How I found a previously undiscovered Lego Bionicle brain (part 2).
And rewrote Bionicle history in the process (how modest)
Hey, before we begin, I want to tell you that there is a PART 1 to this newsletter post, as it was HUGE and contained lots of new information about Bionicle part hunting. You should read that part first, then return here.
(both those links do the same thing, I just thought it looked good)
Okay, so you’ve just read part 1. Now for part 2, the big reveal.
Now, onto the brains.
(Above you can see a proto head (left) with a regular head)
In 2001 the Toa were the only good-guy (lol) characters with two separate pieces for the head. They had a face/skull and a brainstalk/eyestalk. What they’re called depends on who you ask or what mood I am in. These two pieces also clicked together FOREVER, meaning that removing them was not intended.
(This guy stole my wife)
Someone eventually worked out how to remove a brain from its skull safely, but even today if you buy a face on its own on Bricklink, there’s a chance someone chiselled the brain out and there’s damage (happened to me with a lot of 72 of them in 2016, but the seller refunded me so woo free heads (I needed 72 for a mask display which I never finished, my Lego fans here will understand)).
I had previously found unreleased colours of some technic parts on Bricklink, but none of them were interesting to me. I wanted Bionicle parts.
I knew for example that a Tan Kraahkan exists. I almost bought one off a private seller some years before, but I had no money.
I kept searching. I heard a rumour about someone in the community having the trans blue Rau that was meant to come in the Manas sets before they were finalised, and I set my sights on that. I talked to about ten or fifteen people about their private collections and heard of one guy who had pictures on a disposable camera of some Bionicle parts but didn’t have the parts. I never saw the pictures, so who knows? I had heard about prototype Nui Rama as well, but I never thought I’d find them and perhaps that is why I didn’t. Perhaps the limitations in my own mind and imagination of the future were what was limiting me… maybe.
(Above you can see the manas prototypes. That white motor and grey motor with tan base exist somewhere… and I need them. The manas on the right (yes that’s the correct plural pronoun) has a tan* Toa head also… which is an unreleased part. It’s interesting that these guys had a claw snapping function that was removed for simplicity in later models. I’d love for instructions to these. Maybe I should try my hand at making them based off this single image. I think it showed up in some Canadian promotional mini-magazines as well, maybe)
*edit. In my original post I mistakenly thought the head was yellow. Upon further inspection it appears to be tan, with a yellow brain, as the tan colour matches that of the bottom of the left manas.
The wishy washy bit.
I am an atheist. But that doesn’t mean weird stuff never happens to me. In fact, I have a few psychics in my family and circle of friends, and all of them think I’m pretty freaky sometimes. I always want a scientific explanation for things, but I’m also a sci-fi author so let’s be a bit more imaginative. Let’s go all fan-fiction.
Maybe I have another tube plugged into the Matrix, maybe everyone else around me is just not as good at pattern recognition, but something told me that I would find prototypes on eBay in the next six months if I just set my mind to it.
So I did. I got manifesting, and by that I mean I listened to a hunch and started feverishly pawing through eBay listings EVERY DAY for three hours at a time. You can’t manifest by sitting down doing nothing, because manifesting is just you setting a goal and working towards it, it’s just rebranded to appeal to hippies. I think I might be a hippy.
And the hunch was right.
After scrolling through what I estimate to be thousands of listings, I found a small, dusty looking listing that honestly looked like it might smell. It was really awfully photographed, looking more like a badly made Chinese takeaway menu than a picture of some Lego. I could hardly tell what was photographed, but something stood out.
Someone’s kid had coloured in a Toa brain. It was a milky white, not transparent.
I had seen someone do this before to some Toa Nuva masks so they looked like the rare silver variants… and two of the masks in that lot had been legitimate and not painted… so maybe this was something special? Maybe it was a miscast or misprint or something?
Because it would be a nightmare to colour in something like that yourself.
I began to doubt myself.
But then I zoomed in on a green Toa head in one decrepit corner of the second photo.
The eyebrows of this Toa skull had been shaven down, but why?
Quickly I remembered the VooDooheads, Bionicle’s ill-fated prototype line. I remembered a video I saw somewhere, and an image of a very early Toa in someone’s kitchen corner (this is where I imagine the brown Roborider body from before comes in, I think they used those for proto Toa before the Toa torsos were complete).
Something told me I had to buy this listing. So I messaged the seller and grabbed it.
It was another huge Lego listing. It was densely packed however, and arrived in a shopping back inside a bin bag inside a cardboard box that had been kicked around the mail sorting room. The box and outer bag had ruptured, and as I took it inside it tore a final time, almost leaking its contents through the final third membrane. I gasped and my mum laughed but then looked a bit nervous. I had told her I had got what I thought were prototypes, and now it looked like some of them could have gotten lost in transit.
But they were safe. I lowered the battered bag to the living room floor and disembowelled it. Now, pleasing my caveman ancestors, I rooted through the entrails until I squealed like a little boy at Christmas.
I was right. I had a prototype head in my hand.
And it had the eyes inside.
So the seller put the eyes in before shipping?
I looked further. Nope. I had another set of the eyes on their own.
This was a tremendous win. It has been over a year and I am still trying to move the rest of the Lego that this came in, but I got prototypes! Prototypes that nobody else knew about until I uncovered them.
Because they glow in the dark!!!
(It is very hard to photograph these parts without the proper lens)
(That’s better)
And it is a potent glow too. Reminiscent of 2005’s Visorak minifigures, but obviously more solid. I imagine that like later opaque glowing parts, these brains are perhaps too brittle to be shoved into a permanent socket by little kids. Or maybe they just didn’t make it past the final beta test? They seem to be made of a very similar material to the glowing discs in Roborider Onyx, and they were likely made in the same year. The plastic on Onyx’s wheels is a different, grainy quality compared to standard Bionicle brains, and the glowing proto brain feels sort of like marble or a pearl.
So that’s my theory on what they are, briefly.
Bionicle is no stranger to glowing pieces. They were first introduced in 2004 in the form of the kanoka discs, then a single opaque stud in Roodaka’s mouth in 2005, then the Piraka’s teeth from 2006 (Bionicle baddies have serious, radiation-based dental issues) and later in glowing armour on Takadox, Nocturn, and some other bits I’m probably forgetting.
But glowing parts weren’t around in 2001. They certainly were not in the original six Toa, who each had their own translucent brainstalk colour (although notably, four out of six of these react strongly to UV light, these being trans yellow, trans neon green, trans neon orange, and trans medium blue – the same colour that an unreleased Kaukau came in (we’ll save that for another post)). The head is also interesting. It seems as though the Toa would have had a smoother brow ridge and a smaller forehead bump. The head also lacks the Lego logo on the back (more trivia, final release heads come in two slightly different forms. The only difference is what side of the back of the head the Lego copyright sits on).
The conclusion
So my glowing Bionicle brain was, and still is, something that a lot of people don’t know about. The same goes for the prototype head. They aren’t on Brickshelf or BZpower or any of the other places you might expect to find people’s collections, and that’s partially because I didn’t feel like getting attention for it until now. I’ve had an interesting few years, and I try to keep on top of my Instagram messages on my Bionicle account but I often forget for weeks at a time or lag behind because there are so many.
So I’m posting about it today, here, somewhere it is less likely to get washed away by other content and where I can write a long post about it.
I got my Bionicle brains by stalking eBay. That’s the short version. But they probably won’t show up again because of how rare the parts are (and even if they do, you may face a fierce bidding war or dishonest sellers, as I have once before). But if you’re after misprints or unreleased colours of parts, eBay is your best bet. If you can swipe in fast, you can get them cheap, or just in with far too many kilograms of other Lego you don’t actually want. I think that’s a fair trade.
Remember, things are only worth what someone is willing to pay for them. For me that price was quite reasonable, but only because I am self-employed and have the time and resources to pour away into some amateur private investigation, so I could swoop in and grab it before anyone else. I also took a risk, which many people can’t afford to do (and really, it’s better to be safe than sorry with financial risks).
And to the orange Kakama.
I will find you.
And I will buy you.
Afterword
My goal in collecting, in all honesty, is to have a small handful of treasures I can one day put in a glass cabinet and show to guests. Right now what little I’ve kept is in safe storage, and I miss it. It holds no real value, but it means something to me.
If you liked this blog, you’ll love the next Bionicle post I have planned. It’s going to be about my theories on the prototypes I have found, and go in-depth to explain why I think these parts exist. You should subscribe to see that, because otherwise you’ll have to remember to come back and you probably will forget. I know I would.
I’ll be posting Bionicle fan-fiction eventually, and bits on publishing and science fiction and how to write books, and generally just things I find inspiring or interesting. It’s worth checking out, I think so anyway.
-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Phillip / Grumblebricks / Paisleyprintauthor
That sounds insane out of context. Which is on-brand.