BotCon 1996

Man, you gotta work to out-ugly Uma Thurman.

BotCon 1996 was held on July 12-14, 1996 in Rosemont, Illinois. It was the only convention overseen by Men-In-Black Productions, who inexplicably chose to infuse the convention with a Pulp Fiction theme. There were no guests aside from Hasbro/Kenner representative Anthony Gaud.

The exclusive toy was the Predacon Onyx Primal, whose "bio" continued the unofficial Pulp Fiction association of the event by being a slight rewording of a quote from the film. A "Dealer Exclusive" variant of Onyx was also made available only to dealers; this would be the first and last time such a thing was attempted at BotCon.

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of The Transformers: The Movie, MiB held a "birthday party" featuring a screening of the film on a wide-screen TV and a birthday cake. A very generic birthday cake. The sealed VHS copy of The Movie - opened just for the occasion - did not actually work, although MiB were somehow able to acquire another, functional copy from an attendee after several minutes.

Unfortunately, that did not alleviate the fact they neglected to produce forks for the cake. Also, water was served as a drink out of a McDonald's keg (not even that cheap orange drink they normally use).

The dealer room opened to the dealers for setup hours late, and was opened to "early bird" pass holders almost immediately afterwards. No lanyards were available to dealers or attendees. Identification was done via generic "HI MY NAME IS _______" stickers, which the staff ran out of by day two, resulting in people just waltzing in unchecked by the end of the show.

Needless to say, MiB was not brought back to participate in BotCon 1997.

Displays

The art room did feature many unreleased Transformers toys that have rarely or never been seen since (good thing they were photographed for the BotCon Legends fanzine!), including one of the Generation 1 Unicron toys, several unproduced Micromaster and Action Master vehicles, and the "Double Pretenders", a gorilla-shell and spider-shell duo, reportedly to be Pretender forms for Optimus Prime and Megatron. Trukk is munky!

Hasbro "panel"

From Teletraan I: The Transformers Wiki, a Wikia wiki.