“At the end of the day, there was never going to be a good final combination model as long as the Stars were our last sets.”– @Eljay Eljay’s Remixed Review: BIONICLE 2010
Good grief, it has almost been a year. Anyways, back when Eljay reviewed Gaardus, he made the statement above and I decided to take that as a challenge. Not in attempts to build a better combo model that used all six, I agree with Eljay that might be the best that could be done. But I could not believe that no good, or at least decent, combo models could be created just using the Bionicle Stars sets.
Now, I do own all the Stars, got them all back in 2010. But I didn’t want to risk breaking those, so I eventually bought duplicates for this purpose. I honestly don’t remember why it has taken me almost a year to get all the parts, but here I finally am.
For this project, I decided to split the sets into three combos. Gresh and Skrall, Tahu and Piraka, and Takanuva and Rahkshi. In part due to each villain set having the necessary pins to connect torsos and I had an idea for how the Gresh and Skrall combo might work. Since I already had those two paired, figured I might as well pair the others up with their respective hero and villain.
Gresh + Skrall = Armed Tortoise?
For this combo, the first thing that came to mind was that I could use Gresh’s blades to sort of make a turtle shell. And I figured Skrall’s blades could also help with that, maybe his helmet or sword could be the tail. While the ending result is not quite what I had imagine, it’s sort of there?
Articulation isn’t great, but the legs can move around okay. The tail can only bend to dig into the ground and the head can’t move further up. It can look down and move side to side, but that’s it.
As a second goal, I was also trying to use all the pieces with each combination. But that didn’t quite happen and our turtle friend here ended up with these three extra parts.
Tahu + Piraka = Oni Monster?
I had no direction or idea of where I wanted to go with this one. I ended up deciding that Nektann’s face should be the head and when messing around with the Av-Matoran head block, I thought it kind of looked like a tribal monster. Most of the part selection from there was kind of random, but still trying to go for that sort of tribal monster look.
Aside from the more-or-less standard Av-Matoran articulation, he can’t look down. Maybe I should have used the other blade piece as another sword, but I thought the chin blade was funnier. Like the previous combo, I ended up with three extra parts.
Takanuva + Rahkshi = Gladiator? Drummer? Something I guess.
Like with Tahu+Piraka, I have no idea what I wanted to do with this combo. The only direction I decided to go with was to try and make a different torso configuration in comparison to the prior two. The hardest thing to decide was the fate of the Rahkshi spine/head, as it’s a large and awkward piece for a combo. I thought about making it into a weapon or perhaps the combo’s head, but none of that was working out. Eventually it sort of became this creature pelt that the guy is wearing.
I did try to use the axels in other ways, but found them to be too long for anything worthwhile. So I guess they’re just drummer sticks. The rest was mostly just to use up as many parts as I could.
Articulation is again, pretty much standard Av-Matoran, it just mostly exists. This combo was my most successful attempt at using up parts, having only two extras.
You probably noticed that among each build, the gold parts remained out. And in pretty much every instance, I could have randomly stuck it on somewhere. But no matter what, those two random gold pieces would have disrupted whatever color scheme I had to work with. Plus just making it look worse overall in general, so left out they were.
So, what did you think of them? Are they all nightmares or do you think some are cute? Which is the worst? Which is your favorite? Did I just end up proving Eljay even more right? Please let me know all that and more.
And if you’re curious, yes, you’re free to use these models for whatever purpose you desire. I can’t imagine what that would be, but have it.