https://www.tumblr.com/quohotos/816555908508385280/why-do-you-wanna-kill-this-guy?source=share
Hey. 🫵. Uhh. I had that toy. What the heck is this thing? I never knew as a kid, somehow it just got mixed in with my bionicles.
That there is lego set number 8311 GORM, from the disastrous failure of a line Galidor Defenders of the Outer Dimension
Youtube channel Slow Start has a great breakdown of the topic, but even that isn't fully comprehensive.
Basically, lego as a company is family owned and no one in the family was an accountant and so in the late 90s they started to bleed money left and right and the higher ups were convinced that it was because kids weren't interested in bricks anymore.
They specifically saw action figures as what kids were in to and they needed to make them. In the 90s they tried pivoting the technic line to be more of an action figure oriented line with expiriments like Throwbots, roboriders, and cyber slam
They sold but didn't really have staying power, they were just experimentation. One of these expiriments would end up being bionicle and end up being absurdly successful, but at the time there was no way to know if Bionicle was going to be successful or if it was just gonna be a one year flash in the pan like roboriders.
At the same time they commissioned a line of action figures that were specifically aimed at a younger audience
Lego had in their head that their fans were sensitive quiet kids, and that those who wanted to play with GI Joe would just break anything they touched and have no patience, so these toys would take the core concept of building but apply it to action figures that were incredibly rugged and difficult to break. To their credit my 24 year old Galidors are still in great condition despite being lovingly played with for years.
The core concept around the toys is that you can swap around their individual pieces with these hybridized versions of ratchet joints and round technic pins. This allowed for great possibility but also rigidity letting a character hold a pose in very action oriented play. (I love bionicles so much, but some of them can get a little floppy and the smaller connections can and do break if you disassemble them too violently.
This new line needed to be a fucking Franchise. There would be toys, video games, comics, and a live action TV show on Fox Kids.
They got a dude to write the story and basically told him "Do whatever the fuck you want, the budget is infinite, the characters just need to have their limbs change like the toys do"
And thus Galidor: Defenders of the outer dimension was born
Galidor follows a fifteen year old child named Nick Bluetooth who is named after the viking and not the wireless standard. His dad discovered inter dimension travel, traveled to a place called Galidor and promptly piped the queen and had a son with her.
Shortly after his son was born the main villain Gorm who looks like discount darth vader, is a lizard in a robot suit, grew jealous of Samuel Bluetooth and then tried to coup the queen. He attacked the entire outer dimension, nuked their armies, and shut down the inter dimensional highways to separate all the provinces from eachother. To prevent him from taking full power Galidor was sealed off like kingdom hearts, the key to its door was destroyed, and baby nick was sent back to earth to live his life until he grew up to be old enough to come back to the outer dimensions and pick up the battle.
His best friend Allegra, the classic 90s Karate Girl who's good at computers and has a lot of attitude gets roped into it, they travel around in a tardis derivative called the Egg Craft that's bigger on the inside and every episode centers around them going to a place, looking for a piece of the key to Galidor, and innevitably having to fight some guy or solve some problem through the power of glinching.
What is Glinching? Well Glinching is the mechanic that ties it to the toy line. In this world people can swap limbs with eachother, except Nick's dad (and by extension him) are Super Glinches who can use Glinch Energy to transform their limbs into anything without having to swap it with anyone. Gorm has a bunch of glinch energy, but needs to get the rest of it from Nick. He's a master of illusions but he can't make them real without Nick's power so not only is he trying to stop him from overthrowing his rule and freeing Galidor, but he's also trying to all his Glinch juice.
The show says Glinch all the time. This show is full of a lot of really funny words.
Yeah the show is kinda bad? See, they teamed up with Disney to make it, aiming specifically for like that 5 to 10 year old demographic. The script is this insane sci-fi epic and it was supposed to use all cgi (which again, think Jimmy Neutron, not Avatar). The budget got cut DRAMATICALLY during production leaving a lot of the episodes looking pretty crap especially the pilot. Jesus Christ the effects in the Pilot are bad. Many of the characters that were supposed to be CG were instead rendered as large ninja turtle esc rubber suits. I personally think they look great and are surprisingly charming, especially in the later episodes where the actors get really good at conveying their physicality, but at the time people though they looked shitty. The suits excused it by saying "well our main competition is Power Rangers, and that looks like ass, so it's fine if our rubber suits look like ass too"
Then Disney bought the channel that plays power rangers and no longer needed to compete with them.
Galidor got one season and it flopped HARD. No one bought the toys, no one bought the games, some of the games came out after the show was cancelled. There wasn't even a second issue of the comic!
Galidor is special to a very small number of people (myself included) because they were SO bargain bin cheap. Any retailer who bought Galidors were trying desperately to get rid of them. They were actually really good and fun toys, even if they didn't catch on, so if you were like me your cash strapped parents were able to afford all of them for pennies on the dollar and they were awesome.
This is where most discussions of the show end. Isn't it weird that lego did that? Craaaazy.
But I am not most people. Something is fundamentally wrong with me.
Galidor the show has never been released on DVD or any other format. The only surviving copies of the show are recorded from the BBC airing from someone's DVR. Any DVDs you see online are just a bootleg created from the videos dumped to Archive.org
And I have watched it in its entirety twice.
The first thing to understand about Galidor is that it is so turbo ass
The next thing to understand about Galidor is that it's actually kind of awesome.
Lead Actor Matthew Ewald was just this no name kid from Montana who suddenly got to be the figure head of a whole ass franchise and his hair just looks like that. He's so good in the role, he becomes Nick in body and soul. He never gives a bad performance as a 15 year old kid with a bad case of the attitude.
Allegra's character writing is really good even if her actress doesn't always have as many perfect performances. As a character she's more than just a damsel in distress. She kicks ass in a way that's genuinely empowering, but also serves as a really good foil to her best friend Nick.
Nick has always felt that there had to be more to life, and then found out that he's the chosen one who has super powers. He LOVES being on a quest. She just wants to go home, she's just a human and never signed up for any of this shit and there are some really good moments where the two come into tension. Nick is also dumb as shit, and Allegra has to dig him out of the messes he makes.
Including him being a sexist
That is until they strap him to the sexism catapult(TM)
Look I don't have time to get into it, but everyone loves Sokka's arc about learning to not be a Sexist anymore and Nick also has one of those that's handled well it just involves a catapult okay his aunt puts him on a catapult until he stops being sexist it takes like three tries but he gets there.
This show aired before Avatar: The Last Air Bender. I am not going to pretend that Galidor walked so that Avatar could run because Galidor got cancelled in less than six months and nobody saw it I can confidently say that it had actually zero cultural influence whatsoever it is a blip in culture with the most prominent thing remaining from it being incredibly cursed happy meal toys.
I just bring up the sexism catipult and Allegra's characterization to say that it's actually very progressive as far as kid's television goes, especially for the time. While Nick probably has a crush on Allegra the show got cancelled before that could go anywhere and they're always described as friends first. All the female characters get to be fully fleshed out individuals who get to kick ass, there doesn't seem to be a lot of humor based upon cruelty or shaming. It doesn't "hold up today" in the sense that the effects are good or that the writing is always decent or that it isn't a massive fucking time capsule of the aesthetics of the time, but it is so much more in the Xena Warrior Princess camp of the 90s than the "the punchline is that were not allowed to say the f slur" part of the 90s.
They go to a bunch of really ambitious and cool locals (rendered in LOW LOW LOW BUDGET) and see a bunch of really interesting cool piratical effect aliens (think season one star trek). Everything's goofy and cheap but it's ambitious and unique.
Everywhere you get to see how Gorm has not only ravaged these places, but also corrupted them. Some areas are bombed out marshes that have dried up, others are cities that Gorm has made into his own police state and convinced he's there to help. Despite him only showing up on occasion and usually not doing a whole lot when he does Gorm's presence is felt in everywhere they go. You really get the impression that our heros are on the back foot fighting an insurmountable scrappy fight against a dangerous powerful adversary that already won and is just trying to clean up the scraps.
That robot named Jens? Wel he's actually a plant guy and this is his girlfriend who thinks he's dead
The writer of the series is an actual insane crazy person, to the point where the first time we even see Nick Bluetooth he's arguing with his teacher that evolution didn't happen and you can very clearly see a copy of "Chariots of the Gods" placed in his bedroom. I'm not endorsing any of that, I think both of those things are pretty shitty but also it's not something that you'd see in like... idk Power Rangers or whatever. This was made to sell toys but they delegated it to a person who wanted to tell a sci-fi epic and damnit sometimes it has it's moments where you see what they were going for!
And sometimes the script will say "That's a Doduk, an ice planet creature that makes alien noises" and the bean counters at lego will say "the best I can do is Burmese Python"
There are some sequences that are so Turbo ass that they boggle the mind... but also there's something so charming about how scrappy, earnest, and unique so much of it is. I know a ton of this is nostalgia goggles but there just can't be anything like this anymore.
This was born from a specific kind of industry cirumstances, ie: low budget sci-fi on TV and writers who were inspired by star trek but who were crazy people. CGI animation being new and expensive meaning they had to blend it with live action, but also having enough talent and acceptance of rubber suits to put cool puppet characters in. It needed Lego as a company to be horribly mismanaged to even sign off on any of this. It needed that late 90s early 2000s sensibility that "cyber" is hip and so are mountain bikes and karate but also skool sux.
I want to make a special shout-out to the soundtrack, which is SO SO SO of it's time. The main theme is trying so hard to be cool and epic with it's high beats per minute and electic guitars and shwoopy shwippy shwoop techno noises to let you know that this is sci-fi that it actually is terrible so terrible that it turns around to being ironically amazing and then terrible again and then back around to being amazing unironically. Much of the soundtrack is just a couple of guys having fun with a synthesizer, especially the choral voice instrument and while I'm sure it was horribly generic at the time I find it so warm and nostalgic and genuinely good. Not all of the soundtrack is archived, there are songs that play in the episodes that were never isolated and put online. One thing I really appreciate about the score is how reserved it is after the opening. The show thinks it's a sci-fi epic and takes it seriously, there's no Jonny Test sound effect spam that was rising in prevalence in that decade, it's consistent, stylish, epic when it needs to be, emotional when it needs to be, and really helps immerse you in the world of the outer dimension, the world where people can glinch to steal eachother's limbs.
If someone was stupid enough to try to make Galidor Today it would be like a cheap as shit CGI tv show and it would be a lot more formulaic and take way less risks and wouldn't have someone like me 24 years later still being haunted by it.
The last time I checked (which was like three years ago now so someone might have changed it) there were ZERO Galidor works on Archive of our own. Funilly enough, my wakeup moment where I realized that AI was a sham was when I tried out Chat GPT-3 and asked it to write an episode of Galidor and since there was no training data for it I was treated to the most dogshit generic output imaginable. As it exists right now I am the only person on Tumblr who have created non-crossover fanart for this show. I feel like I could just describe the characters of Galidor as my own OCs and 99.99999999% of people would be like "oh yeah that sounds pretty cool and you definitely didn't steal that from lego because why the fuck would lego the bricks guys make this?"
that 0.000000000001% of people who would know is basically me and Matthew Ewald himself who twenty years later still holds Galidor Dear to his heart and can recall so much of it in interviews. One of my friends made a joke about it on twitter and within minutes he replied without even being tagged or anything so I guess. I really feel for the guy, if you were a teenager and were suddenly the face of a franchise that was fuckin' awesome despite flopping and had to be on all those cool sets with all those cool puppets where you got to play a really fun character and save the universe... yeah it'd be hard to forget that I'd imagine. He's acted in other stuff since, mostly low budget films and TV shows but he did find other work and he genuinely is a good actor (or maybe my brain is soup you be the judge) and I think he could kill it in a real role. Matthew Ewald is a cool dude and he's a good actor and he goes to lego conventions sometimes just to relive the Galidor Nostalgia and I feel like you could probably have him come on a D&D podcast and oh god I have lost the plot I am so sorry
What were you asking for again?
Right. That little guy you had in your bionicle bin was a character named "Gorm" from a defunct toy line called "Galidor: Defenders of the Outer Dimension".
Thank you for the question, Tumblr user @tardisinapokeball
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