Citations › Citation ID: 94

C94. BOOK: David C. Robertson, Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry (Crown, 2013), p. 157.

The core of the Bionicle building platform, and a defining characteristic of the toy, was the newly created ball-and-socket connector. With this mechanism, a character’s leg was topped off with a ball-shaped joint, which could be inserted into the hollow socket of the character’s hip. The leg could then be easily rotated. For the first time, boys could build LEGO figures that featured fully articulated heads and limbs, which added a degree of realism that couldn’t be found in more static plastic beings such as the minifig. This multibillion-dollar breakthrough put the “action” into this buildable action figure and ushered in a swarm of knockoffs from the likes of Mega Bloks and Hasbro. Thus the Bionicle building platform took the System of Play in a new direction while at the same time remaining faithful to it.

The Ball and Socket was introduced alongside Bionicle.