Aanchir

I think Shakar was referring to a downgrade in terms of size, physique, and armaments. Obviously everybody's going to have their own opinions about which version of the Toa is best, just as they did in G1, but in the very least the 2016 Toa seem to be around the same height and around as heavily armed as they were in 2015. 2016 Lewa's legs are just half a module shorter than they were this year. So depending on whether his torso is the same length as before, he might not even lose any height at all. What bothers me the most so far is how much less burly the new Onua is than this year's. He just feels generic compared to this year's version. Maybe more finalized pics will have a better pose for him, though.

Seems to me that the style in this preview image might have been exactly what this look test might have been building towards. It's got a similar sense of being a high-detail, set-like character but with improved articulation, in front of a backdrop resembling the current webisodes. If they DO go with that style for the Netflix series, I hope they develop it further to make the characters' masks/faces more expressive and their movements less wooden. Aside from that, though, I can see it working out. There wouldn't need to be so much focus on developing it for small screens as in the previous webisodes, so this level of detail could be more viable.

Actually, LEGO Legends of Chima was done by M2Film, not WilFilm. M2Film also does the LEGO City CGI shorts and a lot of LEGO TV commercials. More details. It's actually a LEGO Bionicle series and a LEGO Friends series.

The "logo" is probably nothing more than a placeholder image. Same with "lego bionicle" being all lowercase in the title. I have a feeling this wasn't intended to be revealed this soon.

In the case of cartoons like LEGO Friends, LEGO Ninjago, and LEGO Legends of Chima, the reason they can't have everything authentic to the LEGO sets is to avoid running afoul of British advertising laws, as explained in this interview. As for the video games, it's a sort of visual shorthand: generally, things that you can interact with in some fashion are built out of bricks, while things you can't interact with like landscapes are made of "real" materials. Really, it isn't too unlike the way LEGO packaging tends to show sets in painted environments rather than LEGO environments so you can tell what's a part of the set and what's just scenery. The LEGO Movie video game was an exception, in order to fit the aesthetic of the movie.

Well, story-wise, the four original elemental dragons from 2011 merged into the Ultra Dragon from 2012. It'd be nice if the Ultra Dragon were referenced again in the story, as I honestly can't remember what happened to it after the season two finale (maybe it returned to the Spirit Coves?), but I don't entirely mind the newer, smaller dragons taking its place. As a collector, the LEGO Ninjago dragons were some of the "must-haves" when I first started collecting in 2011. I quite liked the molded dragon heads, which felt very lifelike and had simple eyes similar to minifigure eyes, which is just how I prefer them. The combination of angular molded heads and angular brick-built bodies seemed like a nice happy medium between entirely molded dragons like we see in the LEGO Castle theme and entirely brick-built dragons like in the LEGO Creator theme. However, I think LEGO has done an AMAZING job with the brick-built dragon heads in this year's sets! The Titanium Dragon, Morro Dragon, and Master Wu Dragon all have lots of personality and feel very lifelike (or deathlike, I suppose, in the Morro Dragon's case). If you had told me four years ago that Ninjago would be switching to brick-built dragon heads I might have expressed some reservations, but now that I've seen what the LEGO Ninjago designers are capable of, I'm quite looking forward to what future Ninjago dragons have to offer! I have to disagree there. The first season definitely had a lot of great moments, but I feel the series has gotten a lot more sophisticated since Season 3. Seasons 4 and 5 were very continuity-driven. There were some episodes I disliked (like the last couple episodes of season four), but there were lots of others I've really loved.

Finally got around to watching Horse People 3: Sports People today and generally enjoyed it. Probably not as good as Rainbow Rocks (which had more songs, and I think better ones on average). Still, a very good movie! I look forward to getting the Blu-Ray and seeing what scenes got cut in the American broadcast.

Jurassic World was also (seemingly) a one-off theme, and we got a team pack for that. Not saying there will NEVER be other Jurassic World sets... but probably not until the next movie, which is just as much of a possibility if the Angry Birds movie and theme are successful.

Well, I don't know if I'd go as far as to call this a "golden age" of LEGO Pirates. There are a lot of great things about the current sets, the availability of older sets, etc! But many critics of this year's Pirates range make a good point that it is, in many respects, "just the basics". The same thing was observed of the 2013 LEGO Castle range, and to be honest I think it is almost inevitable with any LEGO series that gets just a single wave every few years. The 90s, especially the late 90s, were generally not the best time when it came to the quality of LEGO set designs. I'll readily admit that even as somebody whose childhood was during that period. As much as I love many of the sets back then, their complexity and general building value pales in comparison to many of today's sets! But with that said, the 90s were a great time for the variety of sets. Again, I think that might have been partly out of desperation, since the LEGO Group's sales had already started declining by that point. But another factor was having new sets one year after the other. Because of this, and because back then sets tended to stay in stock longer instead of just retiring after a year and a half, each year's sets had to go out of their way to stand out from those of the previous year, meaning much more variety from year to year. I mentioned in my last post my nostalgia for 6262 King Kahuka's Throne. It and some of the other sets of that era are etched firmly in my memory, in part because my brother and I dressed as an Imperial Guard and King Kahuka, respectively, for Halloween 1994! But slightly niche subthemes like Islanders and Imperial Armada which expanded the world of LEGO Pirates beyond generic imperial forts and pirate ships don't have an opportunity to come about unless those basic elements of the theme are already established. Same goes for other themes like LEGO Castle. While the first wave of LEGO Kingdoms was fairly generic (a good castle, an evil castle, a good outpost/gatehouse, an evil prison carriage), the second year of sets was able to expand the scope of the theme to include a little peasant village. The most recent iteration of LEGO Castle, which only lasted one year, didn't get that opportunity to expand. Unfortunately, judging from the 2016 leaks so far, it doesn't seem like the latest iteration of Pirates will get that opportunity either. Which means that when LEGO Pirates does come back, it might very well have to start off with the basics — a pirate ship, an imperial fort, a treasure island, a raft, a shipwreck — all over again. On the plus side, next year's Ninjago range seems like it'll be pirate-themed, albeit with more of a science-fantasy flavor than a historical flavor. Maybe it'll offer some valuable parts for Pirates fans to expand their crews. One of the drawings that CM4S has shared has what certainly has to be one of the most realistic palm trees I've seen to date, and that's speaking as someone who was a fan of both this year's Technic palm trees and the classic flexible palm trees!

What they already released in the 2005–2006 Vikings line is mostly irrelevant since that was a decade ago, and kids today wouldn't have had an opportunity to find any of those sets on store shelves. If they wanted to stick with the whole mythology-inspired fantasy monsters idea, we'd surely get new sets of Jörmungandr, Fenrir, and some of the iconic dragons, just as we inevitably get a new Tyrannosaurus Rex, new raptors, and a new pterodactyl in any new Dino theme. LEGO also surely has enough useful joint and curved slope pieces out by now that they could probably do a great job making those kinds of creatures more lifelike than they were in the original Vikings theme, where they used an odd blend of System bricks and more specialized Bionicle elements. Just look at the Legend Beasts from LEGO Legends of Chima to see what's possible today even at a small scale. Overall, though, with both Ninjago and Elves maintaining a focus on dragons, I don't know if LEGO would be keen on yet another theme along those lines. Granted, we're talking 2017 or later, so maybe Elves would be less focused on dragons by then. But I can't say the same for Ninjago, which has always had at least one dragon per year and isn't going away any time soon. Of course, LEGO could always prove me wrong and introduce a robo-dragon in the summer wave of Nexo Knights.

If the monkey makes it into the final product, I hope it's an updated design with printed eyes. This year the LEGO crocodile and shark were updated with new designs that featured printed eyes, and I'd be thrilled if the monkey were next in line! I almost always prefer LEGO animals with printed eyes — if LEGO "humans" can have printed eyes, why not animals? Especially when said animal is one of humans' closest genetic relatives!

What astonishes me is that you've been here for this long and only have 55 posts!

It's kind of funny... the LEGO Mania Magazine's Fright Knights issue gave Basil a backstory, but really tried to dance around directly calling him a vampire. I wonder why? Obviously the idea of a witch was not considered too controversial for the LEGO Group's marketing wing at the time, but perhaps vampires were a different story. Here's a link to the issue in question. Bear in mind, LEGO Mania Magazine character bios and backstories could be pretty goofy/cheesy, and this was back before a lot of LEGO marketing was standardized from region to region, so this story might just be what the US marketing department decided on. The UK marketing was much different, up to and including the character names (Hubble Bubble and Count Batlord instead of Willa the Witch and Basil the Bat Lord), but still didn't overtly identify Count Batlord as a vampire.

I honestly don't know the specific reason. What I can tell you is that LEGO was not doing well financially in the late 90s and early naughts. LEGO was a bit worried at that point that a lot of kids considered LEGO too "old-fashioned", so during that time there was a lot of experimentation with less traditional themes (Adventurers, Ninja, Wild West, Rock Raiders, etc) and a bit less focus on the traditional themes like Pirates, Space, and Castle. The book Brick by Brick by David C. Robertson talks a lot about the LEGO Group's decline and recovery during this period and I really recommend it to anybody who's interested in learning more about this period of LEGO history. After the LEGO Star Wars theme launched that helped mask the LEGO Group's financial desperation for a couple years, but then in 2003 when there were no new movies for any of the LEGO Group's major licensed themes, they nearly went bankrupt. Only the success of the Bionicle theme that year kept them in business. That's about when they decided they needed a new CEO (Jorgen Vig Knudstorp) and a new brand direction, and when they invested in anthropological research to figure out what exactly it was kids wanted from toys instead of just making their decisions based on "conventional wisdom". It's also worth noting that pirate genre in general really began to fall out of favor during the late 90s. This is often blamed on the massive failure of the movie Cutthroat Island in 1995 which made other companies reluctant to invest in pirate-related media until Disney launched the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise in 2003. It's a lot easier for LEGO to market a theme if it's already "trendy" by pop culture standards... there's not so much pressure on LEGO to convince kids pirates are cool if a bunch of other companies are trying to market pirate-related stories and products as well! This is even true of current themes. Part of the reason LEGO developed the Ninjago theme when they did was that they saw an uptick in ninja-related toys and media aimed at kids. Conversely, it's part of why there haven't been non-licensed Western LEGO products in so many years, since very little Western media these days is aimed at kids.

I'm a 24 year old adult who had a great time playing with 70144 Laval's Fire Lion, and when I was 14/15 I was a big fan of Exo-Force, another cartoony theme with a similar building level. You're right that the building process is a factor in the age recommendations. Notably, themes like LEGO Legends of Chima and LEGO Ninjago tend to integrate a lot more LEGO Technic than themes like LEGO Castle or LEGO Pirates. Some of the functions in these sets — like the aforementioned Laval's Fire Lion — tend to be quite elaborate (I reviewed that set here, including a video of the function). Never really took an interest in those kinds of violent video games myself (though I won't pretend my own interests were representative of a typical teenager's), and considering that most of those are rated M in the United States — and lot legal to sell to kids under age 17 — I think it's a mistake to generalize those as a typical 14-year-old's favorite pastime. That said, it's true there are far more 14-year-olds who play these sorts of games than there probably should be. But would teenagers who prefer those games really be any fonder of LEGO Castle than LEGO Legends of Chima? For what it's worth, the LEGO Legends of Chima TV series is rated TV-Y7 (ages 7 and up) in the United States. The storytelling of LEGO Legends of Chima definitely seems to be more childish than that of Ninjago from the few episodes I've seen (though I hear it gets a little bit more sophisticated as the series goes on), but let's be honest here... most LEGO Castle story media like picture books and comic books, even those from many years ago, are childish in their own right. The only reason fewer people associate LEGO Castle with this kind of childish storytelling is that most LEGO Castle themes are not as media-driven to begin with as LEGO Legends of Chima or LEGO Ninjago. When there is LEGO Castle story media, adults can more or less ignore it and still understand the sets' context. But adults seem to have a harder time enjoying a theme like Ninjago or Legends of Chima without being able to enjoy the story behind them. You may have enjoyed 6054 as a 12-year-old, but it was a different world back when that set came out. I think many kids today, growing up in a world of action-packed cartoons and video games, would rather role-play as warriors with intense high-tech vehicles and magical weapons than as Robin Hood and his merry men. Also, nowadays many toys, including LEGO, can boast lots of more exciting action features than more traditional LEGO Castle sets are generally able to offer. Compared to vehicles that transform, shoot missiles, or deploy smaller vehicles (which ties in with the LEGO Technic integration I mentioned earlier), the most common features of LEGO Castle sets (like catapults and walls that can be rearranged or repositioned) are likely to seem a bit more old-fashioned. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying there's no place for more traditional sorts of themes in today's LEGO landscape. In fact, as a dedicated LEGO fan myself, I love seeing LEGO sets that reference these more traditional parts of the brand's heritage. But I think it's a mistake to assume that pre-teens and teenagers are more likely to enjoy the more traditional LEGO themes than the wackier action/adventure themes. After all, a big part of why so many AFOLs enjoy the more traditional themes is because they are the themes that so many of them grew up with, not because they actually have more advanced designs or more sophisticated stories. And in many cases, firing up the imaginations of kids who are "growing out of" the type of LEGO themes their parents grew up with is part of the purpose for these action/adventure themes.

I'm getting really sick of reading nonsensical and poorly-researched complaints like this. Fifteen years ago, LEGO sets were being criticized at length about using large, specialized bricks (what AFOLs generally call "juniorization") instead of smaller bricks. It's part of what made the earliest Star Wars set designs so blocky, inauthentic, and generally lackluster. The LEGO Group's reasoning behind this trend was that they saw lots of kids playing video games instead of playing with LEGO and assumed kids wanted instant gratification — quick, snap-together builds that were not a challenge to assemble and let the kids jump into role-play a lot faster. However, this trend was not successful and was one contributing factor to their near-bankruptcy in 2003. Around 2004, as part of their recovery effort, LEGO started conducting anthropological research on boys to find out what they wanted in a toy. The researchers found that LEGO had read the video game situation all wrong. What boys loved about fast-paced video games, and also about LEGO, wasn't a sense of "instant gratification", it was a sense of mastery, confronting play as a sort of a challenge. This realization, not some desire to manipulate AFOLs, is the reason why LEGO reversed their design trend and started to focus on increasing the level of brick-built detail in sets and decreasing the number of large, specialized pieces that take the fun out of the building process. In other words, LEGO's shift towards smaller pieces is in direct response to what kids and AFOLs alike wanted. And believe it or not, it didn't mean charging more for less LEGO. 6265 Sabre Island is one of the first LEGO Pirates sets from 1989. It cost $15.50 ($30.10 in today's money), contained 96 pieces including 3 minifigures, stood 13 centimeters tall, and weighed .21 kilograms. 6262 King Kahuka's Throne was one of my childhood favorite sets from 1994. It cost $21 ($34.10 in today's money), contained 141 pieces including five minifigures, stood about 12.5 centimeters tall, and weighed .30 kilograms. 70412 Soldier's Fort is a current LEGO Pirates set. It costs $30, contains 234 pieces including five minifigures, stands 15.7 centimeters tall, and weighs .54 kilograms. In other words, not only the number of bricks but also the net weight of those bricks are one and a half to two times higher in a current set than with 20- and 25-year-old sets that cost more after adjusting for inflation. And the set itself is taller, to boot! The only thing it doesn't include that those other sets did is a baseplate, opting instead for a more complex brick-built foundation. I don't see how exactly you think LEGO is cheating or deceiving buyers in this situation. If anything, older sets cheated buyers by giving them less LEGO (by both weight and piece count) for more money than today's sets!

You do realize Legends of Chima and Ninjago are both aimed at older kids than most Castle themes? And that no set larger than a polybag in either theme has been directed towards five-year-olds? A $10 Legends of Chima or Ninjago set like 70123, 70229, or 70500 is typically aimed at ages 6–14 or 7–14. A $10 Castle set like 6918 or 7040 is typically aimed at ages 5–12 or 6–12. A $50 Legends of Chima or Ninjago set like 70144, 70223, or 70735 is typically aimed at ages 8–14. A $50 Castle set like 7947 or 7093 is typically aimed at ages 6–12 or 7–12. A $90 Legends of Chima or Ninjago set like 70145, 70227, or 70725 is typically aimed at ages 8–14 or 9–14. A $100 Castle set like (not counting direct-to-consumer sets like the Medieval Market Village) like 7946 or 7097 is typically aimed at ages 7–12 or 7–14. Now, you want to turn our attention to older (pre-2000) Castle themes? In those cases, yes, the larger sets (generally, sets that would be around $50 and up after adjusting for inflation) were generally aimed at ages 8–12. Even so, Legends of Chima and Ninjago sets priced as low as $40 tend to be aimed at ages 8–14. So aside from 10193 Medieval Market Village and 10223 Kingdoms Joust, both aimed at ages 12 and up, I don't think it can really be argued that LEGO Castle has ever been aimed at a considerably older audience than Legends of Chima or Ninjago.

Whoops, I guess Lyi and I were talking about different pieces. That's 30338 (single-piece trunk), which is what he was referring to. I was talking about 2536 (the classic, segmented trunk). In any case, they both appear to be discontinued.

I mean, it hasn't been in a single set since 2005... I think it's safe to say by now that it's discontinued. I think the English name is Tiger Widow Island. Black Widow Island is the name we got (in German) from Amazon.de.

CGI is not a level of production quality... it's just another type of animation. You can have 2D Flash animation in a style similar to the current Bionicle webisodes with really high production values, just as you can have 2D hand-drawn animation or 3D CGI animation with really low production values. I'd love for future Bionicle animations to keep using the same style but with higher production values (less recycled footage, smoother character movements, etc). A CGI style like the Hero Factory TV episodes could perhaps be acceptable, but overall I think the current style of the webisodes is a lot more expressive

I dislike raised baseplates. Don't get me wrong, I was OK with them back in the 90s, but in hindsight it really stands out how often they seemed to be used to make sets LOOK bigger and more complex without actually making the part of the set you built bigger and more complex. They also take up quite a lot of storage space, and some of the old ones crack easily. The specialized shapes and the number of studs (fewer than non-raised baseplates of the same size) also limit their versatility for original creations. Most of my more unique and original creations I remember making as a kid did not use raised baseplates. I think if any new LEGO castles have an elevated base, it should be brick-built. Yes, this would probably drive up the cost more than a raised baseplate would. But you get more actual building for that money. The Temple of Airjitzu and Battle for Ninjago City show what is possible with a brick-built base. It lets you get much more use of the space underneath the mountain/cliff face, allows more variety in the shape and size of the foundation, and doesn't require so much reliance on stickers or printing to make the foundation's color scheme and texture more interesting. What might be a bigger concern than the cost would be the recommended age range. Battle for Ninjago City is recommended for ages 9–14 and Temple of Airjitzu is recommended for ages 14+. LEGO tends to like to keep the entry level for LEGO Castle at 8 years or lower. But I think with tasteful use of "BURP" elements like 6082, which some LEGO castles use anyway, you could achieve a less complex elevated base that is still more versatile than a raised baseplate would allow. Even Dragon Mountain, a $50 set aimed at ages 6–12, was able to use BURPs to create an interesting base. Imagine what a $100 or $120 castle that didn't have a large, specialized dragon or such a massive siege engine eating up its budget could achieve with similar techniques! As for baseplates in general, I am pretty happy that sets have moved beyond them and started using regular plates. Regular plates are more versatile, and can allow sets to have a more unique footprint instead of trying to get the most out of a square or rectangular space. I really love the modularity of the last two King's Castle sets, which encourages rearranging and expansion. Or the triangular layout of the Temple of Airjitzu, which would leave a lot of space feeling wasted if its base were a complete square or rectangle.

Another great MOC! I'm not so sure about the Bionicle mask on the forehead because its more complex texture is kind of distracting compared to the more geometric textures of the rest of the model. Not sure whether there's anything you could swap it for that would have the same proportions, though.

Bricklink lists it in one previous set, an Explore set from 2002. But the part doesn't appear in the official image, since it's out-of-frame holding up the zip line. The box pic shows it, though!

This reminds me of a little over a year ago when somebody was trying to argue with me that the Turaga Lhikan polybag had more effort put into it than any other "good guy"/"bad guy" figures because color schemes like black and orange or black and white "clash" while a color scheme like gold and red is inherently better. Yes, really.

Quite lovely! It's a great likeness of Swampert! Good posability as well!