That Matoran with a Vahi

...I cut all of my childhood ones up to use the pictures for other projects, BIG WHOOPS on my part... 😅 Especially since I had literally the whole run of the UK Lego Adventures magazine (April 1999 - Jan 2002), of which scans exist online for only a handful of issues, and as well as several UK Lego World Club / Lego Club Magazine issues which sometimes had different content from their US equivalents (and naturally only the US ones are online). No good crying over cut up comics, I suppose, but I do wish I'd had a bit more of a mind for preservation back in the day... I know the fandom would have learned about the existence of Adventures' Legend of Lewa / Trouble for Tahu comics waaaaaay sooner if I'd still had those issues intact when I joined BZP in 2004...! I've been able to get most of my favourites of the early issues of Adventures back via eBay, at least; but the later issues particularly are incredibly ellusive now. Honestly I'm amazed that the Trouble for Tahu scans eventually surfaced at all, all these years later, since they were from the very last two issues of the run... I'm glad they did, even despite their... minimal story value... but I still wonder how that even happened that they turned up when they did.

I'd already seen the Jaller and Takua one because it was featured on one of the site's weekly email updates; but that Ta-Koro one is new to me! It looks seriously impressive, and a slice of the Bionicle world like that is exactly what I'd love to see in a modern-day Bionicle set. Incredible work on the part of the designer

Yeah, I've seen ones like this popping up in especially B/S/T and the off-topic forums occassionally for a while now (I always try and report them when I happen upon them); this is the first time I've seen them spill to other boards as well though, at least in any great number. I guess there's not really any way to implement tighter security measures to stop the bots getting onto the site in the first place, is there?

Oh, yeah, I just stumbled upon their Art of Kolhii one recently! Pretty amazing work; I really loved how cinematic it felt, and how immersive they made the world look. Plus, it was great to see Hafu get to step into the spotlight (especially after the official movie denied him even a single line of dialogue!🤣). In addition, I don't see it mentioned here but I also found Gali vs. Tarakava by Vrahno a while ago - a new take on the classic MNOG scene - that I really enjoyed too ^^

Taking another run through Star Wars Battlefront 2; the classic 2005 version, that is ^^ A YouTuber I follow was making a series of videos playing through the campaign of that game last year, and that gave me the itch to go back to it for a bit too. I still prefer the very original Battlefront 1 personally - I don't find the maps that were new for BF2 as immersive as the ones from BF1 that didn't make it into the second game - but I return to BF1 with some regularity anyway, so tackling 2 again is fun for a bit of variety. Found my first run through of Galactic Conquest surprisingly easy this time, though... maybe I need to kick its difficulty up to Hard for a bit more challenge going forward...!

I wouldn't call it a resolution per se, but I am aiming this year to try and actually make home-cooked meals for myself a bit more frequently. Since I moved out of my parents' place, I've mostly just been living off store-bought ready-meals and the equivalent, both because I'm not much of a cook and because it didn't feel worth the effort to go to any great lengths preparing meals that are only for one person; so it's just been handier to buy things where all I need to do is throw them in the oven for a while, no further preparation required. After two+ years of this, though, I'm starting to get bored of the same few meals over and over again...! 🤣 I'm not aiming for it to be an every day thing by any means, I'm letting myself take it slowly, just cooking something a bit more involved one or two days out of a week or so; but I've cooked myself a few not-particularly-complex meals, picked from the recipes my parents had collected up over the years, during the course of the month so far and they've turned out decently, so it's at least a start! Also my ongoing goal is, same as last year, to just keep working away at my animated short project ^^ I'd like to think I'll get faster with it as I make progress, but as things stand at present I don't see myself being finished with it uptil at least the end of 2027... drawing an entire six-minute short as a solo (and fairly inexperienced) animator is quite a slow process...!

I have to be honest; at the time 2006 was my absolute favourite Bionicle arc since 2003, and none of the following years topped it for me either. Is it darker and grittier than it needs to be? SURE. Is it also just a far too fun experience because of that? ALSO YES, in my opinion! It felt like a return to Bionicle's classic form in a way; a dark parallel to 2001, and if I have any criticism, it was that the setting wasn't made to feel 'real' with the same depth as Mata Nui was. An authentic Templar-made Voya Nui Online Game, in the style of the original MNOG, would have been fantastic... in fact, I have a lot of thoughts on how such a game could begin to play out, but unfortunately not the technical skill to implement them...! But, back on topic... I enjoyed the Piraka for their banter, their whole 'teech-clenched teamwork' thing they have going on, and for their very unique (perhaps unneccesarily so, but no less cool!) individual powers. Avak and Thok have long been my favourites of the team for a multitude of reasons, and quite honestly I would have liked to have seen the group be utilised more going forward - even if just in the side-story serieals - rather than getting their bodies wiped out and fading away into irrelevance as they did. I love the 2006 main Titan sets. Brutaka, Axonn, Vezon and Fenrakk... not to even mention the absolutely FANTASTIC Kardas, who I didn't own as a separate set but did build the combiner version of... they were some of my favourite sets at the time, the year Bionicle titan sets fully came into their own after working up to it for a few years, and I'd say still hold up as some of the best sets of the line to this day. I really liked Axonn and Brutaka as personalities too - their fight scene, while admittedly not adding anything to the overall plot of the year besides keeping them both out of the way of the actual climax, is still a particular highlight for me. And while we definitely got Vezon-overdose in later years, I enjoyed him as the 'final boss' character of the year. I liked that this was the first year to give us unique Matoran builds, rather than them all being exact copies of one another, and if the foot-for-torso builds were a little goofy, I didn't mind that at all. I do think it would have been really nice if they'd switched the masks around between the different colours, rather than exactly duplicating the Toa Metru; but I understand that Lego was by this point trying to limit the number of different moulds and colours they had in use at any one time, so making new colour versions for them all may not have been an option due to that. It did somewhat deprive them of their uniqueness, but it is what it is, and I still liked them a lot. And the Toa Inika... I remember being so very surprised and delighted to see that these new Toa on the shelves had the names of the Matoran who I'd loved since the early years. It was very much a feeling of "my little guys are all grown up!"... and none moreso than for Nuparu, who had been my first Matoran set in 2002 and a firm favourite of mine ever since. Plus, their sets had unparallelled-at-that-point articulation, which made them fantastic to pose and take photos of while I was playing with them. I do feel like Greg's writing never quite captured the feel of the characters from MNOG and the other Templar projects, where I had first fallen in love with them; but even so, it was an absolute treat to get to follow some of my old favourite characters into their new role as the lead protagonists of the story. Yeah, 2006 was an all-around great Bionicle year for me, and honestly the last time I'd be fully invested in the story all the way through the year. While 2007 had its high points, and 2008 got off to a good start (and got an epic finale), I also drifted a bit during those years before finally dropping off more fully in 2009; but I really did just enjoy 2006 all the way through, flaws and all. ...and we can't forget, it was also the year that gave us the utterly baffling Free the Band promo...!

I was thinking passingly about this recently as well, albeit not specifically related to Bionicle. Over this last year I've been watching through the bonus features of my DVD collection (and listening to the audio commentaries) on the side while I've been working on animation projects; and, like you say, as I go through them I've found that the difference between early 2000s DVDs and modern DVDs is striking. Some of the Disney ones from that era, especially the two-disc special editions (remember when THOSE were a thing!), are amazing; The Lion King, for perhaps the biggest example, leads with a whole sequence of a CGI Zazu flying over the various realms of the Pride Lands before greeting the viewer, in one of the most extravagent DVD menu openers that I've ever seen. Monsters, Inc. and Attack of the Clones were the first two DVDs I ever owned, and they too both went all out with immersive menus, so it's definitely something that I also grew up expecting. Some modern menus, e.g. recent Disney movies, still have activity on them - which is nicer than the single-still-image menus that some other companies use - but only in the form of a selection of (sometimes trailer-exclusive) clips playing with a menu bar along the bottom. Not terrible, but definitely not immersive in the same way, and after a while they all feel a bit the same. I suppose that since so many people will watch online nowadays, companies see it as not worth their while to put a lot of effort into a DVD presentation. Back in the day, DVD was pretty much the only way to watch a movie once it left cinemas (officially, at least), so the audience for such DVD menus was pretty much everyone who wanted to watch the movie after that point. Nowadays, I feel like DVD purchasers are only a small fraction of those who will watch movies post-cinema, so I get why they wouldn't put in the same effort for what amounts to a much smaller audience. But it definitely makes modern DVDs seem more purely functional than, like you say, being an experience in their own right as they used to be. Is this something that was exclusive to certain regions, or certain versions of the DVD? Because my copies of the TLMs have minimal bonus features, with TLM just having some Lego fan-films and a sing-along video, TLM2 having a very short behind-the-scenes feature, and no commentary tracks on either. Did we in the UK get deprived of some neat bonus features? Speaking of bonus features though, I must nod towards Dreamworks here; while they still have the very basic menus, several of their recent DVD releases (The Wild Robot; Puss in Boots: The Last Wish; even HTTYD3) have a selection of short behind-the-scenes features and audio commentary tracks again, which has been nice to discover! It's nowhere near the levels of the early-00s DVD experience, but it's at least a little step back in that direction ^^

What I find curious is that there's not a lot of basis in the early media for that portrayal of Tahu, so far as I'm aware. In the first year, Tahu is mostly out-of-focus in the comics (only showing up in #3 to save Gali from the Tarakava, do a couple of things in the battle, and strike the heroic pose at the end) and most of MNOG (where he only appears briefly in silhouette and in flashback, instead of being seen in action like all the others) until the end of the game, a point at which even Kopaka explicitly accepts him as leader, implying that whatever issues Tahu may have had, he's moved past them by then. (The Lego Adventures comic Trouble for Tahu is an exception that does depict him simply being angry at everything from the moment he emerged from his can, but since that comic was unknown to the fandom at large for many years I feel like it can't be what impacted the popular perception of him.) His fieriness was more depicted as impulsiveness rather than unchecked rage into 2002 as well; Kopaka has to talk him down from charging into the Bohrok nest with just the two of them, but otherwise he seems pretty level-headed, all things considered. It's only after the Nuva transformation, as far as I can see, that he starts displaying his traits of not playing well with others in the comics, which carried over to the movie; and while this would then be retroactively applied to Mata!Tahu by the early Chronicles novels, I personally tend to avoid considering those as fully canon because of their several inconsistencies with established lore. Speaking for myself, I didn't discover BZP and online fandom until 2004, so I don't know if Tahu was still memed on even back in Bionicle's first two years, or if the 'burn stuff' jokes only took off after the Nuva transformation kicked his arrogance into high gear; I'd be interested to learn when that started, but I suppose with BZP's archive being lost to time there's no way to know anymore

While I don't hate Tahu, I have to agree with Nato that the "Tahu Fatigue" kinda takes away much of the enthusiasm I might have otherwise had for this. I'll have to see how the result turns out, because minifig-Bionicle would be amazing if it's done right, but I'd really rather one of the other Toa got to shine for a change. Kopaka. Onua. Gali. Pohatu. Lewa. Not to even mention the Metru, the Inika, some of the villains... Even Tahu being Nuva form would be enough of a change for me, honestly. Just, some variety... I know it's because Tahu's always been the face of the brand, he's the most iconic. I assume also that they know there are fans like us out there who will go 👀at anything Bionicle, so the repeated choice of Tahu specifically seems to me that it's more about enticing people who would recognise Bionicle but were never fully into it, to make them go "OH I REMEMBER THAT" in a way that a non-face-of-the-brand character wouldn't and therefore to drive more potential sales than a character than only we intense Bionicle fans would recognise. I mean. Maybe if this one is popular enough, Bionicle minifigures could hypothetically become a reoccuring fixture in CMF waves, the same way that e.g. the mascot costume characters have. I genuinely don't know if our little niche of the fandom really has the purchasing power to make Lego feel like that's worth their while though. And while it would be super-nice if this turned out to be foreshadowing for an actual minifigure-scale Bionicle location set that would have other characters in, I... think that's very likely to be only wishful thinking at present!

Might not be the universal experience, but as someone who was a Slizers fan before there were any other constraction themes, I personally just rolled right on into appreciating Bionicle. I think it helped, though, that Slizer was very light on lore (and even lighter on consistent lore...!) and honestly looked like its characters could slot nicely into Bionicle (more or less), so it wasn't a huge leap to make - in fact, it was because of their similarities in design that I made the jump to Bionicle as easily as I did (and for a while the Slizers served as minions of Makuta when I played because otherwise I wouldn't have anyone for my Toa to fight until early 2002!). I mean, I wouldn't rule out that such fans exist; but I think the fact that Slizer and Bionicle had so much in common aesthetically really helped to soften the transition for a lot of us. Plus, at the time we were used to Lego themes that lasted no more than a year, so it wasn't exactly unexpected that Slizer would be a one-wave wonder as well (in fact, it getting a second wave at all was a surprise at the time); in contrast, I feel like Bionicle's uncommonly long run - at more than three times the length of Lego's now-typical three-year-long themes - gave its fans the mistaken belief that it would keep getting new content forever, leading to taking it much harder when its plug was pulled than would have happened for any other theme at the time.

I'd like to think that the different masks were intentional, maybe to show off the feature of the Kanohi packs. Probably not the case - might well be the actual masks for the sets got lost somewhere in the past two decades so they just slapped on whichever ones they had to hand - but I know for sure that seeing the Toa with their alternate masks makes me nostalgic for the Kanohi packs, even though I can't speak for anyone else...! Aside from that, in addition to what's already been pointed out, I do notice that Tahu's sword is sideways... the blade held horizontally, rather than vertically. Not crucial, but also from what I remember it's consistently depicted blade-vertical in official media. Where's this display from, out of curiosity? ^^

I don't mind sharing! I wasn't really sure at first how much I'd have to say; but then I kinda started rambling and didn't stop! 🤣 I've attached an image below showing some of the stages, too. I work in FireAlpaca which is a free drawing program, and use a One by Wacom drawing tablet. First, I take a rough pass at what I want to draw, and I do mean very rough; just blocking in the positions of the characters with basic lines, plus rough facial details (picture 1). It's not pretty, but it gives me a good base to start from. Second pass, on a new layer, I go through and rough in far more of the characters' details (picture 2). Not everything, by any means, but pinning down all the significant shapes. This is the point where they actually start to look like the characters, rather than rough blocks with faces...! Third pass is where I really start the final linework. One of the benefits of FireAlpaca is that if you turn on animation mode, then when you create a new layer you can see a faint 'onion skin' view of the layer beneath (the faint red lines in picture 3), so I use the roughs of pass 2 as my starting point, tracing over them but also making corrections and changes as I go. By now, I've got all the rough proportions in place, so I can focus on the close detail work; I captured a number of screenshots from the movie, which I stuck in a separate file that I could pull up to reference at any given moment to get all the tiny details down. (In truth, in much of my work I wouldn't bother with pass 2 and would go straight from the very roughs of pass 1 to the clean lines of pass 3; but Bionicle movie style is so detailed that an interrim pass between them was all-but a necessity in this case!) In the final lines pass, as well, for a picture like this where there are multiple characters, I'll draw them each on separate layers in case I need to shift them around a bit. I didn't need to, in this case, but it's happened before; and it's way easier to just pick up a layer and move it than it is to separate two characters who are on the same layer! For this picture, I also put Vakama's blazer claw on a separate layer as well, because I knew it was going to overlap his body and also knew that it was the most complicated shape that I had to draw for this picture; I didn't want to keep having to erase and redraw other parts of his arm while I struggled with getting that part right, and having it on a separate layer, where I could still see the 'onion skin' of the main drawing but not have it get in the way, saved me a fair amount of grief! Once lines are done, I turn off animation mode, hide the rough layers, and add another separate layer(s) for the colouring. FireAlpaca's helpful here too, in that as long as the lines layer is visible, the fill bucket tool will fill within the lines even if filling on a different layer, so it's not too complex to fill in all the flat colours and then tidy them up afterwards where the fill didn't go right to the corners (picture 4). Picking all the colours is another matter with 3D character models like in WoS, where every point on the character is a very slightly different colour, and I definitely had to fudge them a bit to get them looking good for the picture - especially since the lighting of the scene is so dark - but I just kinda eyeball it until it looks decent. I also found, and you can't really see it at normal size but I promise it's there, that Matau - and to a lesser extent Vakama - has a lot of scaly texture on several of his pieces in the movie if you look closely enough, so on another separate layer I etched out all these patterns. I didn't go for complete accuracy here because, again, it's so barely visible - it's mostly just rough rectables and triangles all over the relevant surfaces that give the needed texture (picture 5) - but I wanted to go for the authentcity of it at least being there. From that point, I turn on 'protect alpha' (i.e. locking the transparent pixels) for the line layers, and colour over any outlines that don't want to be the default black. In this case, that was only a few details like the characters' eyes, Matau's rust patches, etc.; in some pictures I'll colour all the lines to look more like the style of e.g. classic Disney animation, but these characters were way too complex for that! Plus, I felt the lines worked well even just in black. From there I add shadows, again on a separate layer. I picked a suitable colour to go over all the parts I thought should be in shadow, then once that was finished turned the layer's blending setting to "multiply", allowing some of the colour beneath to come back through so that each area's shadows were indeed darker versions of the actual part colour, and turned the opacity down to around 50% to make them less extreme (picture 6). Usually, I'd drop to a lower opacity even than that (around 35-40%), but for a scene with extreme lighting like this, a touch on the darker side felt more appropriate. Last thing for the characters was adding glow effects to eyes, heartlights, and Vakama's flame, and also highlights on the parts of Vakama that would be directly in the flame's light; I also decided to turn off the line layer for the flame so that the effect would look more natural. For the glow, I picked a suitable colour and, again on a new layer, went over the parts that should be glowing with the airbrush tool to give them a softer edge than the regular brush would. Then I changed the layer blending this time to "add", which gives a nice glowy effect, and played with the opacity until it looked right (picture 7). The background, in contrast, I honestly just threw together a little. A plain grey underlayer for the distant sky; rough lines and colours for the tower surfaces; extra texturing in the same vein as the way I had applied Matau's scales; and one last layer over the background but under the characters to smear around a bit of grey with the airbrush again, at different thicknesses and opacities, to make the fog (picture 8). Finally turning the character layers back on (picture 9) and, as long as everything looks right, resize the overall image as needed (for me usually around 60-70% of the size I work at) and export it to a .PNG ready for upload ^^ Sorry if I kinda went off on one here...! I hope some of this is helpful, in any case!

I have a few. Onua Classic is pretty high up there for me, as my very first set; he's not my favourite-favourite anymore, but there's just something special about that initial interaction with the theme, that makes me more attached to him than to many of the later Toa. Muaka & Kane-Ra would be another. I didn't get them when they were new - rather, used off eBay for Christmas in 2006 - so I don't have quite the same nostalgia connection to them; but to this day they're still one of my all-time favourite sets. Their action feature of lunging necks and *snapping* jaws is my favourite from any Bionicle set, and I love the fact that they can create a fairly recognisable animal front half using mostly just standard technic parts. Thirdly and perhaps most significantly to me, all three of the rider-and-mount 2003 titan sets. Here in the UK we didn't get the 2001 McDonalds promotion, I was barely aware at the time that the Matoran characters (aside from Hafu in the Powerpack and Nuparu in the Boxor) had even got physical sets, but I'd recently fallen in love with MNOG and the Bohrok animations; so the reveal of two of the main characters from those, in big sets and riding cool animals, absolutely blew me away. And add to that, a mysterious seventh Toa character with special gold armour? I was all over that wave; I don't remember ever being so excited for new Bionicle sets as I was for those three, especially once the Mask of Light hype set in. They also absolutely did not disappoint at the time, and even now I have so many fond memories attached to them that those three specifically are ones that hold a special place for me. And also my little McToran Matoro, who I got just a couple of years ago, also holds a place for me as he was a birthday present from my fiancée! Especially since she doesn't have much interest in Bionicle stuff herself, so the fact that she got one for me makes him particularly special!

Ooh, I can definitely see Jeiz wanting to get involved in figuring out the mystery! I'll see about getting her into position for that; thanks