Building Action

Lego Reboots Bionicle in 2015

If you’ve walked the Lego section of a Target or Toys R Us in the past year, it might be hard to believe Bionicle was the big reveal at Comic Con. Lego seems to have a license for every nerd franchise on top of the Chima and NinjaGo brands advertised through weekly cartoons.
Why relaunch Bionicle?

Boys are clamoring for this, according to Rob Johnson, a Lego Brand Manager on site. (To prove the point, a recent college graduate practically had his face pressed to the Bionicle display glass in longing.) The line originally launched in 2000 as a subset of the Technic series. Bionicle was replaced by the Hero Factory line in 2010. Johnson assured me the new Bionicle is vastly different from Hero Factory with 25 unique pieces created just for Bionicle. 

The attractive colors and ease of building are meant to allow younger kids to crash the pieces together and help older kids unleash their imaginations when creating monsters and vehicles. Johnson assured me 7-year-olds had no trouble building the sets in focus groups. “Durable” and “easy-to-build” were Johnson’s go-to expressions for describing Bionicle—both incredibly appealing terms to someone who has spent hours putting together Chima and superhero movie playsets just to watch them hopelessly fall apart minutes later. —Madeline