Especially in the early days of LEGO, there were sometimes themes that honestly were not that remarkable on their own. But what they contributed to the ongoing evolution into the LEGO of today still set them apart. The 1994 theme “Spyrius”, a subtheme of the ongoing “Space” theme, was one such theme. While a cool little theme with some iconic imagery associated with it, Spyrius is often panned by the current generations of AFOL’s. It definitely has not had the staying power of Blacktron, Ice Planet or Space Police.
The Spyrius theme consisted of only 6 sets and 3 Minifigures. Following their usual trend of having a faction of designated “bad guys” in opposition to a force for good. In 1994, with Ice Planet 2002 on its way out, Spyrius played the villain while Unitron, another fresh theme for 1994, played the good guys.
The Spyrians were cast as a faction of thieves, spies and scavengers who stole the technology of the other factions. After acquiring said stolen tech, they would then retreat back to their home planet, also called “Spyrius”. Once there they would stockpile their loot in their secret base and sit on it, relying on large mech-like robots to protect it. While there doesn’t appear to be any consistent lore across countries, it was generally agreed (due to lore released in the UK) that the robot character “Major Kartofski” was the leader of the Spyrians. And thanks to released from Germany and other places, the rest of the Spyrians were identified as being mutants of some kind, though how or why they are mutated we don’t know. After being a major headache for Unitron, Ice Planet, and others, the Spyrius theme was discontinued in 1996 after 2 short years, though their influence in the lore of LEGO Space was present until at least 1996 or so.
As stated earlier, Spyrius was a tiny little theme that only released 6 individual sets, then later re-released one of the original sets (twice, actually; set#3013 “Space Jet”). But as small as it was, it provided two crucial elements that impacted the future of LEGO in drastic ways.
The first element was actually a twofer in the form of “Major Kartofski”, the robot leader of the Spyrians. Until now we had only seen human Minifigures. Kartofski was the first robot minifigure to be released by LEGO, as well as the first non-human (aliens wouldn’t be seen until later with the UFO and Insectoid themes). The other element was that this was the first time we would ever see printing on minifigure legs. What is now a common occurrence was unheard of before 1994, and this opened up the door to a new world of character design and customizations.
The second element Spyrius introduced to the Legoverse was the giant robots the Spyrians used to guard their stolen tech. This was the first time we had seen something like this from LEGO, and LEGO has been playing off this idea ever since. Their influence would be seen moving forward, eventually maturing into likes of the Ninjago and Monkie Kid mechs of today.
Aside from the innovations regarding minifigure and robot design, Spyrius has been overlooked in recent years. Although we have seen other themes such as Ice Planet, Blacktron, Fright Knights and others revisited in other LEGO themes (particularly in the Collectible Minifigure line), we have yet to see a Spyrius reference or minifigure remake.
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