toy exclusives this year is a set of Beast Wars postcards mentioned in the report, which will probably be priced at around $10.

• 3H has trademarked "Transformers: Expanded Universe" for use as the banner for their exclusives in the future. This liberates them from being tied to any particular existing generation or storyline.

• There may be a compilation of the first Wreckers storyline produced when it ends, including all of the comics as well as supplementary material such as "Apelinq's Journals" and possibly new content such as TFU-style entries.

• The scope of the storyline will increase more and more, with fiction appearing both at the convention and on the website, and in multiple forms - text stories, comics, Flash animation, soundtrack CDs, and others.

• Also with regards to the storyline, it is planned to be laid out as Dragonball Z-esque "sagas". The first, Enter The Wreckers, will consist of "Departure", "Betrayal", and two more chapters. It concludes at BotCon '03 and leads directly into the next storyline. Although two sagas might overlap at any given convention, the exclusives will generally correspond to one or the other.

• The pages of the "Betrayal" comic that were on display followed the progress of the Dinobot and Mutant groups and featured both Cryotek and several faces from the G1 era.

• The most correct, up-to-date ad for BotCon 2002 is the one that is currently running in the Dreamwave comic. Bob Skir will not be attending. Specifically, Glen clarified that they have been actively pursuing Mr. Skir as a guest, but he isn't comfortable with the hostility of the fandom at large, especially with the "Beast Machines" show still a relatively recent period of Transformers. Another guest 3H hoped to secure was the original designer of the Diaclone line, but he has also declined to attend, citing the general negativity of the fandom.

• The Hasbro panel for this year's convention is intended to be the biggest and most detailed yet. It will hopefully have a considerable amount of Hasbro and Takara production information about past and current lines.

• The scavenger hunt will actually be more of a citywide search for directions, which will sometimes feature choices ("answer fifty trivia questions or go order a pizza from a specific restaraunt) sending the participants in different directions. It was designed for teams of two to four, and the prize package reflects this.

• The 24 exclusives (toys and otherwise) are planned for 2003, and not this year, as previously reported elsewhere.

• 3H is seriously considering extending the duration of BotCon 2004 to three or four days.

• The Aerobot toy from Big Adventures is expected to retail around $13-15 and is apparently very neat. 3H liked the Big Adventures toys enough that they were planning to volunteer to produce them as exclusives when it was unclear as to whether they would be mass-released.

See also Overview

Altered States Magazine would like to thank Jennifer, David, and Graham for their reports. Also, we'd like to extend our appreciation to Glen Hallit of 3H Enterprises for providing us the opportunity to clarify some of the details here. Visit the official BotCon site at http://www.botcon.com/