TTV Interviews Merlin P. Mann [Round Two] - Part 1
Hello everybody! Recently, TTV had the privilege to be able to sit down for another exclusive interview with the screenwriter of the BIONICLE 2015 animations, Merlin P. Mann! This time, we speak quite a lot about the Summer 2015 animations, his thoughts on his experience with the theme, and some observations on the future. You can check out the first part of the interview on Vessel or on YouTube; additionally, Part 2 is available for Vessel Early Access subscribers right now and will be made public on YouTube next week.
Contained within this post is a transcript of the first part of the interview. We really enjoyed being able to talk to Mr. Mann again, and we hope you all enjoy the interview!
Meso: Hello everybody, and welcome to our second interview with the BIONICLE 2015 screenwriter, Merlin P. Mann! We’ve got to make that distinction; how’s it going, Mr. Mann?
Merlin: For you Google guys out there, yeah, do make that distinction or you’ll end up with the wrong guy!
Ven: Also known as Merlin THE Mann!
Meso: Yes, this is the truth. How’s it going, Mr. Mann? It’s been a while.
Merlin: I’m doing great! It just started snowing where I’m at, so anything’s better than sitting outside, that’s for sure!
Ven: Lucky you.
Meso: Yeah, I know right, I’d kill for some snow.
Kahi: Well, I don’t know if I’d go that far, it might be a little bit of….
Meso: Snow means a lot to me, man, I live in the southern U.S. You know how many times it’s snowed in my life? TWICE.
Kahi: Wait, really? It snows just about every year over here.
Eljay: Meso, that’s kinda cold-hearted.
Meso: SO ANYWAY, yeah, today we are going to be discussing the BIONICLE 2015 animations once more, this time with a focus on the summer animations as well as, obviously, some of the shake-ups behind the scenes and the plans for next year that have been announced since our last talk with you.
Kahi: It’s like, there’s this huge drama behind the scenes with BIONICLE, crazy stuff happened.
Merlin: Well, I’ll see what stories I can kinda slip you. First of all, though, you’ll have to excuse me if I start crying at some point, because I’m going to get very emotional. This, for now, is probably the last of my involvement as a creator in the BIONICLE universe, and I really hope I get the chance again because, as I’ve said before, it’s been a heck of a ride and it’s been so great to interact with a fanbase like the BIONICLE fanbase. So, if I get a little mushy at times… bear with me.
Meso: Thank you for the warning, haha!
Kahi: Yeah… we’re very sad ourselves to hear that your involvement has come to an end. We really enjoyed being able to interact with you.
Meso; You have good social media presense; you’re active in the community!
Ven: Yeah, it’s very appreciated because it gives off the impression that they’re actually listening to us.
Merlin:I truly believe that is a great part of the future of storytelling in larger universes such as the BIONICLE universe. You have to be able to do that! When you look at stuff like the new Star Wars movie coming out, you can see how they interact with their fans and try to communicate and let people be a part of it. It’s such a central part of what storytelling is today, and you guys truly got it. So I hope there are going to be other people taking over and being able to communicate with you. I know this is something that pairs so well with the whole Lego virtue, which obviously is interaction and creativity, so I mean… when you tell stories from a Lego perspective, obviously you want to tell a story, but you also want to inspire the users to create their own story! That’s the whole point of Lego, that you give them something they can actually rebuild in any way they want, and that goes for the stories as well. So, I think social media presence is extremely important to the way we interact nowadays.
Ven: That’s a really nice way to look at it.
Meso: It definitely is, social media presence is very important. Before we get fully started with this interview, there are several things I would like to say as a… disclaimer. of sorts. Namely that for this interview we posted a topic on the TTV Message Boards at board.ttvpodcast.com asking for some fan submitted questions. We got a very good turn-out, we got about 40 questions. Obviously we cannot ask them all within the constraints of this particular interview, however we have gone through and filtered through them and figured out some that may be interesting, but also keep in mind that as the conversation flows naturally in our interview, we may ask some questions that other people coincidentally asked. Rest assured that we’re not trying to, like, rip you off or anything, but we are saving the fan questions for later on in the show once our questions are done. If some stuff gets repeated, don’t be offended, please.
Merlin: Great minds think alike.
Meso: Quite honestly, that’s about it, so we can go ahead and kick things off. I think a good place to start would be… because last time we interviewed you was during May, and at that point the first season had wrapped up and we hadn’t heard anything about season 2, we hadn’t even seen the trailer for it yet.
Merlin: I actually don’t remember when they started getting leaked, I mean, posted, but it was a while after that.
Meso: Well, now that season 2 and basically the entire first year of BIONICLE has wrapped up, what was the standout moment that you wrote for during the story?
Merlin: Well, obviously there were a lot. Personally, for me, it was the interaction with the story team and the animators and that whole work process. If we look at the story, and the story points where I really felt I could get into it… I’d probably have to say right about the end, specifically the final battle, the face-off with Kulta, because that was where I could fully translate the idea of what working together had meant. Not just working together, but actually being willing to sacrifice one’s self for each other. I think that whole idea of being willing to make a sacrifice is what defines a hero, so to me, that moment was the first moment where they really got to show themselves as heroes. So I’d say that’s probably my favorite moment.
Meso: It was definitely a pretty impactful moment. Character motivations and story points notwithstanding, it was a very impactful moment in the series because of how it was translated visually. In the animations, specifically, they conveyed that sense of desperation very well.
Eljay: Yeah, they definitely conveyed that impact when Kulta’s staff knocked all the Toa around.
Ven: And it was at that moment when you realized Kulta was the REAL DEAL.
Meso: Yeah, he was no LoSS, that’s for sure.
Ven: Real quick, I’ve been confused about that for the longest time and now I just got reminded of it… is Kulta his official name?
Merlin: Yes, actually, the name is in the story bible, so it’s been there all along. I’m not sure why it didn’t show up in other media. I don’t think we were actually given any directions other than using the other names they had and Kulta… well, the name was there, but it was just never used, which was somewhat odd, but then again none of the other characters had names at that point except for the Toa, so it was probably just a way of keeping things simple and I had assumed that these names would then pop up in other media because, with the animations, we had to be very simple with how much information we gave out because we didn’t want to confuse things anymore than they were already. Kulta is, as far as I know, at least, an official name.
Meso: Well thank you very much! It’s really good to get confirmation on that. The reason why there was confusion is because Kulta showed up in a Lego Club magazine, and that’s the only place we’ve ever seen it. It wasn’t actually used in the book that came out, Island of Lost Masks, however the Protectors got names in that book as a result of Ryder Windham, so there was confusion as to whether the name “Kulta” was canon or not.
Merlin: The Protector names… yeah, I have to admit, at that point I had already been out of the loop, so to speak, because we had already finished our part of the work. I thought that Kulta was going to show up in the book, so I was a bit surprised at that. The names of the Protectors were names that the writer there made up, so that was actually his invention.
Eljay: You didn’t ever talk to Ryder Windham, did you?
Merlin: No, I didn’t, I didn’t… I mean, I knew from you guys!
Meso: Amazing.
Merlin: No, I didn’t have any direct contact with him as a writer. It did turn out to be that he based his books directly on the scripts that we made, which is only natural because he had direct contact with the story team, so that made a lot of sense.
Meso: Yeah. Well, another thing I’m curious about… obviously Kulta had a name from the start, pretty much, the Protectors did not, and I assume the rest of the Skull Villains do not either, or else we would’ve seen them in otehr media. Now, we’ve gotten the set announcements for next year as they’ve shown up in Lego Club magazines, and we know that they’ve gone back to giving names to a large majority of the characters both in terms of set promotion and story. It’s not the weird split anymore where the sets receive generic titles and in-story they get actual names, and I was mainly curious if you had any insight into the behind the scenes process of that decision. Did they take a look at feedback and decide they were cool to put names back on the products and begin advertising them as such aggain because people won’t get confused? Or was this their plan all along, to start the first year with these titles and then slowly reintroduce the concept of named characters back in?
Merlin: I have to be honest, I do not know. The story bible initially did not hold a lot of these things, and I think that probably had a lot to do with wanting to keep it as open as possible, because they knew there were going to be a lot of new story writers that were going to come in and work with this. I think that actually worked very well and, as we said, to their advantage that they didn’t try to tie everything down. They knew that creative people were going to come in and work within this framework, so the story bible consisted mainly of guidelines and a lot of background information, especially dealing with the place and the story arc, but there was a lot of room for guys like me and the story time to play within, which was a great advantage. If there was a decision made that said “Let’s go with names,” I’m not sure, but I’m quite sure they have listened to the responses and reactions. They have had a lot of focus on that, so I’m quite sure they have seen that people really want names, so obviously this is something we want to give them. It’s speculation on my part, but I’m quite sure it has had some sort of effect.
Meso: It’s definitely a positive trend I’ve noticed ever since the theme’s revival.
Merlin: As we talked about the first time around, I think the idea was not to start it off too heavy. Not in order to dumb it down, but to start it off in such a way where everyone can join in, so to speak, and then see what kind of reactions there would be to the theme and to the storyline and stuff like that. I think the one main reaction that was there was “More!” Nobody can really… even if some fans may have been disappointed, as long as the fans are screaming for more, then you’re heading the right way, and I think expanding the platform where we tell the story on and what kind of detail can be given… all of that is moving in the right direction as far as I see it.
Meso: Yeah, we’re definitely in the same opinion as well. The theme has a good progression; it’s very interesting to see it grow and mature, because bviously we now know they have the Netflix show next year, The Journey to One… it’s been the biggest topic of discussion amongst us for the last couple of months. What does this mean for the future of theme and its increased budget and all that… it’s very interesting.
Merlin: Well, the only thing I would say is that… I don’t think the animations were ever supposed to do what the Netflix show can do. I used that expression before, sort of testing the waters and getting the Toa back in line, seeing if they’re still viable and if there’s still a market for it, and there most clearly is. The true story platform, of course, has to be something greater, and I feel that the Netflix platform probably has a very good chance of actually telling and communicating the story. I’m really looking forward to it.
Meso: I’m going to ask one more thing and then I’ll shut up for a minute and let some of the others ask some questions, but I have to do this one because you just brought it up. Do you have this knowledge of whether the Netflix show as planned from the start as something they wanted to do?
Merlin: At least I didn’t know about it, but I do assume these things are things they talk about over a longer period of time. The job that I was commissioned for and that Advance, the agency that did the animations, was commissioned for, was solely the online animations. The whole Netflix series was another commission, so to speak… it’s a project all on its own. Obviously, the Lego members at the story team are working together with whoever is making the Netflix show, and I have to admit I don’t remember who that is. It is a brand new setup.
Kahi: Alright. Yeah, it seemed to me that would be the case, because it looked, from the promotional imagery, that it conveyed a different studio and style than anything Lego has really done before. Especially with Netflix, I don’t know how original content with them works because it’s such a new thing. The only original content I’ve seen from Netflix so far has been live action stuff, and obviously they’re not going to do a live action BIONICLE thing.
Meso: What are you talking about? That’d be amazing! Live action BIONICLE has to happen.
Ven: Just a bunch of people running around in Toa costumes.
Meso: Or the old concept of where a human kid stumbles into the BIONICLE universe and becomes, like… the greatest hero.
Kahi: So, can I ask you something about the timetable? Like, with season 1 and season 2… when were they being worked on in relation to what we got, and how early were you working on the animations?
Merlin: Well, work had obviously been underway for quite some time, I mean the Bible was made out before that, but I got hooked on the project sometime during the spring of 2014, so it was actually fairly short notice before they had to be finished. I was pulled in very specifically as a screenwriter, so I had to transform the storylines that were there into actual screenplays, so presumably a lot of work had gone on before that. I think the first season took about 3 months to do from my part, when I started working on it, and probably the same for the second, so all in all, over a period of 6 months with a little time in between the two.
Kahi: Do you know when you could say you were done with the scripts? Would it be in 2014?
Merlin: Well, actually, instead of just guessing, I could just go and look at my files here. I think the first… version, the first draft of the Winter half was May 2014 and I was finished with that in about August 2014. Then, the summer wave… I started that probably about Winter time, so during December we started churning out drafts and finished in March fo 2015. The last time I wrote anything on here was March 2015. So that’s been a while! I miss it, I miss it so much… it was really fun.
Meso: Yeah, I can only imagine.
Kahi: Writing for BIONICLE and writing screenplays must be great experience.
Merlin: It was awesome. Yeah… those were the days.
Kahi: Were they any like… you spoke specifically about Lego listening to feedback and getting back to you. Season 1, when you wrote that, BIONICLE hadn’t been announced, but after it had been announced and you were writing the summer wave, did Lego ever come to you and say “Hey, the fans really latch onto this and they really like this?”
Merlin: Well… not really in relationship to Lego as such, but within the story group, I mean… we talked about that all the time. It was part of the conversation. So we’d talk about it and say “How bout this? Maybe this would work?” and stuff like that. It made a big difference from the winter wave to the summer wave was that, as we were working on the summer wave, we already had some sort of feedback on the Winter wave, which was amazing. It’s always like that, you think that if we only knew then we know now… I’d say that having this response and seeing the power of the BIONICLE community, you almost want to start all over again adn try to make it even better this time around. I do truly hope and I have no reason to doubt that this is an experience that they will bring into the Netflix show, so I’m sure a lot of the discussions we’ve had in the story team will somehow translate to what is going to go on screen there.
Meso: Eljay, you got anything to ask? You’ve been pretty silent.
Ven: For once, you’re pretty quiet.
Eljay: I’ve just been thinking up moments where I can just jump in, say some stupid pun, and then get shunned.
Meso: That is what you typically do.
Eljay: Had there ever been a point during production where you really wanted to put in a reference or some comment that a character made, or even focus on a character more, but it would end up conflicting with what the story team thought up?
Merlin: Not really… the only real constraint was time. The only real constraint was that we had to keep the stories within these 90 second limits and especially also the fact that we were not… we weren’t sure how people were going to be watching these. I mean, the true fans would just watch them from one end to the other, but we had to be ready for people seeing these in strange, random orders or just seeing glimpses… the whole point is that the kind of story we wanted to tell, obviously we had to tell the story arc and the fundamental story of BIONICLE, but also, as I mentioned before, Lego’s mission is to start stories of their own. That way, whoever builds with Lego or plays with Lego can start making their own stories. That means that we have to inspire storytelling on the parts of the users and fans as well. This means that, for instance, if you thought that the young part of your audience could, in some way, be inspired in some way by this 90 second clip they saw while not necessarily being interested in following the entire story, you still have to have some sort of point or action or showing part of what the toy can do within these 90 second slots. So it was a lot of things we wanted to do at the same time other than simply telling the story, which was, of course, a great and fun challenge for a guy like me who is very used to working within a three act structure and having very clear character arcs or whatever. The one thing you have to understand with the story of a company like Lego is, obviously, the toy comes before the story. Obviously. The play and the interaction comes before the story, which, to an idosyncratic storyteller like myself, can be very annoying at times because, like, “I want to control everything!” That’s not the point of Lego. The point of Lego is that, yes, you can inspire and show how some things CAN be, but you also have to make it so open and so inspiring that people can take it and do whatever they want to do with it. So, these were some of the constraints OR challenges OR opportunities, if you will.
Eljay: That makes perfect sense. For a long time, we’ve understood that the toy has to come before the story and that the story kinda enhances several aspect of the experience that Lego has provided.
Meso: Lego sells sets, not stories was always the mantra of a certain group of people after BIONICLE got canceled.
Eljay: Speaking of the story, there’s been a lot of controversy surrounding certain imagery within the animations, specifically the old generation 1 Mask of Time.
Ven: Hah, controversy! Yeah, there’s riots in the streets, protests all over! It’s like “Grah, mask of time is not real!”
Eljay: All of those being there… did you have any input into that kind of thing and some of the other references sprinkled throughout, or was that kind of an animator deal?
Merlin: I have to admit that was outside my reach, unfortunately. There’s a lot of that I would want to take credit for, but no, other people can take credit for that. I think that was a very clear choice, though, from Lego’s side and the story team’s side that, whenever they felt right, and whenever we want to play with that, we can bring in and bounce off some of the things that make sense to us. I got a few things through there, but the really important stuff that they put in there was a result of the animators.
Eljay: Fair enough, that answers that! Kahi, Ven, either of you two?
Kahi: This one’s a bit more of a… it’s something that I kinda mentioned on twitter jokingly, but uh… that lever though, right?
*laughter*
Kahi: Kopaka sure does know how to push Tahu’s levers.
Merlin: Okay, okay, okay, it’s just us here, right? No one else listening in.
Kahi: Completely private conversation.
Merlin: In all fairness, I have to admit that was a BIT of a mistake that the lever didn’t make it in there but but BUT I think I retconned the whole thing because he DOES hit a button, that’s right, but the BUTTON underneath it hits a lever, you just can’t see it!
*laughter*
Ven: WOW.
Kahi: So the button pushes the lever underneath it?
Merlin: That’s right!
Kahi: Totally makes sense.
Eljay: That’s incredible.
Meso: That was a funny episode.
Merlin: I loved writing that episode, it was a very fun episode to write. It was actually rewritten quite a few times, because we were getting overly ambitious when we started writing it and the animators were like “Chill; we can’t put all of what you want in there right now.”
Kahi: We don’t have that lever technology.
Merlin: That’s right!
Meso: Here’s the real, important, hard hitting question. The Toa fall down a pit after their fight with Skull Slicer; they get stuck in rocks. Skull Slicer also falls down a pit, so what became of him?
Merlin: What became of him… well, this was the part that we wanted to communicate more clearly. There’s a reason it’s called “Hammer Flush,” it’s because you get flushed out of the stadium which you can also see on the markings and carvings on the wall there. So, actually, he’s flushed out into… you know, the whole city seems to be not floating but rather on top of a bottomless pit. So he gets flushed out into the bottomless pit, in a way, so he does not go the same way that the Toa go when they crash into the ground. I can understand if you were a bit confused about that because you can’t really tell that from the animations, but really that’s what it is. You get flushed out by water actually, you get flushed out of the big holes in the side.
Meso: So what, do they just float down the bottom… whereever that is, and they’re just exiled forever? Is that what happens?
Merlin: Well, they were hard fellas back then, I mean this was thousands of years ago. They didn’t pull punches!
Meso: Hammer Flush is serious business.
Merlin: Yeah, you either get the gold medal or you get exiled.
Meso: Well, I’ve gotta take it back to Skull Slicer for a second. You mentioned that Kulta’s name was actually in the story bible, but there was also a much smaller bit of controversy regarding Skull Slicer. We got some details about him, also from the same Lego Club magazine that is also, to this day, the only place that has used the name Kulta, which stated that Skull Slicer was controlled by LoSS. I was wondering if that was ever part of the story bible or if the actually thing that people assumed before that, which was that he was another of Kulta’s servants, is canon?
Merlin: I have to admit that, at this point, I don’t really remember. I can say that I don’t recall seeing a reference that talked about Skull Slicer being controlled by LoSS, which would really make no sense in the way that we wrote it. The way we told the story was that he was part of this undead army that was controlled by Kulta, but there was one thing that told of him previously being one of these masters of Hammer Flush, and he was a resurrection of that. He was also sort of a jester, a joker like type, so he wasn’t really taking any orders, he was just spinning his own game, really. A lot of that… we didn’t really have time to communicate that backstory, but he was a really fun character and, if we actually had a TV show or whatever…
Meso: We could’ve had a whole episode about him!
Merlin: Definitely.
Meso: The main point of contention with the LoSS thing is a common theory that the person who wrote that article for the Lego Club Magazine may have seen that he was wearing a Skull Spider mask and made that 1 to 1 connection and just put that into the magazine.
Merlin: Again, I’m not sure, but I don’t remember seeing that in the Bible at any point. In the progress of the story, it wouldn’t make sense. He could’ve been at one point; that would explain why he’s more of a loose cannon now, he’s not being controlled any longer.
Meso: Fair point actually… what if he was a slave of LoSS, and then he got killed, and then he was reanimated, and now his mind is just scrambled completely.
Ven: Scrambled to the point where he just feels like acting a jerk for the sake of being a jerk.
Meso: Yeah, he just takes Lewa’s mask and laughs and he hops around… that’s his evil plan.
Merlin: Well, I mean, if your line of work involved either winning or being exiled, you’d probably get pretty wack as well. Same with the Gladiators, they were probably pretty messed up too.
Eljay: You know, Meso, that was the Lego Club Magazine, right? Who do we know who manages the Lego Club Magazine?
Meso: Hmmm… maybe we should take this to the Lego Message Boards and ask Greg Farshtey?
Eljay: Greg Farshtey back for his revenge!
Meso: Spreading misinformation in the Lego Club Magazine.
Eljay: Hey, that’s our job!
Ven: I do have a question. What was the most challenging episode to communicate your ideas into? Does that make sense?
Merlin: Yeah, it does… well, uh… I mean if we look at the summer wave, I think probably after the Hammer Flush sequence where they go underground. We wanted that to be a place in the story where things got a bit more creepy and a bit slower, a bit more eerie, so we actually had planned a sequence that was the Toa wandering underground in the tunnel system. It’s why they pop up in the graveyard later on. We had quite a sequence where we wanted the Toa to form more character bonds off of each other and also to communicate the anxiety and thrill of the thing. Obviously, it turned out that we did not have the time to do all of what we wanted. We also had other constraints so we ended up making it more of a recap episode, or at least they started thinking about their own role and what they were doing here. Up until then, they had pretty much just followed the leads up ahead of them so they never had the chance to stop and question what they were doing. That’s what the sequence there was trying to do. The way we wrote it initially would have taken up at least two episodes, and we just had to cram it into one episode.
Ven: That’s unfortuante because that sounds really awesome.
Kahi: Were there any other moments? I think that’s one thing the fans would find fascinating, stuff that you wanted to put into the animations or stuff you wanted to flesh out but you just couldn’t. Are there any other moments you can think of?
Merlin: Obviously we would have found it fun to expand on Hammer Flush or Skull Slicer or stuff like that, but this is one of those obvious places where everyone else can pitch in. We’ll give you a glimpse or a hint of a character, and if you find this interesting, go for it! Tell the story, play the scenes… Skull Slicer especially would be fun for small, closed scenarios for kids to play out. Sometimes you have to leave some of the goodies to the audience instead of eating it all up yourself. Other than that, I mean… well, we actually did write a longer Skull Basher fight which was fun! It was really fun, but, and I have to say this… it was also a bit repetitive to have a huge boss battle right before… the huge boss battle. So, in the end, it didn’t really make sense to have all that there, so that was cut in order to meet the time limits. I also do think that from a story perspective, you don’t want to have a big battle just before a big battle, so I think that all in all it makes sense. It was a fun battle, though.
Ven: That’s interesting, because I’m kind of imagining it working both ways, the way that you guys were initially planning it and the way it ended up now. Like, say, the Toa do get into this fight with Skull Basher and it’s a long battle and whatever, it’s a little drawn out, but then they beat him and now they have the confidence “Oh yeah, we beat that guy, took a little effort but we got him!” Then they go up to Skull Grinder with that confidence and they get smacked in the face.
Merlin: I think you hit the hammer on the nail there because we wanted them to approach Kulta with this enormous confidence that they knew the code now, now they know what they had to do. We had played on the whole “working together” theme and the final point was really “Yeah, you have to work together, but you also have to be willing to sacrifice.” The whole point was that you can’t always work together for selfish reasons, you have to work together for a higher purpose. On a thematic level, that was the point we were trying to make.
Meso: I have to make a comment on the Skull Villains, and it’s probably a pointless question because you probably do not have the answers that I seek, but I have to try. In the story, both in the animations and the book, Ekimu is written as having known about Skull Basher and Skull Grinder, at least in some capacity. In the book he specifically mentions “They call him Skull Grinder” and “They call him Skull Basher” and that’s always perturbed me.
Kahi: Who is “they?”
Meso: Yeah, first of all, who is “they” and secondly, do you know if, perhaps, the Skull Villains existed in some capacity before Ekimu went into his… endless sleep/coma.
Merlin: Well, the whole point is that while he is in his coma his body is in a coma-like state but his mind is still active. He is, through specific masks, able to communicate and listen in. This is not specifically underlined in the animations, but this is very much what the whole “Ekimu speaking to the Toa through their masks” thing was about was that his mind was actually alive, and had been alive all along, so he has seen the progress of things even though he has been in his comatose state. He wouldn’t know everything, though; the right mask would have to be there for him to listen or see what would happen, so he’s sort of like… I don’t know, he’s sort of like the internet, but he needs the consoles around to actually make contact.
Meso: So does this psychic link only work with masks that he himself had made?
Merlin: Not necessarily masks that he made, but I would think the masks would have to have… I don’t know, because it’s not like he could communicate with the normal villagers, it would have to be special power masks.
Meso: I had a thought that if he could see through Makuta’s Mask of Control, then perhaps he would see Makuta naming his creatures or servants, giving them titles.
Merlin: I would say that’s a very fair observation, yes. I cannot comment on that though, because… yeah.
Kahi: I feel like Makuta named all of the creatures like Skull Slicer, Basher, etc. but he named them such terrible names because he doesn’t have the Mask of Creation and he can’t think of anything.
Meso: He’s not creative enough! Boom, there we go! The reason he wants the Mask of Creation is so he can write better fanfiction!
Kahi: He’s like “Alright, well, Skull… Grinder? You have grinding things, right?”
Ven: “Skull Basher? You bash things, got it.”
Meso: Beware the stinger tail. By the way, amazing. Great choice.
Merlin: Yeah, I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself.
Meso: Of all the references you could have possibly made, I’m glad that made it in.
Kahi: Did you see the source material, such as the movies and stuff? Did you watch that before you started writing?
Eljay: It wasn’t in the BIONICLE movies.
Kahi: Oh, it wasn’t?
Meso: Beware My Stinger Tail was just a blurb on the 2009 website. All the Glatorian had their own quotes and Vorox had that one, which was ironic because the Vorox never spoke once in the actual story and the Vorox is a species, so…
Merlin: I have to admit I don’t even know when I picked up on that. Some of these things are like memes or whatever, they just get their own life. It was something we joked about a lot in the story team, we talked about the stinger tails and I was like “We have to put them in!” so I snuck them in there.
Kahi: I know it’s a TV Trope, one of the few tropes named after BIONICLE.
Meso: Of all the things… well, that and the Master of Air joke were the best references.
Merlin: Thank you, I’m very happy about that. I actually had to fight a bit for that, only because I had written sort of a setup for him to come up with that joke that fit with one way of that episode going. Then we changed some things in the episode and these things just weren’t happening, so I had to be like “How can I get this back in? I need this reference!”
Meso: It’s very important! I’m glad it got in, it was a very funny moment.
Eljay: I got one. So, writing the first half of these animations… Tahu was the focus. The second half, we were introduced to the Toa as a team. Out of all the Toa, which was your favorite, and which did you have the hardest time writing?
Merlin: Hmm… that’s actually a difficult question, because when you go in and out of the characters, at one point you hate all of them and at another you love all of them. Looking back, the one I find most underdeveloped is Gali and I would like to go back and try to give her more. A lot of it, sometimes, was coincidence because you start out an episode and you have a lot of great ideas for what all the characters can do. Then you look at it and say “Well, we can’t have everybody doing everything” so we have to start cutting some things, and things are often cut to what fits the best to each other. I wrote several scenes or sequences where Gali got to do her thing, but they just… in the end, they just ended up not fitting in so I was a bit… I dunno, I wanted to do more work on her. I think Pohatu probably ended up being the one that was easier to write. Him or Kopaka, because they just got into a character that was just… you knew this character so well you knew what he was going to say next.
Eljay: Would you have a favorite Toa or character out of the group?
Merlin: No, that would be hard. I would think the cliche here would be to start talking about them as your children and how you can’t really choose between them, but after being a father to many children, I know that there are some children that just really piss you off no matter what. And other times you love them all, so it’ll always be like that, but I dunno… I think Pohatu was the one that surprised me the most. I didn’t really know in the beginning what type of character he would turn in to, so everytime it seemed like he fits in really well being this way.
Kahi: Did you know he was going to have an Australian accent when you wrote him?
Merlin: No, I had nothing to do with the voice acting or the other choices made there, the direction of the voices.
Ven: Or the whole Batman thing.
Merlin: Obviously, the boomerang weapons he had kinda lend themselves towards an Australian thing, but there were no notes in the script about him.
Ven: Crikey mate, beware the stinger tail, mate!
Merlin: That’s not a tail, this is a tail!
Meso: It’s been a pretty crazy ride, the year of 2015.
Eljay: Thankfully we can all agree, out of that ride-
Meso: No, don’t even say it. Lewa is not the best.
Ven: You really want to bring this here? Now? In front of Merlin Mann?
Eljay: Absolutely! He’d be able to clarify!
Meso: Do you want to get into another half hour long debate about whether Lewa killed or knocked down the Skull Warriors? Because we can totally do that.
Eljay: Yes, okay, that is actually something I’d like to ask. So in the animations, Lewa, at the beginning of season 2, swoops in. BAM! Knocks all the Skull Warriors down into the ground and allegedly that’s the beginning and the end of it. He then swoops down and lands on two. When you wrote that, did you intend for him to take out that entire row of Skull Villains, or they got dropped down and the rest of the Toa kinda mopped ‘em up?
Meso: RIDICULOUSLY POINTLESS QUESTION.
Merlin: No, I think this is a very important question and I’m very happy you brought it up. It’s been… I’ve really been looking forward to… no, he’s supposed to kill off all the archers. He’s supposed to swoop all the archers. There are other Skull Warriors on the ground that the others sort of… have to take care of, but he’s teh one that gets all the archers.
Eljay: SO MESO!
Meso: Ryder Windham disagrees with you.
Eljay: Well, Merlin P. Mann agrees with me!
Merlin: I haven’t read the book yet, so…
Kahi: Or you could just listen to our show called Book Club on Vessel, at vessel.com/thettvchannel! Shameless plug!
Merlin: I’ve really been looking forward to that, but I figured I should read the book before I listen to the podcasts. Unless it’s possible to hear the podcast without the books?
Ven: We summarize it for the viewers, but I’m not sure that’s how you’d want to hear it.
Meso: I think you’re pretty well attuned to the source material, so…
Kahi: Yeah… the book is basically the script from the animations, so…
Meso: 9 times out of 10 it’s a direct transcript in the later half of the book.
Kahi: A lot of your exact dialogue is used in the book, actually.
Merlin: So I’ve heard! It’s kinda funny. I’m happy about that, obviously, if you’ve written something and someone thinks it communicates what’s needed then that’s cool, but again… I have to say that, I mean, it was written for the very specific medium that we had at hand, which was the 90-second webisodes. So some of this dialogue was not really… wouldn’t really fit into a literary context.
Kahi: That’s kinda what we said as well, yeah. They worked well for the animations and I think they got everything across very well, but when you’re reading it in a book, it’s a little….
Meso: It felt like there were plenty of times where, since they weren’t limited by such a strict time constraint, there could have been some more detail given here or there.
Merlin: Well, I have to admit again, I haven’t read the books and am really sorry that I haven’t read them. I do plan on reading them, though. I think it’s probably one of the great places of teling stories, obviously. I mean, I write books as well, I’m a novel writer, and I love that medium. Obviously the story that you tell in 90-second webisodes has to be much more visual, has to be much more action-oriented, but I think… I hope they keep doing the books and they’re going to do Graphic Novels as well, right? When are they coming out?
Meso: The next book, Book #2 and Graphic Novel #1 are on the 29th of December.
Merlin: Good, because again, it’s about telling the story, yes, but it’s also about inspiring people out there and you can inspire them on so many levels. I’m very happy that Lego is trying to play on different platforms, because it’s not just about getting the story out there, it’s about getting the universe and the world out there, and inspiring people to play within this world.
Meso: That is really the end goal of Lego; like you mentioned, the stories are the framework, the example, one possible scenario…
Merlin: Yes, and also, I’ve had people ask me how I react to the fact that others, especially online, have been critical and have a lot of other stories they want to tell and how do I react to that and how does it make me feel? It makes me feel great. Whenever I read that people have given such thought… there’s a video on YouTube of some guy who’s going through all the things he thought were done wrong in BIONICLE 2015, and he says a lot of really intelligent things about storytelling in general and starts coming up with his own stories, he really creates something! I could obviously see that as a criticism of the work I’ve done, but I really see it as a tribute to the creativity that Lego inspires. You feel there’s so much you can do within this world… there’s no one right answer, but rather limitless possibilities. The more people that start doing their own versions, doing fanfiction, play within this world… the better.
Ven: That’s a really good way to look at it… you know your thing means a lot when people are already thinking about how it could be better and really analyzing it…
Merlin: Yeah, and of course, I have to say that some people are idiots too.
*Laughter*
Merlin: Specifically within the BIONICLE fanbase and I mean, you guys know this, there’s always some troll that’ll say one thing or another, and they’re not in the story for real as they just want to make problems. The dedicated fans, though, and you can tell so easily… the ones who really feel wholeheartedly about it, and they have good or bad points… they may have terrible suggestions to what you could do with the story, but you can see that they put thought and heart into it, and that’s what it’s all about.
Meso: Very, very true… alright.
Eljay: Meso, unless there’s anything else, do you want to get into a few fan questions?
Written by Meso, 12/9/15