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Netflix Picks Up LEGO Elves for 2017


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Deadline.com has reported that beginning in 2017, LEGO Elves will be joining Netflix's suite of exclusive kids' series! This will be the third exclusive LEGO series on Netflix after this year's LEGO Bionicle: The Journey to One and LEGO Friends: The Power of Friendship. In the eight new LEGO Elves episodes coming next year, which pick up after the four episodes which have aired on Disney Channel, Emily Jones returns to Elvendale with her younger sister Sophie, but things take a dark turn when Sophie is kidnapped by the evil Goblin King and his minions. It's up to Emily and her elf friends to save Sophie and end the Goblin King's ruthless reign over Goblin Village. Follow the link above to learn more!

 

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It's almost like Lego wanted Bionicle to fail this year...

Netflix series was below average and the line was pulled a year early, Nexo Knights is probably going to start season 3 soon, Elves on Netflix soon, Ninjago a movie and a season soon.

Not gonna lie, I'm a bit salty.

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I'll be disappointed if the Goblin King isn't an homage to David Bowie. 

 

"Forget about the baby, Emily" 

 

To Mate.397: I don't think Lego was rooting for it to fail.  More like there was no pitchers left in the bullpen.  In Gen 1, Lego had 1 or 2 IP that had active storylines. (A story with characters, conflicts and resolution.)  This year, there are 10 (Star Wars, Ninjago, Nexo Knights, DC, Marvel, Elves, Friends, Mixels, Lego Dimensions and of course Bionicle)  All of those (save Dimensions) have produced at least 30 min of content for broadcast.  The result, it that someone was going to get a short piece.  Bionicle and Mixel got unlucky. 

"Honor those the dragons heed, in thought and favor, word and deed"

"Worlds are lost and worlds are saved, from those dangers dragons brave"

 

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It's almost like Lego wanted Bionicle to fail this year...

Netflix series was below average and the line was pulled a year early, Nexo Knights is probably going to start season 3 soon, Elves on Netflix soon, Ninjago a movie and a season soon.

Not gonna lie, I'm a bit salty.

 

Bionicle didn't need to fail for any of those things to happen. So I don't see why you'd think Lego would be any less disappointed with its failure than the fans are.

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Formerly Lyichir: Rachira of Influence

Aanchir's and Meiko's brother

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To Mate.397: I don't think Lego was rooting for it to fail.  More like there was no pitchers left in the bullpen.  In Gen 1, Lego had 1 or 2 IP that had active storylines. (A story with characters, conflicts and resolution.)  This year, there are 10 (Star Wars, Ninjago, Nexo Knights, DC, Marvel, Elves, Friends, Mixels, Lego Dimensions and of course Bionicle)  All of those (save Dimensions) have produced at least 30 min of content for broadcast.  The result, it that someone was going to get a short piece.  Bionicle and Mixel got unlucky. 

You do know SW and Friends sets did co-exist with G1 sets back in the day right? Even Marvel sets if you really think about it, with those movie studio sets and  G1 was still their flagship for some years, because they put effort into it. Whatever process was behind G2 clearly had something wrong, there were so many great stuff left on the floor cut out, and instead of backing Bionicle and treating it with the respect it should have gotten, since it pulled Lego out of the gutter back in 2001, they just tried to mimic 2001 watering it down heavily and not advertising it properly, to me that feels like they were not too eager to do this from the start. A reboot that could have been a glorious return of the phoenix that is Bionicle, rising from the ashes was nothing more than a cardboard cut out with some confetti in the end.

 

 

 

It's almost like Lego wanted Bionicle to fail this year...

Netflix series was below average and the line was pulled a year early, Nexo Knights is probably going to start season 3 soon, Elves on Netflix soon, Ninjago a movie and a season soon.

Not gonna lie, I'm a bit salty.

 

Bionicle didn't need to fail for any of those things to happen. So I don't see why you'd think Lego would be any less disappointed with its failure than the fans are.

 

From the start Bionicle was given a shoe string budget (and most was probably blown on those gold masks) to work with and that showed from the quality of the web animations while Nexo Knights and Ninjago started off with their own TV series from the get go, and the Netflix "series", Journey to One, wasn't anything to write home about, it was heavily rushed riddled with errors. Not to mention the terrible business decision of not even trying to advertise it like the other lines but instead "leave it up to the older fans" as they put it to market it for kids.

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It's almost like Lego wanted Bionicle to fail this year...

Netflix series was below average and the line was pulled a year early, Nexo Knights is probably going to start season 3 soon, Elves on Netflix soon, Ninjago a movie and a season soon.

Not gonna lie, I'm a bit salty.

 

Bionicle didn't need to fail for any of those things to happen. So I don't see why you'd think Lego would be any less disappointed with its failure than the fans are.

 

From the start Bionicle was given a shoe string budget (and most was probably blown on those gold masks) to work with and that showed from the quality of the web animations while Nexo Knights and Ninjago started off with their own TV series from the get go, and the Netflix "series", Journey to One, wasn't anything to write home about, it was heavily rushed riddled with errors. Not to mention the terrible business decision of not even trying to advertise it like the other lines but instead "leave it up to the older fans" as they put it to market it for kids.

 

 

Must we bring this nonsense into yet another thread...

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To Mate.397: I don't think Lego was rooting for it to fail.  More like there was no pitchers left in the bullpen.  In Gen 1, Lego had 1 or 2 IP that had active storylines. (A story with characters, conflicts and resolution.)  This year, there are 10 (Star Wars, Ninjago, Nexo Knights, DC, Marvel, Elves, Friends, Mixels, Lego Dimensions and of course Bionicle)  All of those (save Dimensions) have produced at least 30 min of content for broadcast.  The result, it that someone was going to get a short piece.  Bionicle and Mixel got unlucky.

You do know SW and Friends sets did co-exist with G1 sets back in the day right? Even Marvel sets if you really think about it, with those movie studio sets and G1 was still their flagship for some years, because they put effort into it. Whatever process was behind G2 clearly had something wrong, there were so many great stuff left on the floor cut out, and instead of backing Bionicle and treating it with the respect it should have gotten, since it pulled Lego out of the gutter back in 2001, they just tried to mimic 2001 watering it down heavily and not advertising it properly, to me that feels like they were not too eager to do this from the start. A reboot that could have been a glorious return of the phoenix that is Bionicle, rising from the ashes was nothing more than a cardboard cut out with some confetti in the end.

 

Friends didn't exist as a theme until 2012, and neither LEGO Star Wars nor LEGO Super Heroes had the kind of media presence during G1 that they have today. That's what Ptah was talking about — not just the amount of other themes out there, but the amount of other themes with their own animated media. 2010, the year Bionicle G1 ended, was the first year that there were any LEGO TV specials or direct-to-DVD movies besides the Bionicle movies. Themes like Exo-Force and Power Miners were lucky to get a five minute animated mini-movie.

 

 

 

It's almost like Lego wanted Bionicle to fail this year...

Netflix series was below average and the line was pulled a year early, Nexo Knights is probably going to start season 3 soon, Elves on Netflix soon, Ninjago a movie and a season soon.

Not gonna lie, I'm a bit salty.

 

Bionicle didn't need to fail for any of those things to happen. So I don't see why you'd think Lego would be any less disappointed with its failure than the fans are.

 

From the start Bionicle was given a shoe string budget (and most was probably blown on those gold masks) to work with and that showed from the quality of the web animations while Nexo Knights and Ninjago started off with their own TV series from the get go, and the Netflix "series", Journey to One, wasn't anything to write home about, it was heavily rushed riddled with errors. Not to mention the terrible business decision of not even trying to advertise it like the other lines but instead "leave it up to the older fans" as they put it to market it for kids.

 

Um, there's no way the gold masks could possibly have taken up most of the budget. According to the Bionicle Mask Hunt Terms and Conditions, the gold masks given as prizes had a value of $160 each. That's not even 2% of the cost of a typical LEGO mold. Likewise, animation can cost thousands of dollars per minute of finished animation even for a fairly cheap production.

 

Ninjago also did not start out with its own TV series from the get go. It started out with just a 44-minute TV special. Themes like Legends of Chima and Nexo Knights only started out with full TV series because Ninjago was so massively successful with one, and that gave LEGO the confidence to go ahead with full TV series for future "big bang" product lines. Likewise Ninjago probably only got the 44 minutes it did because the previous "big bang" theme, Atlantis, had done well with a 22-minute TV special the year before. Most of these themes were substantially larger in terms of number of sets per year and the net value of those sets than Bionicle G2.

 

Now, do you know what did get a TV miniseries its first year? Hero Factory. And that didn't do nearly as well as Ninjago's TV special did, so I think you can see why neither LEGO nor TV networks were in a hurry to give a full series or miniseries to a product so similar.

 

And bringing things back around to the subject of LEGO Elves, do you know what its first year story was told as? One 24-minute TV special. That's less than the full length of the 2015 Bionicle webisodes (though, admittedly, Elves also had five shorter webisodes in addition to that). Like Bionicle's 2015 webisodes, the Elves TV special was criticized for cheap-looking animation. It did have three voice actors for its nine characters instead of just one, though.

 

In fact, in a lot of ways, LEGO Elves seems to have had a similar first-year budget to Bionicle. It had around 18 new molds compared to Bionicle's 27, eight sets totalling $265 compared to Bionicle's 18 sets totalling $270, one mobile app, one chapter book, and one activity book. It did have a semiannual magazine in Europe its first year, which Bionicle didn't get until its second, but still has had no graphic novels, no booth at any of the Comic Cons, no Facebook page, and certainly no high-profile competitions.

 

All in all, Elves has had scarcely any more advertising than Bionicle (in fact, in some ways, it's had less), and yet it's still performing well. If anything, Elves is evidence that if a new theme truly resonates with its audience, then should be able to thrive even without a substantially larger budget than Bionicle was given.

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