Transformers Artifacts of the Week: Botcon Trademark Search Books and Preliminary Search Letters

My friend Zabgoth over the last year or so has been helping Glen Hallit sell off some of his Botcon Memorabilia, which is how I got these. These books were produced by companies who did trademark searches (pretty sure they now just use PDFs.) These are a very niche Botcon collectible, most people wouldn’t even care about these, but they are products of the process used to create Botcon exclusives, so I find that pretty cool. The ones I have are Apelinq, Arcee, Cancerus, Catscan, Glyph, Nym, Shokaract, Tap-Out, and Unicron. I also have two preliminary search letters, one for Cancerus and Shokaract and the other for Shellshock. Apelinq is somewhat significant as this would have been the first time Hasbro or a connected entity (3H) ever did a trademark search for him. He joined the mainstream in Rise of the Beasts. Far more significant is, or at least, be Arcee and Unicron. The boxes are full of a lot of legal jargon, but from what I can tell, Hasbro never trademarked either name. This probably isn’t a surprise as Hasbro never actually produced a toy prior to 3H making Botcon 2001 Arcee and the Botcon 2002 Unicron statue. So, these may be the first ever trademark searches done on either of those characters as toys, so that would be significant, but there is no way to know if Hasbro ever did a search in case they decided to make a toy. Unicron was prototyped, so there is a higher probability they might have done the search. Far less likely that they did one on Arcee, due to their boys-won’t-buy-female-character-toys-head-up-their-ass mindset. The books do seem to indicate that a company trademarked Unicron as the name of a chemical.

Cancerus and Nym were the names ultimately rejected for Shokaract and Glyph. Shellshock was an unproduced exclusive repainted from Beast Wars Razorclaw (crab).

As always, you can find over 22,000 Transformers artifacts from every Transformers series and generation at TFMuseum.com.

Thanks for reading!