I don’t think LEGO are bad at telling stories. If that were the case, we wouldn’t be here today discussing about the lore of long gone toys that was intended for nothing more than as extended advertising. As far as stories created for no other reason then to sell toys are concerned, LEGOs stories are quite compelling and have clearly left an impact beyond what was intended.
I don’t think the problem lies in the fact that LEGO is inherently bad at telling stories, the problem lies in the fact that LEGO seems to be blatantly unaware of the impact that their stories have had on people and continue treating them as just advertising instead of hiring the right people who actually care and want to tell a compelling story. Bionicle’ story thrived because it just so happened that the people who were involved in it actually cared and wanted to do more than just sell toys, and the same was true of Ninjago. If LEGO treated their stories as actual stores in their own right instead of just an afterthought in the marketing department, their lines could be just as popular if not even more so as other mainstream franchises based on toys such as Transformers or Barbie.
We are here talking about Bionicle. That’s the purpose of the forum.
It is also possible to talk about things that didn’t work.
You mean directly appealing to and attempting to please the incredibly niche market of Bionicle fans who have proven over and over again to be the most volatile and repulsive market LEGO has ever garnered?
Ninjago’s story is notably more childish than Bionicle’s was. Instead of a constantly-expanding narrative, the show very early on devolved into “And THEN” storytelling where the next big threat was something that should’ve had a noticeable impact on the world prior to its revelation and feels regurgitated from ideas prior (snakes for the umpteenth time, for instance). It’s very Power Rangers-esqe in that regard, which given its protagonists is fitting I suppose
I think Ninjago’s success is more in relation to brand dedication than them telling anything close to being a good story. You would not believe the amount of complaints raised over Dragons Rising all across the internet, yet have any of these people stopped buying sets over it? Not in the slightest. This was their childhood, back when they really only cared about the sets and their loose plotline, and much like a lot of Bionicle fans nowadays, it’s hard for them to move on.
Greg also gave the Vahki the most overpowered and stupid arsenal in Bionicle, leading to them either being portrayed as uniform police robots with limited capability or instantly wipe the deck with the main cast. I think Greg didn’t like them because he wrote himself into a corner trying to justify their different staff designs and couldn’t do anything with them after that point.
I think the Vahki could’ve worked a bit better if what they represented was a little more extreme. You’re right in that they enforce the idea too much, but they are also just the idea… Again. Here’s the dystopian city, guess who the antagonists are? The dystopian city.
Prior villains had been nature running amok, aesthetically alien invaders, the alleged anti-Toa, and the real anti-Toa. 2004’s villains were local law enforcement, a concept never fully realized by either the story or the sloppy movie. Would’ve been cool to see the Toa legitimately on the run instead of conveniently carted to the exact locations where nobody else was.
To tell the truth though, how many of their stories have been either carbon copies of prior stuff (see the 3 Space Police lines, Pharaoh’s Quest and Johnny Thunder and Indiana Jones, nearly every Castle line ever, City only having one game (not a set, a game) that fleshes out the Police Department, and LEGO Agents/Alpha Team/Ultra Agents)? Nearly every recognizable LEGO theme is either based on existing media or is essentially a reboot of an existing LEGO IP.
The only truly original ones I can think of off the top of my head are Exo-Force, Knights Kingdom II, Bionicle/HF, and the various secret agent ones. The rest are pretty generic and in many cases don’t truly have a story/plot, just characters (see City and Castle especially). The only reason we discuss the lore of certain themes is because those had a story that was decently fleshed out. Many of legos core IPs, though, didn’t have that kind of writing, and so while they sometimes are referenced as Easter eggs, they don’t really get much attention at all.
One of the reasons why Lego’s stories aren’t selling so well is because many of them are very shallow. They have less substance than some of the earliest Transformers shows, as they don’t even make a good case for why the “bad guys” are bad (see City for a very good example of this).
Have to agree for sure. There really isn’t anywhere in the story where the Vahki being the “SWAT officers” of Metru Nui is actually fleshed out, it’s either them shooting characters or being horrifically incapable of doing anything (see the start of 2005, where most Vahki were confirmed dead because they couldn’t do much to the Visorak). Then there’s also the fact that Metru Nui supposedly had issues with smuggling (never explained beyond the fact that apparently some Ga-Matoran were involved)… so much of Metru Nui was just never given a chance to be anything but flavor text. Even most of the locations in the city were never used in the stories, with most of Ta-Metru , Le-Metru, and so on not appearing anywhere in any detail.
At least based on how David is describing Lego’s story efforts, no they actually didn’t. Lego gave no time for G2’s story to breath or for creatives to do much more than the bare minimum. That doesn’t mean that G2 would have succeeded if they had, but it definitely is not a good example of Lego making significant efforts and standing by them. I also don’t see what the vile aspects of the Bionicle community have to do with David’s point that Lego doesn’t see the value in investing significantly in the story aspects of their products beyond what’s necessary for marketing. Especially as many of us seemed to agree that there are many Bionicle fans that had little knowledge of the stories behind G1 or G2. Meaning there was and maybe still exists a significant market of Bionicle fans that have nothing to do with the entrenched crazy people you’re deriding.
In all seriousness though, how do you give City a complex theme when City is a reflection of real life and you, being LEGO, are trying to avoid as many social commentary or political issues as physically possible?
True, the marketing team was given a budget of $0.00 (which makes what they did produce insanely impressive ngl), but LEGO did actually try to appease Bionicle fans. They tried just as hard as they did with every other theme they produce. See DuneToa’s post:
Would a solid story have saved the day for G2? No, because the reason LEGO canned the theme (and others) was because the abysmal LEGO Movie 2 bombed so unbelievably hard it was shutter themes that weren’t printing cash or risk a public loss of revenue. But comparing G1 and G2’s early years story-wise, while the aesthetic is different, the levels of complexity aren’t that far off. It did a lot of stupid things too, just with a different flavor.
One is that Bionicle was and still is lightning in a bottle. There is no guarantee that any theme could recapture the glory days per se of that magical decade ignore the financial crisis and other such events; the global zeitgeist was in the exact spot it needed to be for a mystical island inhabited by biomechanical elemental warriors with serious egos to take off like greased lightning.
It didn’t matter that the early years were a bit bumpy because the appeal of the toyline and its unique aesthetic were so powerful it overrode anything else. It also ended up having a pretty competent story later on that wove a lot of the narrative elements together and kept existing characters (mostly) relevant throughout its decade lifespan. Bionicle sold well because A. it was the right theme at the right time with the right ideas behind it, and B. because the story helped sustain it well past when the market was ready to move on.
The other aspect is that LEGO foolishly assumed the Bionicle market was strong enough for the name alone (and a permitted storyline at the minimum comparable with Ninjago’s early years) to generate a following. There are not nearly enough Bionicle fans to market an entire theme towards these days, as LEGO found out in record time, and they instead fell back on people who had no experience with the theme and subsequently paid attention almost exclusively because of the toys, making the story irrelevant - none of the old fans liked it and none of the new fans read it.
As for that, the entrenched crazy people as you put it are now in charge of all the major community spaces that Bionicle fans congregate. TTV is one of the few exceptions, and it’s a dying site, with fewer active users as each day passes. Those same people have eagerly positioned themselves as the official spokespersons for the community as a whole, meaning the scarce few times LEGO has reached out since G2’s death have been to them and no one else.
If there is a significant amount of Bionicle fans that have nothing to do with any of them, I wonder where they’re hiding.
So the mods don’t skin me alive for my yapping here’s another unpopular opinion that I was reminded of while typing this novel and a half:
LEGO could and should make another buildable figure line in the scale of the articulated technic figures. Same scale, same system compatibility, but with a greater emphasis on things being built on and around them. Blend Bionicle with System a bit more by making the old design buildable instead of static, and you can still use the mixel socket system.
Only problem is, this would require LEGO to admit they can make sockets in more than two colors.
Forgive me if I am unfamiliar with this, but when has LEGO reached out officially to the TTV? The only times I can think of when this might have happened was with various fan projects that LEGO wanted taken down. Has there been any instance were LEGO genuinely actually wanted to interact with the Bionicle community (as represented by TTV)?
Counter-argument: If Bionicle’ success was entirely or mostly due to “luck” and being the right thing at the right time, then why did Ninjago become even more successful than Bionicle? What has Ninjago done to warrant having such consistent success? It’s not that Ninjas were particularly popular in 2011, neither because LEGO was in bad financial state and Ninjago was the only “cool” thing they had to offer, it’s simply because they succeeded in creating an engaging story with likable characters that kids quickly grew attached to. Throughout the entirety of its run, Ninjago has relied on nothing else but its characters to sell the theme. I really doubt that any kid today that has no idea about Ninjago is going to buy any of the mechs, bikes and jets which they can also get in other themes unless they do so because they are attached to the a characters who pilot those oversized vehicles that have been done to death so many times. To claim that Bionicle’ success can’t also be attributed to having a compelling story and, perhaps even more importantly in Bionicle’s case, great characters is easily disproven by the fact that we’ve seen the exact same pattern repeat with Ninjago (one could argue even Hero Factory to a lesser extent, the theme still lasted a respectable 5 years after all). Good characters do sell a LEGO theme, I think this is something we can confidently observe, even when the story as a whole isn’t anything particularly worth writing home about.
And if we can agree that likable characters are enough to sell a theme even when the story is lackluster, than how much more successful could LEGO’s themes be if they also put more effort and resources in writing good stories to go alongside the characters?
TTV is (with the exception of a notable former member) a group of pretty reasonable and fine folk. Sure they have their faults, but they’re mostly just people, and they certainly don’t fall into the camp of ne’er-do-wells I was describing earlier.
Television show.
“Great characters” is just a little inaccurate here. However much quality the casts of Bionicle, Ninjago, and Hero Factory had behind them, their primary reason for existing was marketability, as evidenced by their colors.
In each of these themes, the red character was the hotshot leader, the white character was more reserved/calculated, the colors were associated with elemental abilities (see the 1.0 weapons), and the central focus was, in the first year, defeating a powerful evil depicted in black who had some major connection, familial or otherwise, to the group’s mentor.
Ninjago even repeated Hero Factory’s trope of bringing in a green and gold “special one” when the popularity of the red character showed even the slightest indication of fading (for Ninjago this was instantly; Jay topped the list of favorite ninja among the target audience by a significant margin).
How many fans at the time knew that Von Nebula’s real name was Von Ness, or that the infected Hau masks were all hand-painted, or that the LEGO Battles Ninjago video game had a coding error shifting the difficulty slider to make Easy take the place of Hard? Probably very few. But Nexo Knights, which had the primary color scheme of silver, failed; Hidden Side, which had its cast of character with at least three colors each, failed; Bionicle G2, which broke from its coherent color designs in its second wave to make the Toa primarily gold/silver, failed.
Now to be clear, I’m not anti-good stories or anti-good characters. I would love for everymost LEGO themes to have rich, detailed stories that try their best to reach the same levels of maturity that Bionicle did. But without a good design lead behind each theme, we’re never going to see that kind of success again.
The reason Ninjago is so popular is because it’s Power Rangers-lite. Its story is the stereotypical “superhero misfit team has to work together to fight the villain of the week without actually killing off any villain (unless the plot demands it)” beat. They brought Garmadon back from the dead 4 or 5 times just because they couldn’t get around to actually giving him anything with his 2014 repentance arc. The villains are mostly Serpentine rehashes with a smattering of Knights Kingdom II, and the show hasn’t progressed since 2013 due to at least 3 reboots plus the movie permanently shutting down most actual character development. It stopped being engaging for most people when it became obvious Lego and Cartoon Network were using as a money printer rather than having Greg Farshtey actually provide assistance in developing the plot (he just did the books and comics after the sets were developed, and I don’t think he does anything for the show).
It’s popular with kids because unlike superhero movies and Star Wars, it really has nothing objectionable in the slightest to convince parents that it could be bad for their kids. As for the sets, the argument can easily be made that kids prefer the vehicles in Ninjago because they are all relatively consistent in design and play functions, with the characters not really being needed to sell the sets. Who doesn’t want the dragon of the year with its associated pilot over yet another monochrome mess of a spaceship that doesn’t even come with half the crew from the movie?
Frankly, though, the characters in Ninjago are getting less and less “engaging” over time. Wu was cool in the initial years because he actually seemed intelligent. Now he isn’t even a sensei, he’s just a mentally degenerate Spinjitzu master who can’t stop a few reptiles without major assistance from supposedly less skilled ninja (using military vehicles).
Most of the ninja had good backstories before the 2016 reboot, being blue-collar characters with specific skill sets relevant to their character development and abilities. Now they’re the most generic teenage anime superheroes LEGO has ever done, who consistently lose all character development at the start of each season and don’t even retain gained traits for long (see the plethora of “Elemental Weapons” they’ve obtained, only to promptly lose because they get clumsier and more plot-controlled each year).
And the villains consistently get more and more generic and predictable each year, being either rehashes of prior villains (or the same villains brought back just to erase all character development they ever had), or enemy reskins (desert snake guys, ice/stone samurai, skeletons). They rarely have a real impact on the story, being yet another enemy Wu conveniently forgot to deal with as a teenager, and typically don’t pose a real threat because they’d rather waste all their time chasing Wu or Lloyd rather than taking on the actual citizens of Ninjago.
Even Pharaoh’s Quest had better writing than this (it had the villain team up with an alien warlord and Atlantean warriors to unleash a combined assault on Earth’s government), and it was nowhere near as popular.
I agree with everything you said. I do not think that Ninjago has a good story in the slightest. But the fact that it started out decently was enough to get the people at the time attached to the characters even if today they’re just the same they have ever been with no character development. Everyone who today still watches the Ninjago show are the same people who watched the “original trilogy” of the 2011-2013 era. I would highly doubt that anyone who has actually become a loyal fan of the series has gotten into the show past 2016-2017 maybe at most. I really don’t see any reason, just like you pointed out, why anyone who has no prior familiarity with the show would care about those characters unless those characters are “part of their childhood.”
But that’s actually precisely what my point was. Ninjago started out with likable characters in the beginning, and that was enough to get people hooked so that they have stuck around up to today. If that was enough for Ninjago to be successful in the long-run, how much more successful could other themes be if they also started out with similarly likable characters and with an even better premise and story?
While we are at it, here is another unpopular opinion that is sort of related: Legends of Chima should have become what Ninjago is today.
Most people who hate Chima today do so because they saw it as a threat to their beloved Ninjago, and that repuation it garnered as an “inferior theme meant to replace Ninjago” has stuck in people’s minds and doesn’t allow them to see passed that. But in the long run, I honestly kind of wish Ninjago would have ended in 2013 and Chima would have become the evergreen theme instead.
I recently rewatched the entire TV series again for the first time in many years, and to be compltely honest, I rather enjoyed it. I would totally understand why somone would dislike the show or prefer Ninjago instead, but after so many medicore Ninjago seasons, even a mediocre Chima show still paradoxcially feels somewhat like a breath of fresh air to me.
While the Chima show had some unmistakble flaws, particularly in the area of character development, voice acting and having too many filler episdoes, I still think Chima has a far superior premise and world-building that honestly, I would probably rank up there with Bionicle among some of the best world building to come out of any LEGO theme. Whereas the Ninjago world feels like just as generic blank-slate that can be whatever the writers want it to be at any given moment, the world of Chima actually feels like a internally consistent world that had so much potential to be explored in so many interesting ways, just like Bionicle.
It is honestly such a shame that Chima never managed to get out of living in the shadow of Ninjago and was never properly given the chance to stand on its own.
This does imply that they are actually lesser than him if they need military-grade vehicles to get anything done
Although I do have to ask who their weapons manufacturer is that can keep coming up with this kind of stuff without the government intervening and where all their old vehicles go as soon as the season changes
That’s a bit blunt, but… yeah
Couple in what I said about it copying Bionicle, much like Hero Factory did, and the entire thing becomes blatantly formulaic. Ninjago succeeded because out of everything LEGO did, it used the most gimmicks to make itself successful. Ninjas, robots, giant vehicles, Bionicle archetypes, and a gold-and-green newcomer after only a little while. Hero Factory also dabbled in the television content for a little while, but it was so hammy it was a surprise they made animated segments for each year of the theme’s lifespan.
I would argee except 1. Then we’d just have a different NInjago choking out other original themes and I’m pretty sure you’d hate it almost as much as you do Ninjago, and 2. we already have enough furries roaming around we don’t need them to congregate
Gonna be honest, the only thing I liked about Chima was the early sets, minus the minifigs. The story was admittedly more interesting because we could always find new tribes or something, but overall, the story would have devolved into exactly what we hate about Ninjago: new powerful bad guy comes along that has remained hidden until now, gets defeated, rinse and repeat till the color drains.
Honestly, I think the solution is what LEGO tried in the early 2010s: connect all the original themes with an overarching universe. Back in the day, Monster Fighters, Dino 2010, Galaxy Squad, Alien Conquest, and Pharaoh’s Quest were all connected, giving us an expanded universe and a semi-consistent story. Furthermore, while each theme was technically separate, the comics included in the LEGO Club magazine advertised all the themes simultaneously (for instance, a Monster Fighters comic preluded Galaxy Squad and is actually the reason I wanted to get into Galaxy Squad). On top of all that, we still got everything Ninjago sets have to offer: grand buildings (Monster Fighters, Pharaoh’s Quest), mechs and military vehicles (Galaxy Squad and Alien Conquest), and crazy creatures (Galaxy Squad, Monster Fighters, and Dino 2010).
Pixal is the designer, though we never get an explanation for any of it other than “oh mini Pixal robots made it” and “oh big creature destroys past vehicles.”
I don’t think Chima would have ended up in the same spot Ninjago did, because the world is fundamentally not suited for the same kind of free-for-all that Ninjago is. The world of Chima has rules and limits, and that’s what I liked about it. Neither could they have used it to drain the ideas from other original themes, at least not directly, because the whole premise of antropromorphic animals kind of locks it in place and wouldn’t allow the writers and desginers to just do whatever in the same way they do with Ninjago. It is possible that had Chima lasted as long as Ninjago did, it would have hit the point where it started to drain ideas from other themes, but then again I think that would likely have come much later whereas the whole fundametal premise of Ninjago is that it is about ninjas vs literally everything, which I think more naturally predisposes it towards draining ideas from other themes while I don’t think that tendancy would have been nearly as natural in Chima.
I think Chima’s world would have had a lot of potential to come up with new and interesting ideas that wouldn’t have felt as redundant as in Ninjago. At the end of the final epsode they teased that the Chima we knew was actually just a small island in a much larger world, which I think is insane and could have had so much poetnial. I think Tommy Andersen also confirmed that there were ideas floating around about having Dinosaur tribes in the future had the line continued, which I think is super interesting.
Again any series begins to feel repetitive after it runs for a long time, I think that is inevitable. But Bionicle managed to do it superbly, and I think in terms of world building Chima had just as much potential as Bionicle did, whereas Ninjago’s problem is preciesly that it doesn’t have a consistent world and that its worldbuilding can just be whatever at any time with no regard for consistency.
I mean, I’m sure that’s true in regards to certain elements of the story, but Chima did show the same propensity Ninjago exhibited for suddenly pulling up new antagonists out of the blue and relying heavily on fantastical mechs/vehicles in sets.
In other words, it was directly competing with Ninjago for Ninjago’s market while also trying to salvage the discarded Thundercats line.
This is somehow worse than the Red Star for Bionicle
I remember that. Very last shot, we see what we formerly thought to be a massive island was actually relatively small. I think they’re attempting to connect it in some way with Ninjago now, as I believe Lord Ras mentions the forever rock and the outlands or whatever those things were from Chima, not to mention he’s a humanoid animal himself.
This is a very funny statement considering the Visorak were even more dangerous and powerful. At least the Vahki and Matoran were on equal footing when it came to arsenal because of the Kanoka. Can’t really say the same when a spider can sing you to death.
They can, the problem is scale. They can’t produce the number of sockets on mass in different colors at a consistent level of quality. Each factory is using plastics and materials that can be obtained nearby, which results in each thing produced a bit different in every region. So let’s say they can easily produce pink Mixel sockets in Denmark and China factories, but not Mexico. That’s enough of a dealbreaker for the LEGO Group to not bother producing that socket in pink period.
This is why third-party sellers can do it easily. It’s less of a design issue and more logistics at scale issue.
