The Alpha Trion Rampage Continues

A couple of times over the past week, I've commented briefly in the context of other issues that a figure that appears to be a repaint of Vector Prime as Alpha Trion has been showing up on eBay. Alpha Trion is a character from the old '80s Transformers cartoon, and is notable for being one of the oldest Transformers, and for "creating" Optimus Prime (the cartoon actually says that he rebuilt a Transformer named "Orion Pax" as Prime, but that seems to be enough to call him "creator" for most folks).

To date, over 20 of these toys have shown up on eBay. That's an unusually huge number of toys for something that hasn't been released to the general market yet. Since these "Alpha Trions" have almost certainly been stolen, I'll not be posting links here. But the sheer quantity of "Alpha Trions" out there is very odd. Most folks think that this will be a BotCon exclusive. But no BotCon exclusive has ever been leaked before the convention in these numbers. The previous record holder seems to be pre-Beast-Wars Megatron, for which a little over a dozen toys leaked onto eBay over the course of a couple of months. We've already seen nearly twice that many in only a week or so!

Some folks are theorizing that this might be a sign that "Alpha Trion" is intended for mass release instead for a convention. Although nothing would make me happier, it's hard to imagine this being true. It's also a possibility that "Alpha Trion" will be available through the Transformers club in greater quantity than the convention exclusive would allow. But even this seems a bit of a long shot.

Fact is, we'll have to wait to find out for sure. In the meantime, I know it's tempting. I was tempted myself when those first "Alpha Trions" were going on eBay for fairly low prices. But please don't encourage these thieves by buying these items on eBay. It only encourages more of this kind of behavior in the future.