Welcome back to It Came From The Attic!, the second in a this series about items from the attic of Mark of MoD. For those of you who don’t know, I am Mark of MoD and I was a Contributing Editor to Mask of Destiny from 2001 to 2008. I was asked to return to Mask of Destiny to help celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the site, and I am hanging around now as an Editor Emeritus, which means I get to continue to post here occasionally.

This time around we are looking at a pair of masks that are quite possibly the most valuable in my collection. It is hard to determine the value of certain items sometimes. Just because someone puts an item up on eBay or BrickLink for some ridiculous sum does not mean that anyone is ever going to buy it at that price. But for rare items where sales are infrequent and there is very little history, immediate replacement cost (the amount of money you would spend to replace an item today, without waiting for a better deal to come along) is sometimes the only reasonable guess.

As an aside, I would like to point out that just because someone purchased an item for an outrageous amount does not guarantee a future high-priced sale either. Two real-world cases outside of BIONICLE come to mind. The first case involves some puzzlingly high-priced purchases of iOS apps on Apple’s App Store.

Back before Apple accepted advertising on the App Store, unsavory developers would sometimes rig a sale of a what would normally be an app priced at $0.99 for $10,000.00 (the highest price you could assign to an app at the time). Why? The answer was to launch their app to the top of the “Highest Grossing X App” list, where X was some category in the App Store that typically had small volumes of sales.

People would see that app at the top of that list and then buy the app — the app having been priced back down to $0.99 in the interim — thinking it must be really good. In reality, the developer had sold the app to themselves or a trusted third party to whom they had given the $10,000 to purchase the app. The developer would get back $7,000 from Apple for the sale, effectively having paid $3,000 to Apple to feature their app at the top of the list.

The second example is that the same type of thing is going on today with NFTs, except there is no need for a trusted third-party (transactions are anonymous, so you can sell from one of your wallets to another one of your wallets to artificially inflate the “value” of your NFT without necessarily being found out), and there is no middleman taking a 30% cut. Anonymity also means you are less likely to be flagged for potential money laundering. As always, Caveat Emptor!

Back to the masks. I wrote “pair of masks” because I only possess two, but those two are really part of a trio: the LEGOLAND California Maniac Clubhouse Hau Masks that come in green, red, and blue.

You can see I only have the red and blue masks.

You can find the parts lists for the mask kits (168 bricks total per mask) and the (one-page illustration) instructions online, of course. A completed mask is 17 bricks tall by 18 studs wide and 2 studs thick, plus two more studs deep if you count the “feet” that stick out the back and stabilize the mask at a slight tip.

I was able to cobble together about 80% of a green mask using parts from a couple of buckets of bricks that, you guessed it, also came from the attic. The rest I filled in with other colors, making what looks like a headband just above the eyes. Imagine a green Tahu aerobics instructor, circa the early 1980s.

So, what are they worth? If LEGO were to sell the kits, I estimate each would sell for between $20 and $30. Complete “sets” (most likely sold as completed masks without instructions) currently are for sale on eBay for between $60 and $90 each. You can probably cobble together all of the parts from BrickLink for somewhere in the middle there, depending on your choice of color.

But an unopened kit like those above? I have only been able to find those on BrickLink for €400, which means they are quite possibly my most valuable masks.

BONUS CONTENT
Imatron has been encouraging me to answer questions publicly here on MoD, so this is your chance to #AMA (Ask Mark Anything). If you have a question, send me an email, hit me up on the Discord server, or just leave it in a comment to any of my posts.

There probably won’t be enough questions for a separate series, but I’ll sprinkle them in whenever I get a chance. This post’s question is from Imatron:

What was the most out of the way place Mark traveled to see or collect something for the site?

The answer is LEGOLAND California, a distance of about 2350 miles. I did not personally get the mask kits from there, but I did go ride the BIONICLE Blaster and enjoy a drink in this cup that also recently came from the attic!