#Tohunga

[firedragon04]

You had to know these lil' guys would be next... right?

[makutaservaela]

Bohrok just cleaning the island, plus a maid version.

And this is now on my Redbubble

[licencetocolt]

Mentally, I'm here.

[irradiated-imp]

For some posts in a friend's discord server, I made my own takes on the various Matoran builds. Figured since I just did a post with the Okotoran build, why not post the rest of them? They're in order of appearance. 01/Mctoran 03/Kolhiitoran 04/Metrutoran 06/Voyatoran 07/Mahritoran 08/Av Matoran

[sims-tec]

Working on a new plumbot. Not fallout this time. Trying to expand.

[changethatmind]

Maori Shamanic Wisdom

Maori shaman and grandmother Moetu Taiha leads you to Discover Maori Shamanic Wisdom: Reclaim Your Essence, Personal Power & History Through Working With Your Ancestral Roots & Rivers Do you ever feel disconnected from your sacred purpose? Respected indigenous elder Grandmother Moetu-Taiha shares that this is quite common. Many people experience this sense of disconnection because they need to…

[karyot]

hahli!

[stoovano]

People asked for more, so here's a mata style Nuparu Mahri!

[snw-faatuatua]

Kaiwhakangau

My redesign of Hunter~

I'm very pleased with how his moko inspired face paint turned out, eventually I will design his true tā moko as I personally think he would first use paint to pay homage and down the line he will seek out a tohunga ta moko (moko specialist) to receive his earned moko.

Designing this was SUCH a challenge, I still wanted to keep the general shape to keep it recognizable but also stay true to the moko.

Now that I have a ref I'll work on more angles and possibly tweak his whole design all together. Feel free to use as a ref yourself! Just credit me please!!

Next I'm going to work on Omega and I'm very excitedddd

[firedragon04]

Makuta sends his regards

[boxturret]

2003, The Era of Sport, The Era of the Hockey Men

I'll be honest, I wanted to do a big multi part write up in a similar vein to the one I did on the Bohrok Pens, but after getting all the sets in hand I just...didn't have much to say about them. I took a ton of photos but when it came to actually putting a post together I just wasn't having any fun, felt like I'd end up reciting set numbers and other things that anyone can look up on other sites, so screw it. In no particular order, here's my rambling thoughts about the 2003 Bionicle Hockey sets:

They're okay.

Function

The spring part at their core is neat, it's bidirectional, so both ends of the spring are set up in such a way that when its rotated it will return to centre.

There are two configurations of hockey men, they all use the same basic functional parts:

The first kind mounts the spring vertically and by pushing on the head the stick rotates slightly

The second one mounts the spring horizontally and pressing the head swings the stick in a wide arc.

There's four different kinds of sticks, two for each configuration.

Each has a different shape to it to affect how the hockey puck is hit, but in practice the horizontal mount is by far the more powerful of the two.

This one fires pretty straight.

This one is curved so it kinda flicks the puck in the air.

This one destroys everything in its path.

And this one is pretty much the same, but with a slight bend in it.

And that's it really. Despite there being 8 different hockey men across all the sets, there's only those four configurations.

When looking at some of the parts, like the spring and the base, I saw how they were mirrored, and was hoping that maybe you could reverse the mechanisms at the very least, but nope.

Sadly the main wedge parts are chiral, so they can't be flipped around. Which seems rather a shame, having left and right handed hockey men would have added some variety.

Masks

On the topic of variety, one of the more interesting aspects of the hockey men is the masks. This was really the reason I got them. I'm really in to the pre-Bionicle idea of Voodoo Heads, and some of these masks seem like they would have fit in well with that theme.

The hockey men actually use a Tohunga head, the same as in the 01 Bionicle sets, but in light grey. So their masks are completely compatible with Bionicle.

The way they were released though was very odd.

There's 7 different masks, which works out perfectly for the number of sets, 4 canister sets, a two pack, a mess, and the omni man who can be anything you wish:

The masks were on sprues, three to a wheel. The first row of three was on one, the second on another. The seventh mask was released on its own.

What's so odd about the sprues is how...different they are.

The first one has a much thinner wall to the ring, there's no support spokes, and the masks are supposed to be held together with a little 3 pronged bit of plastic in the middle, though none of the ones I got had that part in place. In fact, one sealed set I got that was supposed to come with this ring just had the masks loose, with the bit of plastic along with them. Note how the masks all have horizontal parts jutting out from the mouth peg, that slots in to the mouth of the Tohunga skull, just like a Bionicle mask would.

The second wheel is much thicker, with additional supports along the edges, and three spokes holding everything in place. Now you'd think this would be a later revision, but look at the mouth pegs, they're lacking the parts that lock in to the mouth, meaning they're harder to align properly.

The seventh mask is lacking any sprue marks so I think it was done as a single part and has the side parts on the peg. Its also quite similar to one of the ones on the first sprue, so for a while I didn't know it was its own thing.

They're quite odd. Neat looking though.

Mess

Speaking of the seventh mask, here's the set it came with.

Its best described as a hot mess.

In theory its supposed to be a puck feeder, shooting pucks out for you to attempt to hit, but the motor is so weak, and the construction of the feeding mechanism is really prone to jamming.

It barely has enough power to get through the included pucks, which it just limply drops out of its ramp.

If that isn't good enough for you there's alternate instructions for a...thing instead.

Its super awkward to wind up, and you get seconds of a hockey stick shaped thing flailing around a bit, the bulk of the mechanism itself filling most of the goal on its own.

Its also even more susceptible to jamming than the first build!

Goals

Okay, back in to more positive things, the goal in that last set was a stripped down version of the goals that came in the two pack set, which I think are some of the better things to come from the theme.

Featuring lovely long red axles and a special net, they really look the part! shame about the blue friction split pins, this was right on the edge of when everything fell apart colour wise.

What's better is that if you got the big multi pack which came with the two pack and two of the omni-men, you also got the huge hockey rink base which had special tabs just for locking the goal in place.

The rink is a really cool thing, its made from this milky plastic and they printed everything on the back side, so the prints are viewed through the semi transparent plastic. This makes it look very authentic to how ice rinks really look (I'm Canadian I know these things).

Its huge though, it needs a lot of table or floor space. Its larger than toy hockey rinks, and is getting close to some smaller air hockey tables I've seen.

Couldn't even take a full photo of it easily.

You can fit all the major sets on it, but its pretty tight, but that doesn't really matter that much, as I don't think you'd be able to play the game like this at all.

Really I don't know how playable this game is, even with the rink, there's some sets that are purposefully designed to flip the puck in the air.

Combination Models

Speaking of flipping pucks in the air: the hockey Kaita. Okay I don't have a good link to this part.

I think these guys really highlight the weakness of this system. even when using parts from multiple sets the functions stay identical, the extra parts are just tossed on haphazardly.

Also, even though this one says its a combiner of those two sets, you can make it without touching any part of the second one.

It doesn't come though on this scan, but the face plates in these photos are clearly 3d printed.

Mini Guys

As is traditional, the theme also features several small sets. Its quite confusing as there's a lot of different versions, some come together, some separate, some in bags, some not, but at their core there's 6 figures, two pairs of each size class; large, medium, and small. The larger ones sometimes had goals, depending on the version.

The mini guys all have the same function, which honestly is pretty ingenious, using a Slizer foot to wedge the two feet beams apart on one side and snap them together on the other side to shoot the puck. Honestly its a bit more fun than some of the full sized sets.

The one issue is that hitting them too hard on the softer plastic of the armour piece does feel liable to bend it. Something to look out for, especially with the set exclusive yellow one.

That part came in a very wide array of colours in this one theme.

Female Bionicle M.O.C.s for decades after owe a lot to the hockey-men.

Bottle

And I guess to end things I'll briefly touch on the bottle. Much like the Roboriders and Bionicle sets, they came in canisters, in fact the threading is cross compatible between many of these various canisters.

The canisters always had a purpose, the Roborider's lids could be used in the combiners, the Toa's canisters were an important thing in the story, and the lids represented the suva and could store 7 masks, and the Bohrok canisters represented their hive and doubled as a way of displaying them.

The hockey canisters are functional water bottles.

The nub on top can be pulled out and drunk from. Its a fairly standard water bottle design, though I think more recently its fallen out of favour. the lid is lacking a gasket of any kind however, so the water tightness of this bottle is questionable.

Conclusion

And that's all I have to say about the hockey men of 2003. Turns out it was quite a lot, but it wasn't quite as comprehensive as I was intending. I took a lot of photos that I didn't end up using, so I'll put them all up on my drive HERE. In my attempts to get all the sets I just incidentally ended up with practically all the boxes and cans, which is pretty funny considering all the effort I went through to achieve the same for other themes.

Overall, they're kinda neat, interesting to mess around with a bit, but the system was really needlessly limited and some functions were quite lacklustre. If I had to give them a number ranking it would be an eight point three.

****

I'll leave this post on a bit of a mystery I'm not invested enough to get to the bottom of:

There's an odd amount of inconsistency between how the sets are depicted, whether its a straight image or doing this effect where its a single image projected across multiple screens. I got all the canister sets at once, and they all came with their instructions, so unless the person selling them was mix and matching them, which is possible but seems unlikely with the condition they were in, I have no clue what's going on here. Some match, some are one way, some are the other, its all very odd.

Well, have a nice day.

Ah yes! One last thing:

Like the Slizer boxes, the Hockey Men all come with a nice blank tile to write your name on.

Which is, I believe, a crime in oleg fan circles severe enough to warrant execution.

[licencetocolt]

Old Bonk Photo #14

A face you can trust.

[tiredspacedragon]

So, the other day, I came across a website I had never heard of before, called The Sands of Mata Nui. Apparently this website was set up way back in 2001 by Daniel Lipkowitz, a designer a Lego responsible for designing several early Rahi, including the Kirikori Nui, Ranama, Dikapi, and the beloved Mukau. The website showcases those four Rahi, albeit with beta names that were definitely not approved by any sort of legal team, along with several other creations of Mr. Lipkowitz that never became part of the official canon.

Now maybe I'm late to the party here and this is old news for most people, but it is new to me, and since the website is still up and running, freely available all these years later, I figured I'd share it so other people could take a look if they've never heard of this before. It's a very interesting snapshot into the creative environment of Bionicle in its earliest stages, and some of these Rahi designs are just really neat. One of them is a crab, so that's pretty much an instant win here on tumblr, right?

*Disclaimer*: This website is very much a product of Lego's lax cultural policies in 2001. It still uses the word Tohunga for the Matoran, many of the Rahi's names are words lifted directly from the Maori language, and in general there is a lot of thinly veiled cultural appropriation and western prejudice in there. It's an interesting read, but be aware of that going in.

[makutaservaela]

For some reason, I am godawful at lava-surfing.

Doesn't matter the game, but every Bionicle game with a lava-surfing minigame, that minigame is horrible to me. Only Bionicle game level I've been stuck on longer than the Tales of the Tohunga Lava surfing level was the Bionicle Rebuilt moving platform Toa Kaita level.

[outofgloom]

I have a headcanon that Papu and Rangi are a Matoric approximation of the names of the two leaders of the Great Beings. How would these names translate to Praetar?

The names "Papu" and "Rangi" are derived from the figures Papa and Rangi in Māori mythology, and because of this, I have intentionally chosen not to incorporate them into materials on Matoric or related conlanging for the same reason that I have not incorporated other words/terms, such as the Māori word tohunga, that were removed from use in BIONICLE materials after 2002.

See the "Language Acknowledgement" section at the start of the dictionary for a brief explanation of the appropriation that occurred and a fairly detailed accounting of the words involved, which originated not just from Te Reo Māori, but also from Fijian, Rotuman, Hawaiian, and other languages.

[matoroblogs]

original website

Join the Turaga , the leaders of the native tribes on the island of Mata Nui, as they rediscover the lost legend of the Seventh Toa, and find out how one villager, the Tohunga of Earth, came to have the only purple Kanohi Mask and its significance!

Chronicle of the Seventh Toa

While the six mighty Toa roam the island of Mata Nui in search of  the Kanohi Masks of power, and prepare themselves to drive the evil Makuta and his creatures from the dark places in the land, the leaders of the six known surviving native Tohunga tribes meet in the sacred place.

Each of these leaders, or Turaga, is guardian of one part of the legend of Mata Nui, and as they relate their tales to each other in the sand of the sacred place with rocks and twigs as is their way, they discover that some ancient lore is emerging as they combine all the legends they know.  It is hovering on the edge of their consciousness, and they delve further and further into the past to the time when Mata Nui was still a paradise, before Makuta followed his brother, and the dark places appeared.

It is then that the Turaga Vakama, holder of the Great Firestaff and eldest among them, remembers the destruction of the ancient Rongo-Tablets Mata Nui had given to them which foretold the coming of the Toa from the skies, and showed the constellations by which they would know their time of waiting had come to an end.  Over time the Tablets had been pieced back together from the fragments scattered all over the Island, and the finest craftsmen among the Tohunga carved new Rongo-Tablets into stone.  Alas not all pieces could be found, and some had crumbled into dust, so they  filled in the missing pieces under the guidance of the Turaga of that time.

The new Rongo-Tablets where affixed to the base of the crystal telescope through which the keepers of the legend watched the skies for the red star to reach its foretold place among the constellations.  Yet Vakama and the other Turaga grew more troubled as they considered the missing pieces of information that had to be recreated during their restoration.  In the gaps thus left in the legend a more ancient malevolent shadow than even Makuta was hiding from their knowledge and perception.  Through the night and well into the next day the Turaga brooded over their legend and while they told and retold the ancient tales they slowly started to draw a new Rongo-Tablet into the sand.  In all their memories pieces of this legend were interwoven as an undercurrent, and they slowly fell into place.

As the rediscovered Tablet started to take on form, Turuga Whenua, protector of Onua's legend, recognized the symbol as something he had once seen in the rock quarry as a faded pattern left on the ground.  But who was that new Toa, which they for now named 'the Seventh'?  What powers did it possess?  And  where would this discovery lead to? ...

High above Mata Nui the ancient space station, that the Tohunga perceive as the red star, slowly rotates about its axis in orbit.  After what seemed like an eternity of silence the internal machinery had restarted, triggered by a signal placed deep within the heart of Mata Nui underneath the great volcano, long long ago.  The now busy humming of gears and pistons was only interrupted by a sharp explosion and the scraping of metal while the cylindrical projectiles where launched towards the island as the space stations rotation laboriously brought each launch tube into the correct position.  Six cylinders, containing the disjointed elements of a Toa each, had already been fired, and the Toa which thus awakened from their troubled dreams were returned to the land of Mata Nui to fulfill their destiny!

Yet one tube had not yet launched and many moons would pass before the station would be in the correct  position again.  In it the purple, black, and gray parts of the Seventh Toa lay, whose spirit was stirring restlessly, waiting to awaken like its brethren.  To be recombined into the most powerful hero yet: The 7th Toa, the Toa of energy!

The Seventh Toa

In his younger years, Tohunga Onepu of Onu-Koro had dug deep underneath the Volcano in the center of Mata Nui and found a purple Kanohi, the only one known in existence. He did not know, that he had stumbled upon the ruins of a lost city which had been destroyed and burried underneath the volcano in the time before time. No one knows if any Tohunga or their descendants had survived from this lost land. Their Toa, however, was waiting for his return from the skies. Waiting to avenge his people against the evil that had come to pass. Using the special powers of his Kanohi mask, and his mighty weapon, he would return to Mata Nui, and not rest until the wrong had been undone, and the remnants of the lost tribe were reunited, to take their rightful place as the rulers over the Tohunga. To rebuild their great civilization.

For he is Toa Voriki, the Toa of energy!