While The Transformers: The Movie did the expected job of featuring characters based on toys that either had already come out, or were scheduled to come out in 1986, it also featured a number characters for which no toy was ever expected. However, given enough time, Hasbro has demonstrated that almost any character featured in Transformers fiction has a decent chance of eventually becoming a mass-released official toy.* So it is with this "Quintesson Trooper," which appeared as a bailiff in the courtroom scene as a very minor character.
To be fair, the version of the toy that I have, from a Target-exclusive four-pack a few years ago, wasn't the first one released. In fact, the toy was released as the "Quintesson Bailiff" as part of a different multi-pack back in 2020. And that toy, itself, was a remold of the "Allicon" (a long-standing fan name, given because of the Alligator-like alternate mode, eventually made official) originally released on its own earlier that same year as part of the Earthrise line. But this toy more properly depicts the colors of the Bailiff, as he appeared in the movie, than the earlier "Quintesson Bailiff" did, so I'm happy to have waited.
The role of the Quintessons was never particularly well-defined in the movie, itself. Were they servants of Unicron, mopping up the remnants of his attacks (as an early draft of the script, as well as the comic book adaptation of the movie, suggested)? Were they simply a culture with a warped sense of justice that our heroes unfortunately ran into by total coincidence? The cartoon later suggested that the Quintessons were, in fact, the creators of the Transformers, but there's really nothing to suggest that this was the intention for their inclusion in the movie itself (this concept did come up in the middle of the movie's scriptwriting process, so it's not impossible that it remained part of the intention as the movie was completed... it just isn't evident from what's actually on screen). I myself am not really a fan of the Quintessons, so I prefer to ignore any role they might have had in the Transformers' origin, but I readily admit that it's now pretty well baked-in to most versions of the franchise, and that they are among the movie's most distinctive contributions.*I have long warned fans about the expectation of getting these kinds of deep cuts when making predictions, sometimes citing what I pretentiously call "Blackrock's Rule of Desired Toy Potentiality," which states that "the demonstrated ability of a toymaker to do a particular cool thing is not an indicator of the likelihood of any other particular cool thing being done in the future." After all, even if a million monkeys on a million typewriters could eventually write the works of Shakespeare, given enough time, I'm only going to live so long, and if the thing I'm looking for takes too long to finally become reality, I may never get to see it happen, myself! That said, the clear efforts to make so many of these toys that we never thought we'd get when we were kids are very much appreciated.
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