I was gonna put my thoughts on here, but I think others like @Ghid and @BioKnight have summed it up better. Long story short, no, as many have cited, if they were considered to be shown in TLM2 even if they were cut.
Only the future will tell if the bonks return.
I mean, there could just happen to be a completely normal totally not a robot concept camero in a parking lot in some scene.
That would be more of an Easter egg tho.
Hopes and prayers, Max[quote=“MaxinePrimal, post:28, topic:50060”]
Now lets be honest. The only way Bionicle will get a major reference outside of a set easter egg will either be in Ninjago or a Lego Movie. (By the way, there was a reference in the Lego Batman movie. Bionicle Man was a movie title above a movie theater)
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Well that isn’t entirely true. But I should probably note that Bionicle has received more subtle hints and nods than any other LEGO franchise. I mean, the amount of references to it is really innumerable.
I mean, just look at this.
Out of context it seems like a really poor edit, but this was actually at the end of one of LEGO’s videos on their site. It’s been a really long time since I snagged the screenshot but I think the video had something to do with space exploration.
Normal LEGO fans would be interested at the font choice. Bionicle fans would snap to attention. And that’s exactly what I did.
Thanks for ignoring my and BioKnight’s posts btw
Because Clutch Powers was a one-off character which slips seamlessly into the current LEGO mindset for the vast majority of their current products. Bionicle is buildable space robots on an island; tell me where that fits anywhere.[quote=“LegoDavid, post:30, topic:50060”]
there was that minifigure pack that included him, but I don’t think they went trough all the trouble of adding a new character to the show just to promote that.
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Yeah i’d like the Minifig pack that comes with Toa Mata Nui pls
Including Bionicle in anywhere near minifig scale means completely redesigning them. And as you can probably guess, that’s a super risky gamble.[quote=“LegoDavid, post:30, topic:50060”]
You might think Bionicle doesn’t really work with the rest of LEGO’s themes… but we still got the Bionicle minifigures from the playsets and the Invasion from Below minifigures.
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Yes, and they were garbage. 
If you want to include one of them in a movie, you couldn’t emote them naturally. Their faces are insanely bumpy and the prints are super tiny. They would be the most emotionally dead characters in whatever media they appeared in.[quote=“Traykar, post:33, topic:50060, full:true”]
I mean, there could just happen to be a completely normal totally not a robot concept camero in a parking lot in some scene.
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Up until Michael Bay’s Transformers, the concept camaro was just a car. Bumblebee became the camaro to help sell the vehicle, and it’s a business move that worked and worked well. And as you may have noticed by reading this topic, Bionicle fans seemed to be intensely dissatisfied with constant easter eggs.[quote=“Kardax, post:32, topic:50060”]
Long story short, no, as many have cited, if they were considered to be shown in TLM2 even if they were cut.
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I think this is even more of an indicator that LEGO really wants to do something with Bionicle, but can’t because they’re shooting in the dark. Having a major cameo in the lego movie 2 would have been a good way to test that IMO, but I can see why they chose not to.
Clutch Powers was really only able to make an appearance in the recent NinjaGo stuff because of the name drop they gave him back in Season 1 when the straight to DVD movie was more recent and they were planning on doing something with it as a franchise. Obviously this didn’t happen.
And as far as Clutch is concerned now, he’s a completely different character with just a few aspects of his original incarnation present. The old movie might as well not exist and it’d matter just as much with the current incarnation in Season 11. They don’t necessarily need to promote anything Clutch Powers related because he was already established in the world of NinjaGo and could therefore be used without needing to cross promote anything.
BIONICLE was a successful theme for years before they chose to end it and save the brand name (only to bring it back years later and damage it anyway, but that’s besides the point). Having a BIONICLE character cameo in NinjaGo or Hidden Side outside of stickers in the sets wouldn’t make any sense since there’s not a theme to cross promote. If G2 had been successful and was still going, then it might make sense to have another jont through the realms like in Possession when Chima got a small cameo and quickly pass through Okoto, but since G2 only “sold well” there’s no reason to do that except by doing the sticker Easter eggs that set designers have been doing recently.
And that’s all those are, they’re Easter eggs.
I can safely assume they don’t mention BIONICLE because the LEGO group is a company geared entirely towards selling toys. Never under any circumstance would LEGO want to take attention away from their current product.
It should also be noted that a very large majority of the people who originally worked on BIONICLE are gone. Having most likely moved on to other opportunities outside of LEGO. The people you don’t see now making all those cheeky references to BIONICLE & GALIDOR are employees of LEGO who grew up playing with BIONICLE. Even then, the only references they can do are whatever’s in the budget for the set they’re designing.
Without a doubt there’s probably any number of people within LEGO who don’t care for BIONICLE, but doesn’t it seem counter intuitive for a company to disrespect its own intellectual property?
Now, finally, regarding Takanuva’s cut appearance in The LEGO Movie 2.
I don’t know how or why he was in that concept art, being that it’s concept art I assume it is used to generate ideas and anyone can draw anything there. Don’t assume someone at LEGO slammed their fist on a table and demanded Takanuva not be in the movie.
It is my assumption that when considering what would fit into Rex Dangervest’s niche of of that edgy teenage demographic, of course BIONICLE would be considered.
I’ll even let you in on a secret. Do you want to know what Takanuva would’ve looked like in the movie?
Here you go.
Some people assume that this is a mech suit, and you can see Takanuva’s legs sticking out on the bottom there. Personally, I don’t believe that. Maybe if G2 had continued, maybe this prototype would have CCBS elements in there. One thing to bear in mind though is that CCBS is gone. Retired. All those parts aren’t being produced anymore so making this Takanuva out of bricks and technic shouldn’t be mistaken as any sort of dis towards BIONICLE. If Takanuva had been in the movie there’d have simply been no BIONICLE elements to make him with available to the set designer.
I personally assume that this is just something along the lines of a drone, and the name Takanuva is in the same vein as The LEGO Movie’s and The LEGO Batman Movie’s BIONICLE references. Just that, a reference. I.E. a blink and you’ll miss it easter egg thrown in by people at LEGO who love BIONICLE just the same as you and I.
Why wasn’t it in the movie? Well, it’s a movie, and they might’ve wanted to focus solely on the raptors. Having Rex have robots and mech suits and spaceships would dilute the raptors, which have much more joke potential. Also a name like Takanuva would be weird to put in the LEGO Movie 2, obscure reference or not.
That’s a thought I’ve had too, but don’t really consider that due to the importance behind that name. If they wanted a random drone to have a BIONICLE name as a reference, they could’ve easily gone with Bohrok. It probably would’ve been easier to translate to system in some capacity and they were literally drone characters. I think using the name Takanuva for a random drone, even just as a reference, would be something that they wouldn’t do because it dilutes the importance of the character in their lore.
If they were to do that, then you could make the argument that they would’ve possibly been disrespecting BIONICLE’s memory.
The problem with this is that literally all of Rex’s vehicles had a “Rex” pun in it, so even if they hadn’t come up with the idea yet would mean that they would have to discard the reference.
Do we know this for certain? Are there no sets currently in production that use even a few CCBS parts? Even Ninjago dragons or mechs?
Yeah, sorry about that. I love looking up part origins but somehow missed this. I guess it serves me right for having used Brickset’s incomplete inventories this time around instead of Bricklink’s fan-curated database. That’s a lot for the catch man!
Oh my bad. Yeah, I believe the feet we saw used on the protectors are still around, but CCBS shells and bones are out. They’re not available on LEGO’s website for buying replacement bricks and the like and I also haven’t seen them on any of the newer sets.
I don’t think LEGO, as a corporate entity, is trying to disrespect BIONICLE.
The placement of the BIONICLE slide in that little montage - unfortunate placement it may be - was the decision of the director(s) of the movie, not the company. And if it was a theme that they really felt there was “no need to mention”, why did they mention it anyway by showing it on screen?
BIONICLE sold well and contributed to the company’s revival, but it’s not like that enslaves the company to always keep doing BIONICLE related stuff. We got a major nod in the form of G2, and that didn’t go over well. Whether that was the fault of the story team, the set designers, the media team, or the general market - it didn’t capture lightning in a bottle the same way the line did in '01. And it managed to divide us old fans that the nod was being given to in the process.
The worst thing that LEGO could do right now is try to force BIONICLE cameos or whatever down our throats. The older generation would find a flaw and take offense, and the younger generation would see us as a bunch of ungrateful… somethings. (the website is telling me the word I want to use is offensive and I can’t think of a good substitute.) The Hidden Side nod is subtle enough to work, I feel, and if my sources are correct the designer was once a BIOMOCer in his own right. He knows how to get us excited, the upper echelons of the company probably do not. As far as I’m concerned the BIONICLE section of the LEGO house is a worthy enough monument to the theme.
Maybe “Takanuva” would have been a mech that shapeshifted like a transformer into the likeness of the real Takanuva.
But that’s just a theory.
So uh… a humanoid mech that transforms into a humanoid robot? Doesn’t seem like much of a transformer. 
A STRANGE THEORY, thanks for reading
Well I mean, the mech doesn’t look that much like a human or Takanuva, so it could have been possible.
I think we’d get improved versions of the playset versions of Bionicle were they ever to be in TLM2. Think the Barraki/Mahri or Inika/Piraka minifigs, on the scale of the Exoforce robots, but maybe with some Mask helmets or something.
I’d love to have something close to the Hero Factory Invasion from below minifigs. Those minifigs had objectively superior articulation, customizability, and character expression to any of the BIONICLE minifigs (or the Exo-Force robots). Perhaps most important, they had masks (technically helmets, but still functionally the same as late G1 Kanohi).
(thanks @exxtrooper for the pic)
I wish the bionicle system sets had had minifigures like the Hero Factory ones.
Okay, this is something I’m very passionate about. I have a very strong opinion on this.
Why does everyone always assume that “A bunch of other things we don’t need to mention,” is meant to say that no one cares about the themes they flashed? That line has always meant “themes we don’t have the time to mention,” because all that scene serves as is exposition explaining the threat facing the LEGO world.
For the purposes of the movie, all it wants to focus on are the themes it included: Wild West, City, Cloud Coocooland, all those main ones shown. The ones in Will Ferrell’s diorama. And it would be at the detriment of the movie to attempt to include every single possible LEGO theme because that would be too much for the movie to handle and still have a clear focus. It was the right call.
So when Wyldstyle is explaining to Emmett what is going on, that entire little sequence of extra themes is a nod to the much, much, much greater and larger LEGO universe that the film simply can’t focus on. And Bionicle being included in that I see as an honor. They bothered to even include the theme as a part of the larger universe, they acknowledged how important it really was to the company, and they know how important it is to fans.
You know what else was included in that sequence of themes? Pirates, Castle, Vikings, Minifigs, Friends, Speed Racer, and Fabuland. Two of those are original System themes, Vikings was a later off-shoot of Castle, Minifigs is extremely popular, Friends is the flagship girl-focused theme and a major focus of The Second Part, Fabuland was once a main young-children’s theme, and Speed Racer, while obscure, represents the larger world of Licenced LEGO themes.
So please, please, stop assuming that scene was meant to make light of other LEGO themes. You really think LEGO would consider Castle and Pirates, two founding LEGO themes, something not worth talking about? I consider Bionicle being placed there an honor and a tribute, even if it was for only 8 frames.
Those would be fantastic. But long story short, Lego ain’t disrespecting the bonkles.
