Presto

I honestly don't know what Universal plans on getting out of Lego Movies in the next 5 years. LM2 and the Ninjago Movie did not leave me optimistic about the viability of big-budget lego films. If I had to guess, they likely are hoping to produce licensed theme movies like a Lego Batman sequel.

Looks cool! I dig the amount of individuality you brought to each character and the variations of the masks. My only criticism would be that the clear piece on the back of the head sticks out a bit far, but that's more just personal taste.

As far as essential characters I would add the 2006 Titans (at least Vezon and Brutaka).
Turaga Dume is also a fairly important figure I'd be remissed to leave out.
1 Toa Hagah and 1 Rahagah would be illustrative of Metru Nui's prime and it's eventual corruption.

 I also like Sahmad's story as an epilogue but he obviously isn't vital to the main story. 
 

13 hours ago, Xboxtravis said:

So yeah licensed themes are pretty dominant right now, but I really can't say they have detracted much from the number of original themes Lego normally does. Yes looking back as a whole its easy to think of "wow look at all the original stuff Lego used to do!" if we start clumping different eras together, I know Knights Kingdom II, Throwbots & Roboriders, Western, Life on Mars, Alpha Team, Exo Force, Pirates, Power Miners & Rock Raiders, Galidor and of course Bionicle all come quickly to my mind... but I have to pause and realize those themes all released over a span of 8-9 years or so. 

You have a point there. It's easy for me to just clump together my childhood themes but if we just take one year from my childhood, I see that the variety of original sets we got was not unlike what we get today.

In 2002 we got sets from:

• Alpha Team
• Bionicle
• Belleville
• Creator/Creator Expert
• Galidor
• Island Xtreme Stunts
• Jack Stone
• Racers
• Sports
• Spybotics
• Studios
• Technic
• Town

Along with a few re-releases of:

• Western
• Castle
• Pirates

The licensed themes at the time:

• Star Wars
• Harry Potter
• Spider-Man (sub-theme of Studios)
• Bob the Builder (Duplo)

We also are getting parts for Spike

The licensed themes for this year:

• Star Wars
• Harry Potter
• Marvel Superheroes
• DC Superheroes
• Disney
• Super Mario
• Minecraft
• Minions
• Speed Champions
• Trolls

13 hours ago, Xboxtravis said:

Not only that... but some of them *cough* Galidor, Jack Stone *cough* were absolute turkeys. 

You say that, but as someone who was 5 in 2002, Galidor and Jack Stone were some of my favorite themes at the time . However, if you remove those unsuccessful ventures, you get about the same number of original themes, so I see the point that although there are now more licensed themes, there aren't fewer original ones. I would also agree that Ideas has essentially filled the gap that rereleases left, especially with that latest pirates set.

I think my reaction just came from the volume of licensed sets and just assumed that they were replacing original themes as opposed to the apparent reality that they are merely adding to the variety. I guess I hadn't factored in just how much bigger Lego is now.

I'm sure this is well-tread ground but I really don't care for the now long-running era of Lego in which licensed themes rule supreme. As a kid who grew up with Bionicle, Alpha Team, Rock Raiders/ Power Miners, Lego Island, Knights Kingdom, and even Galidor, it kinda bums me out that Ninjago and Hidden Side are the only non-city islands in the sea of licensed themes with defined characters and settings. I'm probably just being a boomer but I resent Lego now primarily being a producer of merchandise for movies and video games. 
I don't fault Lego for this, this is certainly more profitable than their own in-house themes of old and they have responsibilities to their employees and whatnot. I think I just don't like the grim reality that most people view a product as more valuable if it is connected to a pre-existing pop culture property.

I would pull an Avatar: The Last Airbender and omit rock and ice, and instead have  the 4 core elements that have more variation among them:

• Fire
  • Magma
  • Iron/Artifice/Steam
• Air
  • Sky
  • Plant-life
• Water
  • Lakes
  • Sea
  • Ice
• Earth
  • Rock
  • Desert

Outside of those core 4 I'd have all others like light, dark, psionics, gravity, poison, etc. be one-off for titans. I have nostalgia for the sets of 6 from classic bonk, but ice and rock always seemed like arbitrary additions to the classical elements.

5 hours ago, Xboxtravis said:

But it does raise a question, if Metru Nui had the same exact population how the heck do you have a metropolis city with just 6000 people? At approximately 828 square miles, Metru Nui is a 7.26 population density per square mile; which is still rural Wyoming type population sizes... I guess we could assume that large swaths of Metru Nui were industries and factories which filled up the city, but its still hard to believe a city that large runs off a population smaller than most rural cities... again why I can't help but wonder if Metru Nui had more Matoran in it than the Toa Metru could rescue. 

Yea, that never sat well with me. An appropriate population for an island of small is far less than is appropriate for a major city. It would've made more sense to me if most of the population was put in stasis in matoran spheres and left behind while only a small few bubbled up to Mata Nui.

I saw this the other day. Wild how many of the lore eggs went into the Legend of Mata Nui basket. Bionicle's success truly was a miracle.

On 4/14/2020 at 5:32 PM, Lenny7092 said:

7. Takanuva being a Toa Nuva by having the same armor shape. 
9. The Bahrag being biological mothers for the Bohrok. 
14. Toa Lhikan being a Toa of Light. 
15. The Piraka using their elemental powers by themselves rather than depending on one another. 
17. Keetongu being a person. 
19. Vezon still working for the Piraka. 
21. The Av-Matoran in 2008 being from different types of Matoran because of their colors. 
25. The Great Spirit Mata Nui being Teridax’s identical twin brother, but as a god and have light and creation powers. 
26. When people in the Matoran Universe called their world “the Matoran Universe”, I thought they meant the whole outer space universe. It was actually a world within Mata Nui’s giant body. 
27. Takutanuva awakening Mata Nui by opening a gate. 
34. The Glatorian and Agori having elemental powers because of their tribes being associated with the elemental powers. 
36. Every villain up to 2007 were working for Makuta. 

Yea, I thought these as a kid too, don't worry. I think we both got rigid conceptions of how the Bionicle world worked during the golden years and then got confused as kids when things deviated.

I'm sure there have been plenty of threads like this in the past but I just wanted to talk about how I got a lot of things wrong about Bionicle as a kid, which I largely blame on the movies. I also missed much of the lore because I was not a well-read kid.

My childhood misconceptions

• Matoran = children, Toa = adults, Turaga = elderly (in a literal temporal sense)
• Turaga are weaker than Matoran (old person stereotyping)
• Metru Nui had a larger population than Mata Nui (I just assumed the city had a bigger pop. than the island and not everyone made it)
• Takua being is just a weird-looking Ta-Matoran
• Bohrok Va can directly throw Krana onto toa

Apologies that I was the sort of dumb-dumb smooth-brained child that caused people to say Bionicle lore was too complicated for kids.

The Barraki annihilated by brain as a kid. Even the Inika kept the series in domain of terrestrial robots but the Barraki came and were all sea-dwelling and looking fairly organic with their teeth and tentacles. They were notably scarier than anything before. Sure, the Piraka were a bit menacing of Pridak's bloody-looking maw was a new level.

30 minutes ago, Master Inika said:

Was this the program that kept showing G2 footage while talking about G1? That's what really bothered me.

Yuuuuupppp

32 minutes ago, Master Inika said:

Still, there is something vindicating about the outside world acknowledging LEGO.

Yea, it's actually kinda odd how the long-standing #1 toy brand gets very little media attention, so it is kinda hype when it's there.

On 3/20/2020 at 2:36 AM, Chronicler06 said:

I would like to see Lego introduce a theme I'd like to call "Throwback", which would take concepts and styles from older themes and have them built with more recent parts and building techniques. A good example of how that would work is something like how Benny's Spaceship from the Lego Movie theme was clearly meant to resemble the Classic Space sets, but is obviously a much more sophisticated build thanks to the wider range of available parts in recent years. Just try to imagine some of your favorite sets from the 80s and 90s, and put a modern twist on them. This would allow today's kids to have a chance to have sets that are similar to what their parents might have gotten back when they were kids.

I feel like this would be a great way of clearing out a lot of Lego Ideas requests that boil down to "Make another set from my childhood favorite theme pretty please". 

I'm not confident Bionicle will come back before at least 2025, as I don't think the property would be as valuable as it could be until the original fans (people around 7 in 2001) are old enough to have kids in the proper age demo and as such could buy Bionicle as a nostalgia product to share with their kids. This is going off the launch of Transformers and the 2007 Michael Bay movie. If they do that, my bet is it'll be a constraction line based on Bionicle 2001.

On 3/12/2020 at 9:34 PM, The Shadow Imperator said:

All sets from 2008-2010 were affected by the brittle socket redesign. Now as to whether that new design tended to break as quickly as the dreaded lime joints, I don't know.

That just about killed Bionicle for me. I could not justify buying something that I was certain would break at some point. It was bizarrely low-quality for Lego

I quite disliked "The Toys That Made Us". Its editing and fact-checking was sub-youtube in a lot of parts and for the most part it served as yet another nostalgia party for Gen X'ers who have all of modern pop culture to tell them how special and iconic their childhood toys are. As such, I was unsurprised when they used random gen 2 footage throughout their Bionicle sections as well as implied that Bionicle strayed to far from the brick and as such with the theme of the episode, was a misstep. 

Perhaps I'm projecting but I felt an undertone of "Bionicle was popular but it wasn't real Lego like we(the target demo of Gen X'ers) grew up with". 

9 hours ago, Master Inika said:

Am I the only one who likes the elements being gender-specific?

I don't have strong feelings on it one way or another, though I do think it is a shame that because this is all based on a toyline aimed at a male demographic, the main toa teams always have the 5:6 m/f ratio. I suspect fewer would take issue if 1 or 2 more of the main elements were female-specific,

2 hours ago, Xboxtravis said:

Elemental affiliation is probably a bigger identity in their mind than gender would be;

This is an interesting concept I had not considered. I find this all fascinating because designs and character names (stuff made for the toys) were made to be gendered and sexually dimorphic in order  to be more visually relatable and familiar to human child customers, while the lore explores what the matoran are and the implications of their existence (i.e., they cannot love).

49 minutes ago, TakadoxMusic said:

However, Matorans' gender may actually determine psychological/personality differences between them. If we look at Orde's BS01 article, it says the Great Beings changed all Psionics Matoran to female after his bad temper proved dangerous "as the Great Beings believed females were more gentle than males."

So pretty explicitly, the gender expression of matoran, in theory, reflect the values of the Great Beings and Agori culture.
 

The one already at 10k is the only one I see as viable, and as a pessimist I see even that as a longshot as just about any bonk tribute would get overshadowed by a more mass-market property like Flintstones or Friends.

It's fascinating finding all of the slizer DNA in Bionicle. It certainly makes sense, but these images really make the evolution seem much more gradual than I had thought.

I second this question. I'm also curious about the nature of the gender identity and expression of Matoran, as they lack sex due to not having any sexual reproduction. It is odd to me that love is not canon due to a lack of biological sex while gender is so strictly explicit and segregated. Would a non-Ga matoran identifying as female be considered trans?