The Bohrok Are Revolutionary!
Entry posted by xccj
335 views
Well, maybe, so here are my thoughts…
I was just viewing this topic , asking what was your least favorite year. I answered 2005, and listed my reasons. Other people voted for other years too, because they have this oddity that I call “different opinions” that I just don’t quite understand but will have deal with anyway. 
Anyways, as I saw the results, I saw that 2001 didn’t get any votes (yeah, the first year of Bionicle bombed so badly that I stayed tune because I knew it could only get better) but 2002 also wasn’t rated the worst year either. That got me thinking. And realizing what a rare occurrence that is, I decided to write those thoughts down in a blog and post it for greater marketability.
Am I done with the lame jokes yet? Probably not.
So, what was 2002 all about anyway? Oh yeah, it was the Year of the Bohrok (they should add that to the Chinese calendar). So what made it so good that these buggy invaders could capture an audience after all the great Rahi-fighting Toa Originales? (just because there was an alternate poll discussing who uses ‘mata’ and ‘olda’, so I had to make up something ‘newa’) Uh, well, here are some of my thoughts.
Sets: The Bohrok were plagued with what we later called “clone-itus”. Besides for color and shield piece, they were identical. Why’d this work? Well, they were really the first clones to come around, because the Toa were not very clone-ish and the Rahi were far from it. (The Turaga and Matoran… well, for the sake of my argument, let’s not consider them to be pure clones yet. ) So, for the first “real” cloned sets, maybe people were more tolerant. When Lego wanted you to pick up six more of the same design with the Kal, then it got out of hand.
Then there was the fact that the sets were actually MONDO COOL! Think of it, have any other canister sets had all the playability of a Bohrok. They had arms, legs, and heads, so you could play with them in a humanoid-style fashion. They had about the best function ever with their head snapping gears (all the other gear sets either twirled arms or waists). If that function ability wasn’t enough, they could launch krana out of their foreheads as well. Then they could transform into their ball-like states to either be stored in status or used for bowling or other ball-related sports. (ever play Bohrok baseball? Then you’re glad all your Bohrok are clones) Really, mobility and overall image of sets have improved, but how many sports can you use a Piraka in? I can’t think of many (they could act as bowling pins in bohrok bowling, I suppose).
Then there was a storyline, which extended on the already super cool one that Bionicle had already established. The best thing they did was reuse the old heroes for the first part of the year, so we didn’t immediately get the Toa Bohroko, who descended from the skies to help fight off the Bohrok once the original Toa got crushed in round one. The comics were good, creating one of the most suspenseful and exciting sagas of the Bionicle comics that I can remember. (because later on the comics were always splicing up missing sections from the movies and books. In 02 they told the whole story). If you got bored of the toa’s adventures fighting the Bohrok, then you also had the cool flash animations on the web considering the home front (the animations weren’t the next MNOLG, but they sure beat MNOLG 2 for storyline material). It was a great year for a story, maybe even better than current years because it didn’t disregard anything of the past, because they considered most people would still remember 2001. Or maybe it also had something to do with me remembering the glory years of Bionicle, which were so much better than this current stuff, and which shaped my childhood forever! ( 
Note: maybe that’s too dramatic) Anyway, I thought it was good.
Yeah, there were other downsides. The Bohrok Va were not cut out to be replacements of the Turaga sets. With the Toa Nuva, we got the first signs of infection of clone-itus. The Bahrag, Exo Toa, and Boxer were excellent sets with amazing functions, but they were too expensive for some people. The on-line game of the time wasn’t any good (Battle for Mata-Nui… move Toa thingies around to whack all bohrok in le-Koro and Ta-koro, but get glitched out in Ga-Koro and die. Not to mention that this comes at the time when the Bohrok have already been defeated.) And, in case anyone remembers, the on-line updates were really slow… we got the last half of the online episodes in the last one month of the year. And, worst of all, the Bohrok saga just led to the Kal saga, which was a major flop set-wise.
But in the poll I linked to above, nobody had voted 2002 the worst year yet. So I’m going to credit the Bohrok for bringing a little bit of happiness to us in that year that made us like it better than, say, 2003 or 2005. They filled our hearts with joy as they unexplainably destroyed most of Mata-Nui and threatened to bring the end of Matoran society. (Hmm, I do believe that’s a good example of irony! Or satire… I dunno, did you memorize the meanings of all those English phrases? I was in the back doodling on my notes) ((And really, what the Bohrok did wasn’t all bad, the great spirits wanted them to do that stuff with leveling everything on Mata-Nui. They’re timing was a bit off because Makuta messed with their alarm clock. But, of course, we didn’t know that…))
Now did you get through that with a straight head? If so, then I obviously didn’t twist my words around enough. Make sure to count how many lame jokes you counted… so I can tell how well you read this. 
2 Comments
Recommended Comments