Random set of the day: Tahnok
Posted by Huwbot,
Today's random set is 8563 Tahnok, released in 2002. It's one of 28 Bionicle sets produced that year. It contains 41 pieces, and its retail price was US$8/£4.99.
It's owned by 3614 Brickset members. If you want to add it to your collection you might find it for sale at BrickLink or eBay.
Help me come to life! If you like the set I've chosen for you today, please pledge your support for me on LEGO Ideas so I have a chance of becoming an official LEGO set!
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24 comments on this article
CHIKT CHIKT CHIKT
All these random sets of the days with wheels have culminated into a thing that can become a wheel. Love it.
A Bionicle set, for the second last random set of 2020. If tomorrow's set isn't a Clikits, there's just no justice in the world.
Ahhh, the Tahnok. It's Blacktron potential is nowhere near that of the Nuhvok.
My first memory of this set was NOT buying it, but buying 7201 instead. I was a very sad 10-year old boy later that day, as i had the chance to buy it at I think Toys R Us, but went to Walmart to see if it was cheaper. It wasn't there, and my mom didn't want to drive back to Toys R Us (or I told her I didn't want to) so I picked up 7201. When at home in bed, I definitely remember crying, thinking how dumb I was.
Fast forward 18 years, I have owned over a dozen Tahnoks, sold about 8 on Bricklink, and would take a 7201 over a Tahnok any day of the week ending in Y.
Still Have my original Tahnok. still my only regular blue Ja Krana, got multiples of every other of the 7 blue ones.
I think I saw one of my friend’s senior pictures in a pose like this.
He thought he was so cool.
I still don't have his swarm's Krana Xa :(
When BIONICLE "finished" in 2001, the first major tease (to me, at least) that something BIG was on the way next year was the back cover of BIONICLE comic 3 . A slime-covered ball, just barely exposing the curled arms and legs of the Tahnok, burst out of a cocoon. The text beneath the image was ominous: "The truth will HATCH!" Months later, I realized that, if held at the right angle, one could make out the word "BOHROK" in the murky background. But in November 2001, that image was enough to get my hyped for what was on the way in 2002.
Naturally, being the red fire Bohrok, Tahnok took center stage of the marketing for the swarms. Images of a squad of Tahnok, chikt-chikt-chikting their way out the BIONICLE set pages, were teased in the Holiday 2001 catalog that winter. And in January 2002, fans were formally introduced to the Bohrok swarms in comic 4 , part one (of six!!!) in "The Bohrok Saga". I won't summarize the comic, but it features the recently-victorious Toa facing down an invasion of the fire village, Ta-Koro, by multiple swarms of Bohrok (Tahnok not among them). They barely prevailed over these foes, only to learn from Turaga Vakama more about their true nature and the quest the Toa would have to undertake in order to defeat the swarms.
In that comic, we were introduced to each of the Bohrok breeds and their powers, including fiery Tahnok, which naturally commanded the power of fire like Toa Tahu. Naturally aggressive and brash, they swarmed into Po-Wahi, driving the Po-Matoran from their homes and melting down the cliffs and canyons. In Le-Wahi, they burned the jungles to ash, and with the powers granted them by their living Krana, the Tahnok took on defined roles in their squads. Powers from the Krana also mimicked certain Kanohi mask powers as well, making even one Bohrok a formidable foe for a lone Toa.
With all this new information, I was Bohrok-crazy in January 2002, and conversely, really wanted a Tahnok to be my first Bohrok, just like Tahu had been my first Toa a year earlier. The only problem was that I a rather bountiful Christmas in 2001, snagging the largest Rahi sets as presents or with cash gifted to me on that holiday. That left very little leftover for the Bohrok, which sadly were not due for wide release until February 2002! But that wasn't my only conundrum; 2002 was also a Star Wars movie release year, and I was all-too aware of an upcoming wave of Attack of the Clones Lego sets for April. The Jedi Starfighter in particular had caught my eye, having featured in a starwars.com webisode about the making of Episode II back in the Spring of 2001 (remember when Lucasfilm didn't give a damn about hiding every little thing about upcoming films??). It had an "early preview" release in March 2002, and the last of my Christmas monies went to that set. It was (and still is) an awesome set, one of the best of the year, but it delayed my Tahnok. At that point, of course, Bohrok were plentiful on Wal-Mart shelves in my town, and I could only look at them wistfully as the school year wound down.
It was thanks to school, however, that my Tahnok found its way into my hands! In early April 2002, I found myself returning the state-level geography bee (hosted by National Geographic) in Arlington, TX. Like in 2001, I finished in the top ten in the state. However, this time, I went all the way to second place, and with that achievement came several prizes, including $75 in cold, hard cash. Bingo.
Back home, the next time I was in Wal-Mart, I went right for the LEGO aisle and searched through a few Tahnok canisters until I found one with a Krana Xa (my favorite of the Krana designs) and bought it. I built it excitedly at home. It was the end of the age of my infrequent forays on the Internet, so I had read no reviews about the Bohrok yet. Building it was sheer joy of discovery in the new parts, seeing how they came together to make the head snap forward or launch the Krana out of the brain pan. [...
Back when I was running MoD, there was no Ambassador Network, no was there a ton of support for fan sites like there is now. Still, on a few occasions they would reach out and ask for a mailing address to send stuff. About a week later you’d actually find out what “stuff” was, since they never stated it in advance. One “stuff” was a giant poster of this guy, made to look like a movie poster you’d see hanging on a cinema wall. It wasn’t a normal poster, though. It was printed in something that looked like paper but felt more like plastic. Mine had a dirt smudge in one corner, and I got a corner of paper towel wet to clean it off...which is when I discovered that the ink was water-soluble. *sigh* I actually liked that poster better than the cardboard Tahu standee, but Tahu was a tiny bit less vulnerable to water.
@ElephantKnight :
I turned down a free copy of 7201 at New York Toy Fair because I “already had that set”, and I didn’t really collect multiple copies of sets at that time, nor was I really building System MOCs in those days. I think that’s the only time I’ve declined free LEGO bricks. Certainly the only time I can remember passing on a free set, especially from a theme I was trying to stay complete in.
@Your_Future_President:
Back in those days, that _was_ cool. Then again, I remember one year in high school, three of the seniors put “Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice as their favorite song. It was pretty much out of rotation and banished from the charts by the time the yearbooks were printed. I learned from their mistake and picked a classic when it was my turn: Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones (I was involved with the tech side of theatre in those days). Between the four of us, I suspect only one of us still cranks the volume when his “favorite song” comes on the radio...
[continued from my previous post]... Even more exciting was seeing how the Tahnok could be folded into that ball and hung from inside the canister during storage. Creepy and clever! I was over the moon, and wasted no time in introducing the menacing little guy to my Toa team to battle. I think my only dissatisfaction came from seeing how the face plate was not patterned at all like the designs seen on the CG image of Tahnok on the canister label and in the instructions. A small chagrin, though.
One final bonus: a mini-comic book included with the set summarized the coming of the Bohrok to the island of Mata Nui. But in the final pages, nestled among ads for other LEGO and Technic sets, was a teaser image, a silhouette of a large, bipedal mechanical construct with what looked like Toa Tahu inside it! The only text was, "Summer 2002: [Exo] www.bionicle.com/exo". An exo-suit for my Toa figures??? My 13 year-old mind was blown, and it was off the races again, getting hyped and excited for what BIONICLE was bringing next.
@MCLegoboy:
I preferred to make them into Christmas ornaments...
@Atuin:
I’ve got the only known complete set of all released and unreleased Krana. In addition to full sets of all Bohrok, Bohrok Va, and Bohrok Kal Krana (48 each, for a total of 144), there was a very noticeably different shade of purple for Gahlok Va (full set of 8) that could be obtained normally. Mark also found me a full set of the chromed plastic and _unchromed_ plastic blanks (old light-grey). Lastly, I was given two of the White Metal and one Sterling Silver Krana at NYTF (Mark got one of the WMKK as thanks for all the help with the chromed/unchromed plastic Krana, and the Euro misprint masks, so he might have only been short the SSKK himself). Yes, you read that right. I gave away a WMKK at a time when a lot of kids would have given up their whole collection for one. But, to be fair, I was only offered one for myself. I asked if I could take a second one to send to Mark, and they were cool with that. So it was really his from the start.
I came from the school of "Bionicle isn't even proper Lego" but eventually came around. These guys were very clever. You could suspend them from the insides of their canisters like a cacoon, and the ability to transform was very clever.
I didn't grew up in the early 2000's like most people here, but that doesn't stop me from appreciating how clever the Bohrok are as sets. The functions are amazing, and very fun to play around with. Press a nob, and the neck goes forward, launch the kraata to attack the Toa, plenty of posibility, and the ability to fold them as balls (kind of like the Destroyer Droids from the Star Wars prequals). All those functions working perfectly into a small, compact set. Brilliant!
Reading the comments on these Bionicle RSotDs is STILL a weird experience after all these years.
These sets provoke in me a similar reaction to something like Belville: "Yikes, what IS that...?" but reading what people have to say about them (and with such depth & passion) is like stumbling into a comments section on a website for an entirely different hobby which I can't comprehend in the slightest.
I hope that helps explain, in a small way, why some people don't think of Bionicle as LEGO.
I recently found this set fully intact in my giant bin of childhood Lego
Oh hey, my first Bohrok!
I will admit, at the time, I never intended to get ANY Bohrok. I had absolutely loved the Toa of the year before, but after a whole year spent on a Bionicle high, I was starting to wind down by 2002. Like Lego_Lord_Mayorca, I saw that first promo image of the Bohrok - though in my case, in the back of the November/December Lego World Club magazine, because we had a different comic release schedule over here - but in contrast? It really didn't excite me because I couldn't tell what the heck it was supposed to be!
However, by the time early 2002 rolled around, the only Toa who I was missing was Lewa; and naturally, I was eager to complete my team, even if I didn't have my eye on anything else Bionicle at the time. In the local Woolworths, however, I found that the canister sets were on a Buy-One-Get-One-Half-Price offer... and I mean, NATURALLY, that was too good to pass up when I was planning to buy one of them anyway! I couldn't tell you why I picked Tahnok as my first Bohrok; but for whatever reason, I did, and I walked away happy with both him and Lewa.
(Mine had a Krana Bo, for anyone wondering!)
Still, 2002 was a bit of an 'off'-year for me, as far as Bionicle went. Comic 3 (4 in the US, but in the UK we had got comics 2 and 3 shortened and mashed together into a single issue, making the first Bohrok comic number 3 for us) appealed to me, and I loved the Toa's new gold masks in particular; but here in the UK, we didn't get the rest of the year's comics, so my enthusiasm quickly dwindled. We instead got five-page snippets of comics 5, 7, 8 and 9 printed in the Lego World Club magazine, barely enough to get the full story from; it was only with 2003's comic 10 that we started getting the full comics on the side again - which, naturally, was when my Bionicle interest kicked back into full gear. And while there were web animations, I didn't discover those until well into the following year, so I had no real frame of reference for 2002's story at all. In fact, until the Bara Magna arc, 2002 was the year in which I bought the absolute least number of Bionicle sets: Lewa, Tahnok, one krana pack, the Boxor and Kopaka Nuva - and that was all for the year.
Of course, I'm sure some of that can also be attributed to Attack of the Clones-mania as well... I was still a newbie little Star Wars fan at the time, AotC was to be the first Star Wars movie that I saw in the cinema brand-new, and it was a VERY BIG DEAL for me! I admit that a lot of my pocket-money that year probably went into Hasbro's Star Wars line rather than Lego's, because it was the cheaper way to get more of the characters quickly...
This was also my first Bohrok. Unfortunately, it's developed cracks in the ball joint sockets. Some of my Toa Mata have also had cracked sockets.
Owning a Boxor vehicle was one of the most important Bionicle things to happen to me, simply on account of the Bohrok.
There are few evil swarms in any form of media that have had the same impact as the Bohrok swarms.
@bananaworld said:
"
Reading the comments on these Bionicle RSotDs is STILL a weird experience after all these years.
These sets provoke in me a similar reaction to something like Belville: "Yikes, what IS that...?" but reading what people have to say about them (and with such depth & passion) is like stumbling into a comments section on a website for an entirely different hobby which I can't comprehend in the slightest.
I hope that helps explain, in a small way, why some people don't think of Bionicle as LEGO."
May I ask... why exactly do you have that reaction? What's so weird about Bionicle, that casual LEGO fans just can't get into? That's one of things I never understood about the general LEGO community.
The Bohrok are a good example of one great toy design cloned 12 times to many into becoming obnoxiously repetitive...
Who am I kidding, I own 6 Bohrok, 4 Bohrok Kal and I still want the other two Kal and to Bricklink a "Fohrok." The play functions on these figures are still a blast, they can roll into a ball, launch their Krana at enemies, or they had a lunging Technic four bar linkage function to give them a neck attack. Very well designed, if repetitive
@bananaworld:
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I get it. I’ve actually understood it for the last 20 years, to be honest. Unlike most of the people who wax nostalgic, I was an adult when the first sets hit, and joined a LUG soon afterwards. At the first (maybe second?) meeting I attended, the subject came up, and of course some of the existing members were discussing how Bionicle wasn't even compatible with System parts, when one of them realized “the Bionicle guy” was standing there and belatedly, and somewhat half heartedly, asked me to chime in. My response was to point to my brand-new Bionicle Scout Trooper that was mounted on a Technic/System speederbike from RotJ (a build which, I might add, took me just 24 hours to complete, part of which was just racing to the store the next morning to buy another Geonosian Starfighter to get a couple brown triple wedge bricks for the cowling on the speederbike). That kinda shut down that particular conversation, but I got griefed for years over the fact that I didn’t hate the theme like most of the other members.
It was a weird shift, though. System begat Technic, and the earlier sets clearly showed their DNA because they were built with Technic _bricks_. Modern Technic was a similar shift to beams and liftarms, but again you could see the Technic heritage carry over, so it wasn’t as big a transition as going straight from System to modern Technic would have been. But both generations of Technic focused on mechanical systems. I mean, Bionicle did too, early on, but not as much as it did in character building and organic design. For those, it beat the pants off System, but had almost nothing to do with making giant cranes.
So, System builders didn’t understand it at all, and Technic builders didn’t care about the new possibilities it presented. Of course it was going to get a rough reception. Kids who hadn’t developed a restrictive mindset went crazy for it while the System themes largely took a nosedive, and a few experienced builders with a flair for the weird saw some outside-the-box possibilities. But even to this day, I run into people who dismiss the theme, until they see some of the things that other builders or I have done with them. Sometimes the reaction is conflicted, where they see a Bionicle MOC (or several) that really they’re really impressed by, but they can’t give up their dismissive attitudes. It’s, “Oh, yeah, that looks really cool, but in general the theme completely sucked.” I try not to take it personally, since most of my experience with this sort of thing is at public events where I’m showing off several of my own Bionicle MOCs.
@xboxtravis7992:
What the heck is a Fohrok?
@LegoDavid said:
" @bananaworld said:
"
Reading the comments on these Bionicle RSotDs is STILL a weird experience after all these years.
These sets provoke in me a similar reaction to something like Belville: "Yikes, what IS that...?" but reading what people have to say about them (and with such depth & passion) is like stumbling into a comments section on a website for an entirely different hobby which I can't comprehend in the slightest.
I hope that helps explain, in a small way, why some people don't think of Bionicle as LEGO."
May I ask... why exactly do you have that reaction? What's so weird about Bionicle, that casual LEGO fans just can't get into? That's one of things I never understood about the general LEGO community. "
Spit-balling here as someone who is obviously a Bionicle fan as already established... I think the visual language of a lot of constraction sets are different enough from normal Lego it puts off some Lego fans. No studs, no smooth bricks, and instead ball joints and psuedo piston details. I think CCBS tried to bridge the gap, but by moving constraction to smooth shells while it brought it one step closer to normal Lego it was a step away from the piston detailing that Slizer and Bionicle both embraced. Yes early Bionicle was derived from Technic, but especially in the smaller canister sets the overly specialized Bionicle pieces were still detached enough from what Technic has that I can see many people viewing it as separate from that system. Yes Bionicle is a great system for building figures in, but because its not normal Lego its hard for non-Bionicle fans to see how they can use the parts to create things with without spending catchup time to learn how the unique constraction world works.
Then of course we have Bionicle's obscenely large lore and story plots. As somebody who has been here since 2001 playing MNOG, I get the appeal of Bionicle's story; but I can see why it rings as nonsense and convoluted for outsiders. Its hard to make a compelling elevator pitch of what makes Bionicle so engaging, without spoiling the key plot elements and even then it is lore heavy enough you can easily trip up a newcomer with the Hau's and the Akaku's and how they differ from a Huna... and that is just year one of the story.
If it makes you feel any better, I feel the same with Ninjago since I never gave its story the same dive I gave into Bionicle. I was 7 years old when Bionicle launched, and 17 when Ninjago launched. One was a theme that captivated me as a child, the other hardly registered on my radar because I had a drivers license and school and other teenage stuff. I can tell you the names of some of the main Ninjago characters (Lloyd, Garmadon, Wu, etc.) and even a few bits of their backstories (I know Garmadon is Lloyd's father, Zane is a robot)... but I can't tell you the name of every snake villain and every random sidequest the ninjas went on because I never invested in the lore the same way I did with Bionicle. I know the difference between Roodaka and Gorast, but I can't tell you squat about Ninjago beyond the same six characters the line has had for ten years that I have sort of learned about via osmosis of being in the Lego fandom for that time and hearing their names mentioned enough.
So I imagine that Bionicle has the same barrier for entry that I have when it comes to Ninjago, I am not fully invested in Ninjago because 1) I was to old for it when it launched, 2) my interaction with it is only in Lego fan circles and the occasional set purchase for "oh I guess this is neat" and 3) the long list of Ninjago TV episodes now seems like an impossible barrier for entry to the lore, just like how I think a lot of non-Bionicle fans feel when we tell them they can catch up by reading 20+ novels, four movies, 1 tv series set in an alternate universe for G2, and a 9 year long comic series that DC published.
@PurpleDave
The Fohrok are (ahem, pushes up nerd glasses) seen in a 2005 comic where Toa Irnui and Toa Norik face off against the army of the Brotherhood of Makuta. Seeing the potential of Bohrok as foot soldiers, Makuta commissioned the Nynrah Ghosts to build robotic Krana-less Bohrok knockoffs that the fandom has called "Fohrok." These Fohrok were in blue and orange armor, differentiated from the colors of the real Bohrok swarm. The two Toa Hagah defeated all of Makuta's Fohrok during the battle and they were never seen in use again.
See what I mean about the lore being hard to get into? :P Kudos to those who understand that.
Yeah, I kind of get it, too. On the one hand, to me what defines something as being Lego is whether it's made by The Lego Company, no matter how outlandish it appears, so to me there's no question of not being "real Lego"; but on the other, I can also completely see why it would lack appeal to the casual viewer.
Even as a kid who embraced the Toa wholeheartedly when they first came out, subsequent Bionicle waves have, at times, hit me hard with the "WHAT THE HECK is that I don't like it because it doesn't fit my preconceived notions of Bionicle" - the Rahkshi were the most obvious case of this, but I think I felt it a bit with the Barraki at first too - and only warmed up to them when I gave them a chance. If even I, a dedicated Bionicle fan, felt that way a few times, I can only imagine how much more your average Lego fan must feel it towards the theme as a whole!
On a weird tangent, I almost kinda miss that feeling now...
@xboxtravis7992 said:
"just like how I think a lot of non-Bionicle fans feel when we tell them they can catch up by reading 20+ novels, four movies, 1 tv series set in an alternate universe for G2, and a 9 year long comic series that DC published."
Not to mention at least one online game in addition to all that! Can't be fully caught up on Bionicle lore without including MNOG in the deal as well xD
@ThatBionicleGuy I have been thinking very hard recently about what Flash emulator I am going to ultimately install to keep playing MNOG past well... tomorrow. That game is brilliant. Actually if there is one place to enter the franchise at, its MNOG if you are willing to dive into the technical sorcery required to keep Flash games running past December 31, 2020....
Also the "what the heck is that" reaction I had to the Barraki is what killed my stream of buying G1 sets from 2001-2007. They were really an alien set wave compared to what was normally part of the line up. I much like them better in retrospect now though.
Brilliant discussion here. Say what you will about Bionicle, love it or hate it, no other theme has spurred such depth in the comments of RSOTD (at least as far back as I've been a regular here)