Peri

the volcano is his mouth! mt ihu is the nose

Thanks for posting this, looks like it was a lot of work and theres a lot of cool stuff in there! The Fijian ra does sound really likely to me for Kane-Ra since they had a habit of calling it the Bull of Legends - just a stone's throw from 'Sir Bull.'

nice! not sure on all of those (for example takutanuva is certainly just a portmanteau of takanuva and makuta) but those definitely look like the sources for kotu, ahkmou and probably ehrye as well (that one's tricky since we don't know what the mnogii version of the name spelling was). Nuparu coming from paru would be pretty ballsy of them if accurate since they definitely weren't supposed to be using Maori terms at that point.

one extra note, you dont necessarily need to use adobe animate - if you can secure an older version (aka, one of the iterations of adobe flash) they work fine too. I use CS6 but theres nothing particularly superior about it, it was just the newest at the time i started. explaining how to recreate the art style is a little more difficult - i think your best bet would just be familiarizing yourself with the adobe animate/flash toolset, as well as the composition of the mnog assets once youve got them open in your animation program and can pick them apart. from there you can develop an understanding of what templar did and how, and try to recreate that yourself - thats what ive tried to do. best of luck to you!

did a little more research and just for anyone who is curious: October 14, "Search for the Secrets of Mata Nui Event" As for value, I'm not sure, but I think it's something that might really depend on the buyer you find. i could see people paying up to $20 for one, maybe more if they really wanted it!

Toys R Us did a lot of bionicle giveaways and events the first few years. I don't remember the name/date for this particular giveaway, but if you bought any bionicle set that day, they gave you this poster + a copper huna. The battle of the beasts was a future event they just advertised on the poster - it was a Manas tournament.

As you can see, it was distributed during the Power Lies Beneath Tour in 2002, not through Lego Magazine. Hence the rarity!!

Oh no, its down? I didnt even know it was up somewhere... was it one of the things Templar cleared from their site? In any case, thanks for preserving these. From the image that looks like a lot of polygons for a 2002 web game!

Right when Greg told BZP it was cancelled and he still had all the writing he had done saved, people asked him if he could post it on the forums, and he was open to the idea. There were some behind-the-scenes talks and it didnt pan out for some reason or another, but I guess they got as far as Greg sending over the first bit.

Greg wrote the novels as freelance, he was actually contracted by Scholastic for them instead of Lego. I'd guess it was less them telling Greg that specific book he was writing was cancelled than it was them informing him that the book count was going to be smaller than projected for that year - then he made the decision himself to toss the stuff he had written (a 'free space' story like Voyage of Fear or Legacy of Evil) to make sure he could cover the core 07 story with the three slots he had. So no loss on Scholastic's end for commissioning him. From what I remember he said he hadn't written the full thing, and from interviews it doesnt seem like he even really had the time for rough drafts (five books, even small ones, plus full time work and hours answering Qs on here is a lot). I'd wager whatever he did write was the stuff hes alluded to - this intro covers his idea for Matoro's possession, and I can definitely see chapter 1 hitting on the Zyglak and Vezon's capture. That might be as far as he got.

thanks all for sharing your experiences, i didnt get to visit a legoland until 2011 so hearing about the bionicle stuff i missed out on is very neat!! vakama and hahli narrating the 03 fireworks show is an interesting pairing, and its cool they were running mnog on the clubhouse computers in california. still hoping someday someone who witnessed the tribal jam in 01 will come forward to describe it... ive only been able to find this lone photo:

pics and scans from the tribal quest as it was in california. they had an excess of tgnms there, too, lol

That 1800 is just the Lego shop at home number... I'd wager they offered the slizer-branded spare disc packs by mail order.

According to Greg, the original bible said Mata Nui was "in a place that might be earth," so there is some precedent if this teaser were meant to be taken literally. I'm not convinced though Antarctica here is meant to be more than symbolic, if only because itd feel somewhat redundant for Faber to be trying to get two "near future on Earth" environmentalist narratives off the ground at once. but on the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me too much if that were the case. I guess we'll see, hopefully.

Yay, glad to see this is up! Excited to read more of these through proper translation instead of just google... the blog looks really spiffy too. nice header!