To start, then, I'm going to be building through each of the years of the Generation 1 series until it's demise in 2010. The series undergoes remarkable shifts in aesthetic and genre over the course of it's 10 year run, so there'll be plenty to talk about and think about.
In the interest of these posts not being overly long, I'll be splitting my considerations of each year into manageable parts, hence this being part "1.1."
This build through of 2001 includes both commercially available models and the officially-sanctioned/canonical combiner models published by Lego. The first thing to note is that officially-sanctioned and canonical are not necessarily the same thing. We have officially-sanctioned combiners for the Turaga, published both by Lego and by Kabaya in Japan, but the models depict characters that make no appearances in the storyline. For officially-sanctioned models, I accept models published either at the Lego website, in the Lego magazine, or by third-party distributors of Lego. The most prominent of these last is Kabaya, and I'll be sure to point out these Japanese takes on the Bionicle universe when they appear. As I noted here, the aesthetic of the Japanese models is quite different from the European and North American aesthetics, so the models are worth considering closely. Later into the build, once we reach 2006, we'll also look at a pair of Korean Piraka models, assuming I've found the pieces for them by that time! A final type of model I consider, and collect, is the contest-winner models that occurred through the line's history. These models are made canonical by their inclusion in the fictions that accompany Bionicle, and their creators have been kind enough to post instructions at various locations online.
Since this is going to be, at least partially, preparation for my dissertation, I'll also be looking at a few books as I'm building the series, and probably drawing on them for theoretical formulations. Daniel Lipkowitz's The Lego Book is a decent, and colourful, history of the company and the toy. Jonathan Bender's Lego: A Love Story is a nice piece of reflection and reportage on the phenomenon of AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego), and Mark Wolf's Lego Studies is a collection of scholarly essays about the phenomenon that is Lego. They're very different perspectives on the same toy/media, which will be fruitful in my consideration of Bionicle as a nascent fictional mythic structure.
To begin with, here's the whole of my 2001 collection, with the exception of the comics. I'll post a picture of them when I get to the inevitable extended meditation on Bionicle in sequential art.
I'll zoom into each section as we're going along, comment on the builds, the place of each character or creature in the story, and on the ancillary merchandise surrounding the series. There is one MOC in that picture. I've always been a fan of the infected Tohunga (more on that term later) version of Makuta from the original animations on the Lego site. I painted one up with the rust-looking stuff and he's sitting in the center of that picture, stroking the back of a Fikou spider. He's probably the only one of my own MOCs I'll be including here. Other peoples' MOCs, contest-winners in particular, will make appearances by virtue of them having been placed in continuity.
To finish things off with this initial post, here's a quick video of my constructing Kirikori Nui, the first official combiner of the Bionicle line, and the last model I put together yesterday in my build of 2001. I'll look more closely at this model and the Ranama, as they are combiners that utilize pieces from non-Bionicle sets, and are thus unique in the line. But we'll save that for another day.
I'm hoping to update this blog at least twice a week, perhaps Tuesdays and Thursdays, as those are the days I'm not on campus for work. I'll do my best, and even if I'm going to miss a day, I'll update to let you know that. Thanks for following along, and happy building.
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