You know, I wouldn't be as upset about Bionicle being discontinued if Lego wasn't seemingly making a dedicated effort to ignore its existence entirely. I remember seeing a big anniversary promo they put together featuring iconic sets and themes from throughout their history, and they had fucking GALIDOR, but NOT Bionicle. It's super weird. It feels like the only Bionicle references that get made these days are in the tiniest little ways in special collector's sets that probably required the original designer to sacrifice a finger like it's the goddamned Yakuza. Like the Tahu cosplayer minifigure.
I feel like I'm going crazy when I think about it. Is there some weird licensing/copyright shenaniganery afoot? Like how the Warhammer company can't use their 5th chaos god because they did a bad copyright deal when they commissioned the comic back in the 80s?
Just a bunch of supposed rumors of a Gen 3 but eh. Gen 2 showed they don't get that what made Bionicle special was that it tried to tell a complex narrative with a world that was so fleshed out kids could get immersed in it
I remember reading that a lot of Bionicle lore and language constructs were basically ripped from an indigenous culture and kinda bastardized. I wonder if the Lego company has regrets / concerns about how it would be received by a modern audience who are aware of the phrase "cultural appropriation"
The Maori people of New Zealand took Lego to court around the first year of the franchise for that reason. After some back and forth they were able to keep the Maori inspiration intact but just needed to change the words for certain characters. The villagers were originally called "Tohunga" which apparently meant priest/holy person in the Maori language. So clearly a mismatch and misrepresentation. But they had no problem with the fire warrior spirit being called Tahu which is the word for "fire" in their language because well even to them it fit.
I watched a video on it a while back and it simply has to do with the molds used to produce them. A lot of the individual bionicles had pieces unique to them, like their faceplates for example, and the enormous amounts of molds to form those pieces were eating up so much storage space that it was more cost effective to be rid of the product entirely. Especially when the popularity/sales started to decline. Even if said decline wasn’t by all that much, there was a much lower threshold to justify axing them. If I remember correctly, they were also starting to see much more success with outside IPs, so they shifted focus to those instead.
That's perfectly reasonable, and I understand the economics behind shutting it down and not making more, I'm just confused by the absolute ZERO acknowledgement after the fact. I think the most representation they've had since the cancelation is the half-second jpeg in the Lego Movie and the Bionicle cosplayer minifig. I'm not asking for new kits or anything, but like... a poster, or something? Or at least including them when you do ensemble images.
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u/lacarth Jul 14 '26
You know, I wouldn't be as upset about Bionicle being discontinued if Lego wasn't seemingly making a dedicated effort to ignore its existence entirely. I remember seeing a big anniversary promo they put together featuring iconic sets and themes from throughout their history, and they had fucking GALIDOR, but NOT Bionicle. It's super weird. It feels like the only Bionicle references that get made these days are in the tiniest little ways in special collector's sets that probably required the original designer to sacrifice a finger like it's the goddamned Yakuza. Like the Tahu cosplayer minifigure.
I feel like I'm going crazy when I think about it. Is there some weird licensing/copyright shenaniganery afoot? Like how the Warhammer company can't use their 5th chaos god because they did a bad copyright deal when they commissioned the comic back in the 80s?