Featured set of the day: Tahu
Posted by Huw,
Today's selection has been made by Lego_Lord_Mayorca:
It had been a dark time. My sixth grade year was halfway over and I was already ready for the entire school year to be done. As I went into the holidays for December 2000, I looked towards Christmas to bring some measure of reliable joy: LEGO!
However, in that realm, things were not well, either. Although one can argue with my individual opinion about how lacklustre LEGO's offerings in the year 2000 were, it is a fact that the company itself was in trouble. The “Star Wars” line from 1999 was a smashing success, but in the long run, it had only put a bandage on the bullet wound that was LEGO's finances. It was a dark time for the company, too.
Thankfully, for us both, help was on the way.
My first hint that something special was headed my way was the small catalogue included in one of the “Life on Mars” sets I got before Christmas Eve. Being a set from a theme slated for a January 2001 debut, the catalogue featured many of the other sets and themes that would be released that year.
Towards the end, in the Technic section, I found something curious, something that seemed both similar and yet, totally new, compared to the Roboriders and Throwbots of the years prior. It was simply presented as “BIONICLE”, and six...characters...were the sets shown. I write “characters” because my twelve year-old mind wasn’t quite sure what to make of them. They looked sort of like the humanoid Throwbots of 1999, but they were in far more dynamic poses and environments than those sets.
On my initial glance, I couldn’t find a single piece that looked like a Lego brick or Technic piece. They had bizarre names like “Kopaka” and “Pohatu”. And there was something about their “faces” that haunted me.
Over the next month, even after going back to school, I still kept looking at those two pages in the catalog. I stared intently, and slowly, I determined there were some familiar parts, leftovers from the Throwbots. But everything else was still so brand new!
Outwardly, I probably expressed no desire in obtaining any of these BIONICLE sets. But like Roboriders and Throwbots before them, the curiosity bug had bitten me, and when the March edition of the Lego MANIA magazine featured a “BIONICLE Fire Kit” that contained 8534 Tahu, the Toa of Fire and 8540 Vakama, leader of the Village of Fire, plus a mini CD-ROM for the low price of $9.99, it was too intriguing to pass up! Using a bit of my leftover Christmas money, I managed to convince my dad to order the kit for me.
When the box arrived two weeks later, I was simply not prepared for the contents! Opening the box to find a plastic canister reminded me of the Roborider canisters, but that’s about where the similarity stopped. The canister had a revolving label, held on by friction to the outside surface.
The image of Tahu that I was almost bored with now was on it, but also curious images that, as I spun the label, told a strange story of another canister on a beach, pieces scattering upon it, and a robotic figure assembling itself to form (presumably) Tahu himself. On the lid was an ornate carving of a robotic face. More curious now than ever, I carefully ripped off the seals taping the lid to the canister and took a look inside.
Out came pieces like I had never seen, plus an instruction manual and the mini CD-ROM. As interesting as the CD-ROM was, I put it aside for the time being to get cracking on assembling the set.
It was simple, but I took my time as I wondered over each piece. Now that I had them in my hands, I could admire all the details that adorned the new limbs, head, feet, and torso. While sadly none of the limbs bent like they did on the slick, CG artwork, the lines of pistons, hard angles, and fluid, fiery lines on the sword and mask spoke to me less of machine and more of a living work of art.
Of course, I wasn’t quite thinking all that as I snapped Tahu together. By the time I put his mask on his face, however, I knew I had something even more special than I had previously imagined. As I held up the completed model to admire it, the sunlight coming through my bedroom windows caught the translucent pink “brain” of the set, and suddenly, Tahu’s eyes lit up, as if the set itself awakened to proclaim, “I have arrived”. Captivated, I spun the gear on his back that swung his fire sword-wielding arm, and I felt that sense of fun that even a twelve year-old kid could still feel with a cool toy.
Tahu firmly in hand, I rushed outside to find my dad, working in the yard. I must have seemed quite silly to him, running up to him and breathlessly mouthing off about how “realistic” Tahu looked, and how he was far beyond my expectations for a Lego action figure. I implored him to check out the “glowing eyes”, but my dad just didn’t feel the same magic that was taking me over. Already on the fence about my Lego obsession at my age, he was also of the old school that saw Lego purely as bricks and plates, not weird fire swords, masks, or pre-formed robotic limbs. He wasn’t dismissive, but the gentle threat of yardwork now that I was done building Tahu was enough to send me scurrying back inside. Besides, I still had to build Vakama and inspect that CD-ROM!
Vakama was a smaller build and less interesting because he didn’t have any new pieces now, aside from the mask and fire staff. But the CD-ROM’s contents could merit another article! It was from that disk that I learned what BIONICLE really was and how Tahu and all those other characters fit into it. By the end of the day, I was hooked.
When BIONICLE was officially launched in July 2001 in the USA, exhorting consumers to “Find the Power!” I didn’t have to because I already found it. Tahu was the beginning of my BIONICLE fandom and probably what saved me from losing total interest in LEGO altogether; my first step into an extraordinary fictional world just as I was about to take my own first steps into the brave new world of adolescence.
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31 comments on this article
I remember many were of the opinion back then that Bionicle wasn't even"proper Lego." I include myself in that group... but I have long since stood corrected and learned to appreciate the line.
Someone should hire this guy - great write-up, @Lego_Lord_Mayorca !
Nice to see a relatively newer set that I can relate with more (albeit still before my time).
Excellent article I must say. I only got into all things LEGO in my 40s but this article makes me wish that I was immersed in LEGO for this Bionicle range way back then. Well done.
I never had any of these, but I had a CD from a cereal box(?) with some videos.
The story of this line was fascinating and I didn't experience such storytelling from LEGO.
I lost the contact with Bionicle in later years, so I don't know what haopened to the characters. :(
Wow, I was not expecting that rush of nostalgia this Thursday afternoon. It truly was a magical time!
Great article, @Lego_Lord_Mayorca !
Tahu was my first Bionicle as well. I wonder if we should do a poll of how many people went for the red guy first, that’s why they kept being the leaders right?
^ Tahu and Kopaka were my first ones. Also had Lewa and the green/blue ones (forget the other name and what color was which). Never had a full collection or anything.
After 2000 , my dark age started.
I did have most of the Slizers/Throwbots, but never got into Bionicle beside 1 small set I got as a gift. (8852 Lehvak Va)
Man, Bionicle was a weird thing for Lego to do. Barely connected to its most popular products, bogged down in a hilariously convoluted story... back in the day it was something I was pretty obsessed with, and in spite of (or maybe because of) its quirks I'm very glad it exists. If memory serves I got Tahu a few months before Tahu Nuva arrived one Christmas, as an accompaniment to the epic Exo-Toa.
At the same time, I'm glad the reboot didn't stick around for long. It fell very quickly into repeating some of Bionicle's worst sins (like pointlessly rereleasing the same characters) and while there were some great sets a lot of the later products just seemed garish and poorly designed.
That said, I do appreciate how they worked in some of the mechanical functionality into the new characters. The Toa Metru were always my favourite characters in Bionicle, and I think that's because they struck a nice balance between poseability and conventional Technic mechanisms. We also got Norik and Iruni in the same mould, and they were beautiful models to own back in the day.
Bionicle is the sort of thing that'd never get off the ground now (which isn't a bad thing, per se) but I'll always be glad this is the era of Lego I grew up with.
TLG must have been doing something very wrong for a theme like Bionicle so far removed from standard LEGO sets and themes to be considered their 'saving grace'. Or maybe it was out of desperation, throwing something at the wall that would 'stick' with consumers amidst all the other not-so-successful experiments at this time in their history, and they just got lucky with Bionicle.
@darkstonegrey said:
"TLG must have been doing something very wrong for a theme like Bionicle so far removed from standard LEGO sets and themes to be considered their 'saving grace'. Or maybe it was out of desperation, throwing something at the wall that would 'stick' with consumers amidst all the other not-so-successful experiments at this time in their history, and they just got lucky with Bionicle."
As Kopaka said in BIONICLE: Mask of Light, "Not luck. It's what you DO that makes you a hero." As cliche and cheesy as that is, I think it applies here. A lot of Bionicle's success came from its marketing and development teams making effective strategic decisions at a time that other parts of the LEGO brand were making costly and reckless mistakes.
The book "Brick by Brick" has an entire chapter about what made Bionicle so successful at a time that so many other themes were failing, and about the lessons LEGO learned from it that they continue to apply when developing new themes to this day. It's definitely well worth a read if you want some clearer insight into how LEGO got themselves into such a dire situation, and what it took for them to recover from it!
Anyway, great article! I feel like my first experiences with Bionicle were pretty similar — I was a little bewildered by those earliest teasers, but after taking a chance on that "Bionicle Fire Kit", I was totally hooked. I was ten years old at the time, and some of my major interests were mythology and robots. The Bionicle sets and story brought those interests together in a way I'd never seen before!
These days, it's harder to say in hindsight that Bionicle remains my all-time favorite theme — other themes since then like Ninjago and Elves have retained a lot of that magic while also demonstrating their own strengths at stuff Bionicle sometimes struggled more with, like maintaining a consistent cast of characters, giving those characters plenty of individual opportunities for their skills and personalities to shine, and exploring those characters' familial or romantic relationships — not just their friiendships or rivalries.
But regardless, Bionicle still easily stands out as the most influential LEGO theme of my childhood. I don't think any other theme from the 90s or early 2000s comes anywhere close to awakening such strong feelings of nostalgia in me!
As someone who loved the Throwbots and the Robo Racers, there was something about Bionicle that just didn't quite grab me. The magic just skipped me completely. It felt very cash-grabby (the same characters endlessly re-released. I haven't bought a police or fire City set for about 15 years for the same reason), and I just didn't get it. You know, what appealed to me about the Throwbots was that they *were* so radically-different. I liked that about them, but Bionicle didn't do anything for me at all.
Onua was my first. Still probably my all-time favorite. I'll never forget opening that canister for the first time and seeing his claw pieces. Plus, it was the only OG bionicle that I got that came with the CD-ROM, for whatever reason.
Finally, a quality set!
Bionicle might seem weird if you try to figure out what Lego was trying to do, but they had been trying that action figure market for a while. As mentioned, the Throwbots were probably a big enough hit for them to try something more branded. And they were definitely experimenting with some technic pieces too.
The Throwbots will stay in my heart as the pioneers and the best series, although my brother and I did delve into Bionicle a bit (mostly him, due to how I had the Throwbots). I only ended up getting Onua, but I could tell they had a nice product in their hand there. We got ourselves a few... Borocks? too later, but otherwise didn't delve deeper in the Bionicle madness. Too many of their products looked too similar, and as others have pointed out, re-releasing the same characters again and again got a bit tiring.
In my Lego world, Tahu was a coward and a poser who could be relied upon to run away from every fight as fast as he possibly could, except when he didn't. He was more of a super-powered fire-breathing C-3PO than a bold and courageous leader, and in imitation of Takanuva he rode a speeder bike called the "Guppanui" that was powered by his waily-waily cries of fright. But no matter how incompetent and stupid Tahu was when the chips were down, he always won because the bad guys were even less capable. Darth Vader, for instance, would make the mistake of marching out with his laser sword to take on the whole Toa team by himself, which meant Tahu could just step on him with that big Bionicle foot. Makuta himself was revealed to be a shady film-maker minifigure without any superpowers (more like Oz the Great and Terrible than like Mysterio), so Tahu could sit on him and that was curtains for Makuta. Ogel couldn't get his act together either. In the end, the only threat that good old doofus-goofus brainless Tahu couldn't beat back with bluster and a blast of flame from his fire sword was my teen age.
^This gave me a good laugh.
@Robot99 said:
"Someone should hire this guy - great write-up, @Lego_Lord_Mayorca !"
Heh, funny you mention that... although this article is obviously for fun and I plan to write more (as much as Huw will accept, at any rate), it would be a dream to find a job as a writer! Thanks for that compliment!
And thank you to everyone else who enjoyed this! My first instinct was to write about some of my childhood stories revolving around Lego sets of the early-to-mid 90s, but this one was more recent and thus easier to recall. Tahu was my gateway to BIONICLE, but Onua was the Toa set I wanted most after getting Tahu. Then, with the release of the first BIONICLE comic book in May 2001, Kopaka became my favorite Toa. Still is, really.
This is an interesting look at Bionicle from a child's perspective - I must admit that I've never understood the appeal of this theme and why it has such prominent fanbase, apart from sheer nostalgia from having grown up with them. One thing is the odd non-system parts, another is how the large scale didn't permit building much more than the characters themselves - no buildings, no vehicles and no locations. Due to how their entire world was missing from the actual sets it seems to have relied heavily on secondary media (TV shows, games and CD-roms) to convey their story and magic, without this essential background material the sets themselves just looked like some rather generic robots.
I never got the Toa Mata when they originally came out, but I still managed to get them all from the secondary market a year or so ago. And I got the exact same enjoyment out of them as everyone else here who got when when they originally came out.
@Yooha said:
"I never had any of these, but I had a CD from a cereal box(?) with some videos.
The story of this line was fascinating and I didn't experience such storytelling from LEGO.
I lost the contact with Bionicle in later years, so I don't know what haopened to the characters. :("
BioMediaProject.com has an archive of all the comics and online serial stories. I didn't start following BIONICLE until near the end, I really enjoyed reading all the older comics on that site.
After reading this, I’m now thinking mine was too short....
They should've moved forwards with an ongoing comic series even after the toys ended. It's the kind of fictional universe that has the potential to grow, mature, rebuild, just like Transformers has done, or even now Power Rangers (the BOOM Studios comics are great).
Tahu is still probably my favorite set, and the one by which I measured all subsequent waves...although he could use a little more Evil in his design...
I really preferred the parts they designed for this wave, and one of the things that I found rather sad is how quickly new shapes would be retired, never to be seen again, and forever locked into just a handful of colors. When I started making IP-based MOCs, it made building certain characters a lot more challenging (I basically gave up on making C-3PO, especially since I'd already locked in the body design for 4-LOM).
@darkstonegrey:
Well, it released concurrently with Jack Stone, so yes. Yes, they were doing something very wrong at the time. Very, incredibly wrong. Even now, when I see the newer sets with the "4+" branding, I'm constantly reminded of the "4 Juniors" rebranding that Jack Stone got in what was equivalent to trying to right the ship that Jack Sparrow sails into port at the start of the first PotC movie, but comparing the two lines you can see direct evidence of some of the lessons that Aanchir hints at. Gone are the Jack Stone megafigs, and while the 4+ sets feature a lot of bulky parts, those parts are clearly designed to be universal elements rather than designed to produce a pre-built model like they had with Jack Stone.
So much of that first experience you describe is utterly relatable; the way you describe discovering the characters and the new pieces and all was almost EXACTLY the same for me when I first saw the double-page spread on the Toa in Lego World Club magazine and built the first of them - Onua, in my case.
I'd honestly forgotten; but your description of that experience is so evocative, it takes me back all those years, reminding me of exactly what it was like to fall in love with this toy line for the first time. Very well-written article - and thank-you so much for that amazing blast of nostalgia! :D
@axeleng: Truth be told, as a Bionicle fan, I DID often feel a certain amount of frustration that Bionicle was never all that conducive to sets or MOCs representing the world the characters inhabited.
LEGO tried to address this by introducing more traditional System-based Bionicle playsets from 2005 to 2007 (https://brickset.com/sets/theme-Bionicle/subtheme-Playsets) but they largely lacked the charm of earlier Bionicle location designs, with a heavy emphasis on battle scenes.
That said, the lack of scenery in most Bionicle sets hardly detracted from the fun of playing and building with them. The builds were sturdy enough that you could play with them amidst REAL natural scenery if you so chose, and even in a more typical indoor setting, it was usually easy enough for imagination to flesh out whatever worlds you wanted to tell your stories in.
Meanwhile, a major creative strength of Bionicle and other "action figure themes" was their potential for building original character and creature designs. Nowadays, there are a lot more useful System elements like ball and socket joints, curved slopes, and such than there were a decade or two ago. But in the early 2000s, this was an area Bionicle uniquely excelled at.
Not only did Bionicle provide the raw materials for building posable characters and creatures with mechanical functions that helped bring them to life, it also provided a fictional context that those creations could believably inhabit, even if they looked too mechanical to resemble "real world" people or animals.
By comparison, Bionicle's forerunners like Slizer/Throwbots and Roboriders loosely suggested environments for each set/character to inhabit, but never really explored them enough to hint at the characters being part of a complex society, or their environments being habitats for other sorts of mechanical creatures.
Over time, the experience of creating Bionicle MOCs served to translate my childhood interest in robots into a lasting passion for creating large-scale characters and creatures in a more general sense. I still love building models like that, even in totally different styles or with totally different sorts of parts — but I never would've gotten so proficient at it if it hadn't been for that experience as a Bionicle fan!
Well reading this article I was filled with a lot of nostalgia. I actually have a rough draft of Lewa (my first Bionicle set) that I started toying around with to submit for this new Featured set of the Day... but this article summed up my thoughts a lot better than I could have.
2001 was a dark year in the history books in a lot of regards, especially as a seven year old child who started having nightmares about Bin Laden and Co. blowing up his school and killing his parents; so I latched on hard to the fantasy escapist world of Bionicle. I never was able to explain to my parents what the appeal was, but they kept buying them for me since they knew I liked it. I stopped getting Bionicle sets in 2007 after a few Barraki figures. I thought I was to "grown up" and the line was going in a direction that seemed foreign to the old tropical paradise journey of the years past.
I never had a Lego dark age, I have got Lego sets nonstop since 2000. But I had a 'Bionicle Dark Age' from 2007-2015. Bionicle was mostly just a nice thing I had fun with as a kid, a few neat action figures I could pose and think nostalgically about; but not really anything else. I never touched Hero Factory at all. I left the country for two years, and surprise surprise to enter a Lego Store in 2015 only to find the Bionicle G2 reboot sets on the shelves. I bought Tahu Master of Fire that day... and well the nostalgia was strong and I started collecting Bionicle again. It paused a little bit after G2 ended, but once more I have been sucked back into Bionicle and the world of chasing down Kanohi masks on Bricklink and digging for bulk pieces and spare sets in used Lego stores...
I don't want to admit how much I paid recently just to finally get a Trans-Neon-Orange Kaukau and a White Noble Matatu...
All the little piston and gear decals of BIONICLE figures and the way their eyes glowed in the light has always fascinated me to this day. While I love the fact that CCBS doesn't break at the sockets nearly as easily, I miss all that carved in texture that made the figures feel truly robotic.
This is nearly word for word the exact experience I had. It's like you reached into my memory and typed it out. Simply wonderful to hear someone else describe these same events from childhood. Bring a tear to my eye. 10/10
@iwybs: I love it when people create their own stories and play scenarios for established toy characters. It's weird because I'm not really into reading fanfics...
We must be Bionicle Brothers or something-- because my story/discovery of Bionicle played out EXACTLY the same way! Same age, collected Throwbots, the same mini catalog reveal, same Fire Kit purchase, the names and masks hooked me. The only thing I also did was log onto www.bionicle.com to see what it was all about. Jumping into MNOG at my grandmother's house (my folks didn't have "high-speed" internet yet!) in january of 2001 was one of the greatest memories of my early teen years.