After the smash success of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Ertl stepped up to the plate to grab the toy license for Star Trek III – which, of course, was a much less action-oriented movie. Ertl produced only four characters, as well as small die-cast metal replicas of the Enterprise (not as good as the earlier version released by another manufacturer for Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and the Klingon Bird of Prey.
Each Starfleet character came with a clumsy phaser pistol that the figures could barely hold, and Kruge came with a flexible rubber Klingon Targ.
It seems as though Ertl had no plans to expand on their line of Star Trek III characters, which is sad, since these figures were fairly good. And why there was no Dr. McCoy figure (when McCoy is, for once, one of the main characters in the movie), but there is a Spock figure (though Spock was not seen in this form through most of the movie), is a clue to Ertl’s intentions – this was to be a quickly-made, almost disposble tie-in.