What if. . . BIONICLE had two more small sets in 2007?
Crekax
Creature of Mahri Nui!
Like all Brinehka, Crekax is moody and doesn’t like being in brighter waters or far from his normal hunting grounds. Yet he is an excellent helper in attracting and hunting fish for the Matoran! When threatened, he fires spheres of hardened Lightstone from his launcher!
*Includes hardened Lightstone launcher and sphere ammunition!
Padox
Rahi ally of the Matoran!
One of a team of Brinehka, native undersea creatures that serve the Matoran of Mahri Nui, Padox’s job is to scout and provide light in dark sea caves. When threatened, he fires spheres of hardened Lightstone from his launcher!
*Includes hardened Lightstone launcher and sphere ammunition!
Brinehka
The Brinehka species are an anglerfish-like Rahi created by the Makuta using Viruses and Liquid Protodermis. They tend to inhabit deep and dark waters across the Matoran Universe, with a school of them accidentally falling into the Pit. Luckily for them, they possess a natural immunity to the Pit Mutagen.
Using darkness and rock formations to hide, their unusual top fins are able to generate a harder version of Lightstone to attract small prey. Though should their lights attract predators, they can fire this sphere of hardened Lightstone to defend themselves. Known to prey on Lightfish and sometimes eats small rocks.
Brinehka are notoriously known to be moody by the Matoran of Mahri Nui. They don’t much care to work and rather stay in one spot for long periods, waiting for food to come to them. With the correct incentive, they can be convinced to work with Matoran in hunting fish and serving as guides in the dark areas of the Pit. Like the Hydruka, the Matoran tended to give them names to help keep track. At some point Padox received damage to his eye, which a Matoran repaired.
Designer’s Notes:
So yes, this is my entry for @Rons_oc /Ron Folkers’s What If contest. If this isn’t uploaded to Flickr tonight, it will be sometime tomorrow. But yes, I decided to go with a set ‘What if?’ rather than a lore one.
The small sets of Bionicle are always my favorite part of each year, no exception. And 2007 stands out as an oddball, because it is the only year in Bionicle that doesn’t have six sets…Unless we count 2016, since that only have five because one of the Elemental Creatures was packaged in with a Toa and that’s more a cheat…Anyways, so yeah, small sets, 2007 only has four of them.
Depending on how you define things, it’s also the only year where the small sets are also mixed. It’s not all Matoran, all Rahaga, all Agori, or all Creatures, it’s a mix of Matoran and Rahi. You could argue that the Light/Shadow Matoran of 2008 and Agori of 2009 have as much variety from a visual or build standpoint as 2007, it’s still an odd mix in comparison. Which made figuring out that a missing pair of small sets would have looked like in 2007 an interesting challenge. Do you just make more Mahri Nui Matoran, maybe one more Matoran and another Hydruka, or something else?
Of course, the first thing I did was look at and study the original sets. Air, Stone, Fire, and Water were already taken, leaving the Earth and Ice to be built. Why where the black and white sets not among the small ones? It couldn’t have been due to their colors selling poorly, because the following year gave us Solek. Though looking at the Playsets, it might be due to the number of creatures with black and white color schemes this year that Lego decided small sets with those colors would be redundant.
Looking at the other sets, we do have Fire and Water Matoran with Karzahni. Where they originally part of the small wave and moved into the titan set? And then the critters were made as replacements, which is why it’s this mix? Maybe it was the 2007 budget cuts, who knows.
But since it was a mix, I decided a new clone pair of creatures was in order. Originally, I was going to make them villains and part of the Barraki’s armies and give them Squid Launchers. Only the smallest set that came with that launcher was a polybag and otherwise came in larger sets. All the small sets had the Zamor Sphere Launcher and even the Bad Guy polybag set of the year. So it stood to reason that, whatever creature I built, it had to have that launcher and not the squid one.
As a quick side tangent, it’s funny to think that the Bohrok Va are the only full small wave with the villains of that year. All the others are good guys or at least civilians (looking at you Ahkmou), meaning that since 2002 it wasn’t until 2008 that there were small set villains again. And it was only half a wave, which 2009 also did depending on how you count. So while two of the small sets in the 2007 wave being with the villains would be neat and lead into 2008 well, it seemed unlikely.
Now, since I had to include the Zamor Launcher, this presented a new problem. I am building like this would be a set and trying to keep in the ~40 part range like the others. The launcher, plus ammo, eats of 6/~40 total usable parts, which isn’t great. And I have to ensure the launcher is still functional and easily usable, limiting the number of possible creatures I could make. Especially if I wanted some sort of logic to it.
Early ideas include crabs, lobsters, sea turtles, perhaps some sort of penguin, but I ended up choosing an anglerfish. Due to the old voodoo arm being a primary piece in all these sets, it with the launcher and the yellow-orange spheres would work really well as the anglerfish’s light thingy. And it would put the launcher up, making it easy to use. Just had to figure out the body and fins.
Now while I have a stand in the pictures, I wasn’t sure if Lego would have given them a stand back in 2007. So when building their body, I had to ensure that they could rest “flat” and be easy to balance while on a floor/table. Which is what majorly affected the armor pieces I choose for the fins. You can see in the pictures below for how well they can sit on a floor surface.
I ended up picking Matoro’s shoulder armor and Nuparu’s armor for the fins. I had considered some of the foot options, like the Hordika feet, and tried Inika shoulder armor, but none of them worked great for balancing or looks. And while the Matoro armor looks the best to me, I wasn’t sure if designers could include two new armor pieces in the small sets. The Hydruka got one each and they weren’t recolored, so if they were to have two armor pieces each they would have to be in colors that the larger sets would have. Matoro’s neutral silver works well enough for white and Nuparu’s black for the other.
Though speaking of recolors, let’s talk about the heads. 2007 reused and brought back a lot of 2005 pieces and even recolored some. When I initially was building the head, I used Hordika Matau’s and thought it looked pretty nice. Figured that, if I was Lego, I could just recolor this as white and black. They did reuse and recolored the Hordika Vakama head, so it was plausible. But I only owned Matau’s head, this is a physical only competition, and digital versions of the heads don’t exist yet. So I bought a couple, hoping that the others weren’t too different from Matau’s and would work similarly…they didn’t.
You can see the gallery below for comparisons, let me know which one you prefer, but only Matau’s fits properly. His can even move side-to-side to a limited degree. But Whenua, Onewa, and Vakama are all too small on the inside for the eye fill I had with Matau’s and would only work if the thin liftarms were removed. Vakama and Nokama’s backs can’t really fit with the space between the Hordika chest piece. Nuju and Onewa just sort of float on top of it, or at least one corner. Whenua has a thin but long sheet of plastic coming down the middle that crashes into the Hordika chest piece’s middle. While they all have this thin sheet coming down near the back, only Whenua’s became a problem due to how differently his head is shaped.
With additional modification work, I’m sure they would fit better but that would eat up more pieces. So in an ideal situation, they would both be the Hordika Matau’s head in new colors.
But that aside, I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. The tail can move back and forth, the fins can move around, the launcher can be aimed and used, it can sit balanced, and if it has the preferred head that can move a bit too. Ended up using 42 pieces, two over what I was hoping to do but it’s close enough.
If you would like to build your own, I made some quick instructions below. I only did Padox, since they are pretty much the same minus some colors and fins. And the previously mention modification required for Whenua’s head.
As always, feedback is always welcomed. And let me know what you think the missing 2007 small sets should have been or what you wish they were.
with any luck.