I’d like to wish a happy voyage to Leah, who is heading out to live in Denmark for the next two years, where she’ll be working more closely with the BIONICLE™ design team. I guess I cut it pretty close with my visit to meet her during my trip to Toy Fair.

Also, I’d like to extend my congratulations to Sabre, who I hear has been promoted. She’s been a really great resource for a lot of those pesky questions that I keep asking. Replacing her will be Carrie, who sent me a reply to a query I’d sent to Sabre a while back. It seems a lot of people have been desperately wanting to get their hands on some MATORANS, but the McD’s ones are discontinued and prohibitively expensive on the secondary market. Given how little design work would have to happen for more MATORANS to be released, and how popular they would be, it seems like a no-brainer to release them en masse to retail. Unfortunately, the as-yet-nameless one which is included with the BOXOR is the only one that we will be seeing this summer, making a whopping total of two that will have been released to the retail market. (And yes, she used the word ‘summer’, which makes me wonder if we might see some more towards the end of the year. Here’s hoping…) Anyways, if the design team is reading this, I’d just like to emphasize that the most important one to release is an ONU-KORONAN with a purple HAU. Got that? Pur. Ple. HAU. After that it’d be nice to see TAMARU and KOPEKE, since they are the only two members of TAKUA’s team that can’t be made with existing parts.