Help with identification

[JayFigsss]

Hello there! Hope I'm posting in the right place,

I'm stumped by a scout trooper helmet I recently acquired from a used bin. It's filled with only genuine Lego, but this piece is puzzling me. It seems and feels genuine, but it doesn't exist on Bricklink, Brickset, or even the knock-off site Herobloks. As a side note, I do collect genuine and knock-off figures of characters Lego never made, so I'm pretty confident I can tell when it's a knock-off, as I have literally several hundreds of them, with over 1300 genuine Lego minifigures (I say this humbly), which is why I'm stumped on what to think of this helmet. Here are just a few pointers I noted:

• It is obvious this was based on the scout trooper helmet, but different, in addition to the black colour that Lego has never made for scout troopers
• The design seems to date back to the earlier days of the franchise (see pics)
• It's not the same as the usual scout trooper helmet, in that it doesn't have the bulge on the back and the sides (see pics)
• It doesn't have the Lego logo, but so are many older pieces
• It has the same finishing textured quality as genuine Lego pieces; some would say there's some "shine" or a "sheen" that only Lego has
• It feels solid and not cheap or lightweight, like all the knock-off ones
• As the design is from the past, I believe the quality is quite high for knock-offs to be able to replicate, especially back then
• I've also checked on several custom brands, but the only customs I can find are either Clones/Stormtroopers/Vader helmets, with plenty of overly detailed commandos, but none this dated in terms of design
• Tried with Google and Brickognize as well

If anyone has even any hint, I'd appreciate it; at least some direction would help besides all the above-mentioned

Ignore the other minifigure parts; you can see the textured sheen on the surface of the rim under the helmet in the last image above.

 

The texture is also visible on the black of the minifigure under this light, but the blue helmet (a knock-off) does not have that, as you can see based on the way it reflects the light. The mould sprue/tip/butt/vestige on top is also clean compared to what you'd get in knock-off figures.

 

Here's a comparison between what the old scout trooper helmets looked like back then. The green helmet is a genuine LEGO.

 

Sorry for the long post, I hope someone will actually read this.

Edited September 3 by JayFigsss

[TeddytheSpoon]

I wouldn't consider myself an expert on rare parts, but my 2 cents...

Best case, it's a prototype part. My understanding is that LEGO tended to make these in red, as stress lines and fractures are easiest to spot. But parts do get made in other colours too, to test the different pigment mixes.

With my design engineer head on, though, I'm leaning towards a convincing knock-off, for two reasons. One, some of the design aspects, in particular the lack of a line breaking the anti-stud into two halves. Even back in the 90s I'm pretty sure a lot of headpieces had this split, to prevent minifig heads getting stuck (particularly important for all-covering helmets like this one!).

Two... it just doesn't look much like a scout trooper to me. If anything it looks more like something out of Spaceballs! It's possible this design would've still been made as a prototype, but if the drawing was on the table at the same time as what eventually became the production model, I wouldn't be taking it forward for prototyping.

As I said I'm not so knowledgeable on what prototype parts got made, so I would be interested to see what someone wiser than me would think. But that's my inference.

Good luck finding the answer!

[Kdapt-Preacher]

I have never seen that helmet before and have no actual inside knowledge of any kind, but my uninformed guess is that it's a recent custom, and the weirdness is because it's meant to be this specific storm commando or something based on the same armor. Most depictions of the storm commandos have them in black versions of regular scout helmets, but some have that more vertical mouth and lack the bulge around the lower back, which would be a pretty good fit for your helmet there.