What I find inspires me to write these blog articles is the trivia and history of a toy. I don't mean the lore, although I can certainly talk about that. No, more of its oral history and context. How I remember it, what it's like when I take it off the shelf, and what a wiki dives reveals. I then write several at once, and ask twitter to decide for me which of the several I should post. They chose this one.
Alpha Trion's wiki picture
So, context. Alpha Trion is by far the most famous character/toy I've done a deep dive on, but originally he had no toy at all. He was a supporting character in the Sunbow Generation 1 cartoon circa 1985, left on Cybertron with some resistance fighters, acting as an aged mentor to Optimus Prime when the narrative called for it, and his death proved no barrier to this. One assumes that somebody thought having an actual toy fulfill this position would harm sales, so Alpha Trion was created from whole cloth. A similar character exists within the contemporary Marvel comics, Emirate Xarron, and you still occasionally get versus arguments. For my money, Xarron was handled better. Both also lacked an actual altmode because of reasons, which has obviously been a barrier to toy versions, although Alpha Trion has done better here as he was on TV. Following a failed attempt by convention licensee 3H, Fun Publications succeed with their version in 2007. Here Vector Prime, another famously old dude, was retooled into Alpha Trion, which becomes important shortly. Circa 2010, Hasbro was laying down rules for important chunks of Transformers lore, something that would see fruit in the "Aligned" continuity and Power of the Primes. The specifics of these need not detain us, its a long story, but one effect was to elevate Alpha Trion from "very old dude and mentor" to "mythologically old dude and multiversial singularity". This didn't really stick, and shortly after it stopped sticking, we got some actual mass market Alpha Trion toys, following a near miss in 2014, when he lost out in Japanese fan poll to choose a mail-away release. The first was a repaint of Minimus Ambus because Takaratomy had to be bloody weird about things, and the next was a completely new mould in 2016. It looked like this.
Suffice to say, people
weren't expecting that. Alpha Trion was many things, including a
fighter in his younger days, but a buff barbarian was not one of
them. The dude was relatively skinny once you accounted for the cape.
Its like someone did a version of Cohen the Barbarian, minus 50
years. Or Ragnar Blackbane in purple. Nor was he a lion or a flying
aircraft carrier spaceship with a lion motif. Not that he was
anything before. You can deduce the thought process behind this.
They wanted to pay tribute to the convention toys, and they took
design cues from the Aligned version for the robot mode. Then
somebody wanted all voyager class toys to be triplechangers, and for
every mould had to be somehow retoolable. This is how we ended up
with this inexplicably hench geriatric, he's a pretool of the rather
big triplechanger Broadside, this also influencing one of his
altmodes. That said, the Funpub convention toy is another clear
inspiration, given that it also was a powerfully-built swordsman, and
the Titanmaster Sovereign is clearly Beta Maxx from the same
convention set, and thus the Mini-Con Safeguard. That toy also gave
Alpha Trion a flying altmode, while the lion seemingly comes from the
cancelled 3H version. So, I can see what they were aiming for. That's
a lot of deep cuts, mixed with pragmatism. Its just, one wonders, if
a retool of, say, deluxe class Scourge would have been better
received. Something more like the proposed 2014 mail-away version. I mean, that would possibly would have looked too bulky for
Alpha Trion, but it's less of reach than the beef mountain here.
So what's he like as a toy? Let's start the obvious, this dude has a presence. The robot mode is a real eye-catcher, the dude just looks huge in a high fantasy kind of way. There is a simply excessive amount of paint. It's not even immediately obvious how he transforms, especially as the lion bits look like a pelt of a slain animal. It is my whimsy to imagine that if this chap has a holomatter avatar, it is Brian Blessed. The sword is similarly impressive, and I get the feeling that Alpha Trion is no samurai or jedi. No, this chap is more like a Dark Souls boss, with simple, telegraphed attacks, but Primus help you if he connects. Mind you, part of that is the functional but not especially great articulation, he's got a lot of joints but a few omissions due to triplechanging. He also does have a 3-barrel blaster, which the Titanmaster can sit in, if that's a plus. The other two modes perhaps aren't as successful, but they generally come across as distinct from each-other as the focal point changes. The lion mode draws your eyes with that big silver mane and front claws, while the spaceship thing goes blocky and foreshadows Broadside. It's not a perfect effect, but enough moves so you avoid obvious flaws like, say, a train with wings, or Octone's jet mode. Where it falters however is with is with the arm/shoulder area. The lion ends up with limited motion in the front legs, nothing in the neck, and paws that like to detach, while the ship needed something to suggest engines. Both modes do have play value, and are pretty striking to look at, with Sovereign's cockpit area being a highlight. Word to the wise, there are two tiny tabs where you can mount the gun on top.
When you get down to it, the voyager price point in Titans Return wasn't that good. The design team just wasn't ready for triplechanging headmasters that had to pull double duty, and while these weren't necessarily terrible, they weren't Thrilling Thirty Springer. Most were made obsolete by later releases too. However, the odd thing is that Alpha Trion has aged far better than the rest of his kin, simply because it went in a new direction. It is ultimately a toy of earnest ambition, whose only actual sin is over-ambition. You look at that robot tell me it isn't awesome. Tell me why a lion-spaceship-barbarian isn't up your street. Of course, this got serious push back from Sunbow purists, and I can see the argument. No, this isn't the Alpha Trion we know, and for his first western toy, they should have been more conventional. Given how Titans Return in general played out, I'd make the case that they weren't actually trying to be faithful to 80's era animation though, which is not a flaw. Just a different set of priorities. They tried to make the old guy exciting, and we got a good toy out of it. That said, Takaratomy seemingly agreed with the purists, and skipped him, instead opting to retool the toy into Leo Prime. TT had gone full G1 animation for their releases, so this wasn't a surprise, but I'll admit that Leo Prime does look pretty cool. There was also an Alpha Trion in Power of the Primes, but you'll forgive me if I don't take that one seriously, and one toy in Cyberverse. He looks a little familiar...
Cyberverse's 2019 Alpha Trion Toy
My point? Well, just that Titans Return Alpha Trion is a toy that exists. And, sometimes, going in a fresh direction is exactly what we need.
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