Aanchir

This should be accurate. It's mentioned in Brick by Brick on page 155. Granted, it specifically says this was true "at one point in 2003", so it may not be accurate for earlier or later issues of the Bionicle comics.

Ideally, I'd want new songs to be written specifically for Bionicle, rather than licensing existing songs. The Fold's Ninjago songs or Cryoshell's Bionicle songs are a good example. Something catchy with lyrics would be ideal from a promotional standpoint — after all, look at how much more widespread nostalgia there tends to be for theme songs to shows like Power Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Pokémon, and Transformers than for the parts of their soundtracks that lacked lyrics. The instrumentation, however, ought to feel distinctively Bionicle, bringing together mystical and mechanical sounds. I don't really follow much in the way of popular music so I have no idea what artists would have the best style for Bionicle or generate the best marketing buzz.

I think it was just that earlier production runs didn't use glitter and later production runs did. I know all my family's Toa Metru lids were glitter-less.

I never noticed the feet were remade The first batch of sets just used the old feet, but some later batches had new ones! I'm kind of disappointed the copy of the set I got only had the old ones. Here is the new version on BrickLink. It's kind of a bummer that after going to the trouble of remolding them, they didn't end up using the new versions on any other sets…

I honestly would've liked if they'd redesigned the Glatorian head with a stronger joint, the same way as they did with Toxic Reapa's feet in later production runs. A totally new head or continuing to use the 2.0 heads could have also been cool, but that might've reduced the ability to reuse the characters' original helmets, which I thought was a really good call with that particular series.

You look phenomenal!

I have mixed feelings about this character. Certainly the red is a nice change of pace, and makes the set an impressive parts pack, but they're still largely the type of faceless, monochrome "trooper" build that tends to bore me. I'm much more drawn to the Rey and Chewbacca figures, which strike me as having more personality.

I dunno, the names of the ninja in the early treatment feel maybe a bit too on-the-nose in terms of their elemental affinity. I only just realized this after you pointed it out. I still prefer them. I imagine Ash was rejected due to potential legal disputes with Nintendo over pokemon. I doubt it would be a matter of potential legal disputes, since Ash on its own (without a last name) is a generic enough name that it couldn't really be protected by trademark. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if the name got rejected due to kids already associating it with a character from another franchise, since that kind of thing could have made it harder for Ninjago to grow in popularity. Side note, Ninjago did end up eventually using the name Ash for the Master of Smoke in the Tournament of Elements (who finally got released as a minifigure this year)!

I'd say this is true to an extent of CCBS, but it's certainly got a way more comprehensive selection of CCBS parts than any of the third-party building software I've used. I also wouldn't say the Technic selection is extraordinarily limited. From what I've seen, most parts used in modern Technic sets are there. There's room for further expansion across all categories, though.

Very nice work!

LEGO did have some sets in alternate-sized boxes when they were transitioning to smaller boxes a few years back, but that was in 2013, well after Von Nebula would've been retired. But the box in that listing does look authentic. Your guess is as good as mine.

I don't think hating Lepin but liking custom parts like BrickArms is at all hypocritical, since generally brands like BrickForge and BrickArms usually don't steal/copy existing LEGO parts, characters, brands, etc. Now, when people hate on Mega Bloks and are perfectly fine with other non-LEGO parts, that gets a bit murkier. People who do hold those opinions usually justify it to themselves because BrickArms isn't trying to position themselves as a direct competitor to LEGO, but whether that argument holds water is up to you. Anyway, BrickLink already allows sellers to list customized parts like official bricks that had been custom painted or chromed, custom sticker sheets, and even entirely custom parts from companies like BrickArms and BrickWarriors. However, actually cataloguing custom parts is an entirely new step, and I do think there are some things about that which merit a bit of skepticism. Wouldn't actually cataloguing bricks from certain customizers unfairly favor those customizers over others? I'm not sure I like the direction that would lead, with custom brick startups having to curry special favor with the BrickLink admins to get their products on a level playing field with other, potentially bigger customizers.

Great to hear the reasoning behind the changes straight from the source. Personally, I don't feel like the changes are too jarring. Olivia still has wavy brown hair and light brown eyes, Mia and Emma still have the same skin color, hair color, and hairstyle as ever, Andrea still has brown skin and hair in tight curls, and Stephanie has barely changed at all. All in all, the changes are hardly any more severe than when they cast a new actor to play a classic character like Batman or Spider-Man, and a lot LESS severe than when they cast a new James Bond or a new Doctor.

My favorite is the Mask of Water. The Unity Mask of Jungle is also pretty awesome.

Still in sets! In this year's sets, the Batman BrickHead and Fenrir in The Ultimate Battle for Asgard have glow-in-the-dark eyes, Battle of Atlantis has glow-in-the-dark studs as what I guess is meant to be some type of bioluminescent sea life, and The Witch Hut has a glow-in-the-dark piece of glowstone in a treasure chest.

Yeah. I think the explanation given was that, since Universal still holds the licennse for Bionicle on DVD, they figured they might as well make use of it one last time. It really is quite an illustration of how irrelevant Bionicle has become. Remember the hype for Mask of Light's release? I was told it was massive, and basically unprecedented for a Lego product. Now there's not even enough money in the budget to give a DVD a proper back cover. I feel like this says about as much about the waning relevance of DVDs as about the waning relevance of Bionicle. Some Netflix shows don't even seem to get DVDs. Like, Voltron: Legendary Defender is in its fourth season and still has an active toyline, yet I don't think it's had any DVD releases. The way people enjoy home entertainment is increasingly shifting away from physical media and towards digital downloads and streaming. Even as a die-hard Ninjago fan, I've basically stopped buying Ninjago seasons on DVD, since the first five seasons are available in high definition via Netflix and it's probably only a matter of time before the two most recent seasons and the "Day of the Departed" special get added as well.

I saw a good post on Tumblr once pointing out that if you go back to the source material, Aragorn and the Dúnedain should really be portrayed as North African. Gondor in general also has a number of Egyptian-inspired characteristics. While of course there's no reason a new Middle Earth adaptation needs to be beholden to the source material, Tolkien's descriptions certainly leave much more room for more racial diversity than Peter Jackson's adaptation did.

LEGO has definitely moved towards having more moral ambiguity in a lot of their most story-driven themes like Ninjago, Legends of Chima, and Elves. In these themes, there have been plenty of instances of enemies becoming allies and so forth, not to mention instances of ghosts, snakes, and robots who are good guys or regular humans who are bad guys. Also Elves, like Power Miners before it, goes out of its way to show that the goblins are not evil so much as silly and mischievous, at least outside the corrupting influence of the Goblin King's magic (the Goblin King himself being a fairly attractive elf, much like the protagonists). That said, I can understand why in themes that are lighter on story (like most Space, Pirates, and Castle themes) LEGO might be more inclined to separate its good guys and bad guys according to appearance. Even in a story-driven theme, you often can't count on kids already knowing the story when they buy the sets, and they'll want to have a strong sense of who's on each side and what they're fighting over. In a less story-driven theme there's even fewer opportunities to make it clear that a character with the same creepy or monstrous design characteristics as the bad guys is actually on the side of the good guys. If LEGO ever made a Space theme with a Star Trek level of storytelling, then I would be more confident in their ability to work more morally ambiguous characters and more complex messages into that theme.

To some extent, LEGO Space was action/conflict oriented from the very beginning. LEGO wasn't allowed to be open about it for a long time, but the designers weren't naive about how kids would play with the sets. As Jens Nygaard Knudsen (the lead designer of the Classic Space sets and inventor of the minifigure) explained in an interview back in 2009: "We were not allowed to make weapons, and the aerials and other elements that pointed forwards on the spaceships looked too aggressive. Instead we added a lot of radar dishes and sensor probes, but to us they were really guns!" The LEGO Group's upper management was in those years still staunchly conservative about what type of content they considered kid-appropriate — Godtfred Kirk Christiansen even threatened to fire designer Niels Milan Pedersen for having the audacity to stick a rudimentary minifigure skeleton in a Castle set prototype as a joke! Luckily, by the time he dared to try again and design the minifigure skeleton we know today, those attitudes had softened, and Neils is still working at LEGO designing new molds to this day. Back on the subject of LEGO Space, the original white and red classic spacemen were originally envisioned as rival factions analogous to American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, although as other colors were introduced this idea was more or less abandoned. The Blacktron sets in 1987, on the other hand, were expressly designed as a "bad guy" faction to oppose the Futuron "good guys". And of course, by the time Pirates rolled around in 1989, LEGO was fully prepared to depict bad guy vs. good guy conflicts in sets, even to the point of arming them with everything from swords to guns to actual firing cannons. Personally, I feel like the modern LEGO approach of being honest and accepting about kids' natural affinity for good guy vs. bad guy play and storytelling is a big step up from outwardly condemning it while still obliquely designing sets with that type of play in mind.

Good review. It still amazes me how great Nexo Knights is at making its castles feel livable in one way or another. It shouldn't be so amazing, but frankly LEGO Castle or Kingdoms sets in the past have focused almost myopically on battle scenarios and action play. At most, inside the castle, you might get a throne room, treasury, and armory, but rarely any place for characters to eat or sleep or do much of anything besides preparing for the next battle. In a theme like Elves that plays up the dollhouse aspects of its castles, it's maybe not so surprising to see more focus on castles as a place people call home, but if a theme as full of over-the-top action as Nexo Knights can include things like beds or a dining table, traditional castle sets really have no excuse. Structurally, this castle is really fun and exciting. I love the idea of the central tower becoming a spaceship (something people speculated about since we first saw a non-brick-built image of Knighton Castle on last year's box art). When pics of this set first emerged, I did have some misgivings of it using the existing half-octagon tower battlement piece, rather than brick-building the battlements on its towers like the Fortrex did. But it doesn't look bad, and makes up for this slight reduction in detail in other parts of the build like the neon battlements that line the walls. The angular design language of Nexo Knights is also on full display, including a pattern on the main gate that somewhat resembles the shape of a Nexo Power. As characters go, I really like the idea of Merlok gaining some mobility with a robot body, and it really conveys the robot wizard look quite well. I was not really at any point expecting to see Hamletta in a set, and it's especially nice that they went so far to recolor and reprint the pig element instead of just using a generic pig. Getting King Halbert in his blue regalia is another nice surprise. After getting Queen Halbert's peacetime outfit and King Halbert's battle outfit last year, it's nice that this year's sets have given each of them their other clothing option. More squirebots are also always fun! The monsters in this set are not bad. In general I feel like we've been seeing stronger monster designs in the summer wave than in the first half of the year. They're really exploring the breadth of possibility of Monstrux being able to turn anything made of stone (columns, walls, bricks, statues, and even entire towers) into a monster servant! The Stone Stompers don't interest me as much as last year's lava monsters, but I like that this set at least has the versions of them with headgear, cracked lightning details, and/or armor instead of the ones that just look like pale, naked statues. I do think this set could've stood to have more female characters besides Hamletta and the female statue. It wouldn't have been hard to put Macy in this set instead of (or in addition to) one of the other knights. And it's a bit of a bummer that the only set this year to actually include Ava, Jestro's Headquarters, has her as a damsel in distress. Overall, I haven't been as drawn to this year's Nexo Knights sets as to Ninjago or Elves, but this set is still definitely on my wish list and I'm hoping to pick it up on clearance. One nitpick about the review… I understand that you didn't want to use the stickers, but it would have been nice if you'd at least shared a photo of the sticker sheet so people can get a better sense of what kind of details would have been added if you had applied them. If they really affected your enjoyment of the set enough for you to list them as a con, then why not mention them earlier in the review instead of just as an afterthought? I haven't had any time to watch the full video, but skipping around a bit I'm not sure if you showed or mentioned them much there either.

Well, besides those there's City, Friends, Creator, Technic, Architecture, etc… but of those, Friends is the only one that's particularly story-driven. And then there are some other themes that aren't a constant presence, but that are frequently re-imagined (sometimes in story-driven forms, sometimes less so), such as Castle, Pirates, and Space. But overall, the tendency is for most new themes (even a lot of licensed ones!) to be more of a "flash in the pan" with a one to three year lifespan.

You sort of have a point with Facebook, but loads of kids use Netflix. Bionicle: The Journey to One is just one of many kid-targeted exclusive series they've developed, and they also stream lots of kid-targeted TV shows originally developed for TV. According to this article, 71% of kids ages 6 to 8 and 76% of kids ages 9 to 12 use Netflix.

I don't really think any of these things was meant to replace Bionicle G2, to be honest. Keep in mind that Bionicle G2's ending was somewhat abrupt (the decision was made when The Journey to One was already in development), whereas most of these themes you mention are either already ongoing themes or themes that have been in the works for years. LEGO didn't just suddenly realize that they wanted to create new content for these other themes. Also, I don't see how ending Bionicle and focusing on other themes instead in any way implies LEGO has their priorities wrong. You keep mentioning in topic after topic about "the downfall of themes" as if it's a bad thing for themes to end, but outside of extraordinary circumstances, most themes are only supposed to last a little while before they end. It's not like themes that only last a few waves are a recent phenomenon. You can't keep treating every theme that doesn't last 5+ years or get a fully developed and carefully resolved story as if it's some kind of failure, because long-running themes with fully developed stories have never been the norm.

We actually have two pieces of quantitative evidence that Ninjago may be more popular than Bionicle was. For one thing, Ninjago's sales in 2011 were stronger than ANY previous theme's first-year sales — including Bionicle's. Furthermore, according to Google Trends, monthly search interest over the past three years has been as high or higher than search interest for Bionicle was at any point past January 2004 — search interest last month specifically was more than twice as high as Bionicle's has been as long as Google's been tracking this kind of data. That doesn't, of course, mean Ninjago is an inherently more appealing theme. There are a lot of non-theme-specific factors that have changed since Bionicle G1's heyday… more kids use the internet on a regular basis, LEGO is a much bigger company with a presence in many more countries, etc. But I think you're selling Ninjago's popularity short. Regardless of the reasons, there's little doubt that it's reaching more kids and families than Bionicle generally has. And regardless of the LEGO Ninjago Movie not meeting expectations, there's still no reason to think that waiting 20 years for the kids who love a franchise to grow up would be a better strategy than just making a movie while the franchise is still popular. If nothing else, the presence of a movie NOW will get it enough exposure that it'll have a better chance of LASTING twenty years. The original Transformers animated movie in 1986 was not commercially successful in terms of its box office returns, but it was still an iconic piece of Transformers media that helped further popularize the brand. The fact that it existed and stuck in people's memory helped keep the brand going to a point where the much more commercially successful live-action Transformers movies even got a chance to happen. The LEGO Ninjago Movie has been substantially more successful, netting about 70% more box office revenue than its budget. By LEGO Movie standards that's not a huge profit, but it's not a loss by any stretch of the imagination. It is very likely that the LEGO Ninjago Movie will help boost the popularity of the Ninjago sets and TV series going forward, which I have no doubt is a big part of why LEGO chose to make it in the first place.