When I was a kid, I watched a lot of nature shows. I mean a LOT of nature shows. Frogs,
snakes, lizards, bugs. You could say I was a creature kid, but
really I was just *fascinated* to see them skitter around, going about their lives,
following whatever whims cause a lizard to do what lizards do. All of it filmed by what
seemed to me like an omniscient camera that could go anywhere and see anything.
I wanted to have that experience. I wanted to be able to control the camera myself,
point it where I wanted to and follow the critters I wanted to see.
The closest I could get to that experience were
little triops. Prehistoric creatures frozen in time, like sea monkeys but…not shrimp. But also
kind of shrimp? You put em in water and they hatch and grow and come to life, and that was
pretty cool for a while… Until one of them grew too big and ate the rest of the ones in the tank.
But you know what never eats it’s entire family?? ROBOTS!
In 2011, a toy came out that changed my…uh…
Well mostly it just changed the way I spent my allowances…. Good god.
Hi I’m Jett Kuso, and I today I’m talking about one of the best toylines ever made: Hexbug Nano.
I was not a filmmaker back when I was a kid, but I am a filmmaker now so lot of people
ask me for advice in regards to youtube. How did you get good at lighting? How did you get
good at editing? How can you be so confident talking on camera and how are you so humble?
Well, I’m still working on the last one but I’ll tell you my very simple philosophy for
youtube content creation: Self improvement. Every video I’ve made since we started making
videos has been to improve myself, and my own skillset. So even when a video
hasn’t performed very well, I still have the gratification of having improved my craft.
I’ve been on youtube for ten years now and it’s taken THIS long to get to where I am,
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Anyway, onto the Hexbug stuff!
This is a Hexbug Nano. It’s what’s known as a ‘Bristlebot’ to smart nerds. A vibrating hard body
robot equipped with angled bristles underneath it. The vibrations make the body bounce up and down,
and the bristle angle pushes it forward each time it falls.
They can be made very simply with a toothbrush and a motor, but the company Innovation First
decided to streamline the concept with an attractive design and ~Fun colors~
The result of any bristlebot is an erratic pattern of movement,
as imperfections in the bristles and the surface send it buzzing off in random directions.
And good god, it looks like a bug. Like, it REALLY looks like a little bug skittering around.
They’ll even flip themselves upright if they fall over, after a decent amount of…grotesque jiggling…
A hexbug will quickly end up zipping off the edge of any table it’s on, so your best bet is
to put it on the kitchen floor and start chasing it around like a woman in a tom and jerry cartoon.
*Chasing a hexbug on the kitchen floor, trying to smack it with a rolled up newspaper*
My childhood attention span was occupied remarkably well just trying to keep my first
hexbug from skittering too far away from me, and into the all-consuming void beneath the oven.
It’s fun for a while, but then quickly the thought hits you… What if… two of them???
Immediately upon placing two live hexbug nanos on the kitchen floor, chaos theory takes full effect.
It takes catching-a-fly-with-chopsticks level focus to keep two nanos in check… Three makes
the task impossible, so you get creative. You begin to utilize the only hard building material
available to children: Books. If blankets and pillows are the walls of childhood castles,
hardback books are the dungeons and catacombs of small-scale playing pretend.
Kitchen floor hexbug mazes will only get you as far as your parent’s patience will allow,
and carpeted bedroom floors ddddon’t work for these guys. But lucky for you,
consumerism has a solution for everything! Ha-ha!
Playsets. Good lord the playsets… The first one I got was really simple. A white Hexagonal platform,
to which you can connect grey track pieces to make a simple loop.
………Yeah this isn’t enough.
The Habitat set! THREE hexagons with many more tracks. You can
mash it together with your starter set to make a properly big complex of bugs,
skittering around on their paths. They bump into each other, fighting to get past each other on
tracks, searching around with invisible feelers to find their next imagined task.
This is the point where you’re either going to recognize the magic of this toyline,
or wonder what the point even is. Cause you don’t *play* with the hexbugs. Not in the same way you
play with an action figure, where the toy is an extension of yourself. Hexbugs are quite the
opposite. They’re automatons, you don’t control them. They are their own creatures, and you are
the arbiter of their world. You design their habitat, let them go free, and simply observe…
…Now that I’m thinking about it, this isn’t enough bugs for all this space…
Man if only there was a way to—
…Fine.
There were go, that’s plenty of bugs! Actually it might be…a few too many bugs…
Oh no they’re cramped in there, they’re getting into traffic jams!
I have to help them, urban development can’t be THAT complicated!
…Oooo this booster set gives me a bunch more
curves… Oh and THIS booster set gives me a bunch more straight pieces!
OOOO and the hive playset comes with a rare hexbug and it’s—
WARNING. Once you acquire the hive playset, there is no return.
I’m not kidding, this thing was a game changer.
It was a REALLY good product, and it opened up new levels for me as a young hexbug collector…
The Hive is a take-it-with-you playset that unfolds into a two-story
habitat. There’s a ramp leading up to a second floor, fun obstacles that plug
into holes in the floor, and plenty of space for the bugs. Just like YOUR house.
It connects to all of your existing tracks to make an even bigger habitat, but uhhhh… hey whats up
with that second level anyway? They can get up there, but then what……? Well, you could follow
ADA regulations and make a long OSHA-compliant ramp, or you can follow suit with the rest of
America and simply saying NO to workplace safety by purchasing THE HEXBUG NANO ELEVATION SET!
It features height-adjustable support pillars that connect to all your existing tracks,
and a spiral ramp letting bugs up and down. Y’know what? Screw it, lets get a second hive playset
while we’re at it! And a spiral ramp booster pack! YES! THREE LEVELS, BUT WHY STOP THERE?
THE BATTLE BRIDGE, YES! FIGHT! FIGHT FOR MY AMUSEMENT, ONE SHALL STAND ONE SHALL FALL!
AND A ZIPLINE! ONLY THE CHOSEN FEW GET A ZIPLINE HOOK,
THE REST SHALL FALL TO THEIR DOOM! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
…Uh… Ahem. So… Around that point I got older and… While I wouldn’t say I grew out of hexbugs, I grew
into other uh…darker interests. But Hexbug Nano kept going. In year 3 they introduced hexbugs V2,
with bristles on their backs, so they could travel through these little tube
pipes. These things honestly look insane and incredible, but I never got any because I was
scared my normal hexbugs would get stuck in the pipes and I’d have to get all new ones.
And let that be a lesson to toy designers:
Always allow backward compatibility and ADVERTISE backward compatibility. You
might get some new sales by re-selling slightly different versions of stuff kids already have,
but more likely you’ll scare kids and parents off with your so-called ‘innovation’. Or you’re Apple,
in which case you can do whatever nutty BS you want because your company's name is cute
instead of sounding like a new underwear brand advertising itself on a podcast.
Some of this stuff looks absolutely *nuts* though, and I would love to get my hands on
at least a few of these sets. Finally, my hexbug habitat can be as complex as the human genome.
One day it’s the bugs, and the next day you’re considering how to recreate the
stanford prison experiment in your discord server,
until you realize that every discord server is the stanford prison experiment.
Ahem. Clears throat to give the impression that the jokes are
improvised and I’m regaining my composure. Ahem ahem. There are a LOT of little details
that make this toyline as brilliant as it is. Small design choices with big impacts.
The platforms have these little gates that you can swing closed when there isn’t a track attached.
The length of the tracks and the angle of the curves are perfectly measured so they pretty
much always bring you back to another platform no matter how wild and far-out you get. Hexagons are
the bestagons, so utilizing hexagons makes for an EFFORTLESSLY customizable building system.
They even had the slots for the multi-story pillar connector things
molded into the early products before they ever revealed the elevation set in Year 2.
They designed the year 1 products with year 2 in mind, so when the multi-story sets were
revealed it was like all of the stuff we ALREADY had had twice the value. I HAD to
get my hands on the multi-story stuff to use the features I didn’t previously know my toys had.
It’s not just backwards compatibility, it’s planned forward compatibility.
For a comparison, BakuGear from the Bakugan reboot are designed to fit onto the magnets
of ultra bakugan. So when year 2 hit and BakuGear were released, it was exciting
because they opened up a NEW feature on all the year 1 ultra Bakugan we already had.
Compare this with Battle Gear from Gundalian invaders, which were useless and incompatible
with anything but the newest Bakugan. Sure it made me want to buy new Bakugan
to use the Battle Gear with, but if they were backwards compatible I would’ve bought WAY more.
This kind of foresight goes a really long way in keeping a toyline evergreen.
Imagine if the hexbug nanos had had the Year 3 bristles on their backs
in year 1? We wouldn’t have known what they were for until the crazy spirally tubes came out,
and it would’ve blown my mind and I would’ve bought a MILLION of those new sets.
Admittedly, the soundscape that these huge habitats create is uh…bad…
It’s REALLY quite bad, just uh……
Yeah…. Woof.
So what’s the point of the whole thing?
Well, the appeal of the whole line is that they are robot bugs that act autonomously.
You get to watch and observe them as they go around, so *most* of the time you want
them to work flawlessly. But they’re just chaotic and just flawed enough
that you have to manually intercede occasionally. The tracks are wide enough that hexbugs can often
wiggle past eachother, but sometimes they get stuck and you have to help them out.
Sometimes if they fall over they can get up, but sometimes you have to help them back upright.
They move in a way that *looks* so alive. When they bump into walls it looks like they’re looking
for food, when they’re low on battery and can’t get up when they fall over, they squirm around
helplessly they look like a bug stuck on it’s back. Everything about them inspires empathy
from the kid playing with them, which prompts just enough interaction to keep you engaged for hours.
Is it fun to make a high platform with one open gate overhanging carpet?
Maybe. Does it fill you with sick fascination to place a one-way gate on a remote platform
to one far end of the habitat and see how long it takes for a rat-utopia-esc
behavioral sink to form naturally? Of course it does, but that would make you
either a maniac or a future social behavior researcher and no one would ever do that.
They’re also like, the perfect combination of cute looking and cool looking.
Sleek designs, but they’re super tiny and their little legs are adorable.
And all of this doesn’t even talk about the little things they did in the marketing,
like putting out rare hexbugs and chase figures. Checklists to make you collect more, a perfect 5$
allowance price point, test-tube shaped packaging to add a pseudo-scientific theming to it. It makes
you wanna buy more bugs, and once you have the bugs you need the playsets, and the more playsets
you have the more bugs you need to fill it. They even sold their own BATTERIES. It’s was BRILLIANT.
The toyline has continued on ever since then into a llllot of weird places. Glow in the dark sets,
battle bugs with weapons, sssspace command… uh… Transformers??? Wow I completely missed that era.
And then there’s the, which current toyline has gone a colorful direction, with an emphasis on
these flexible barriers that you can use to make larger habitats without the need for platforms
but…. you have to have a hard floor or a table for that, and that kinda limits the audience, but
whatever. I’d actually love to make a comparison video between the new stuff and the old stuff, but
I have no idea if any of you are gonna care about that so if you guys can get this video to 3,000
likes and a 1,000 comments, I’ll make a video comparing Old Hexbug Nano with New Hexbug Nano.
Anyway. Basically uh… I think my point is that hexbugs are cool because they’re like pets that
can’t die because they’re robots. So if you were a kid that liked nature shows but almost
cried whenever the critters would get eaten by something, uh… You probably had hexbugs *laughs*.
I don’t know man, yeah, the video is either about that or the danger of letting your kids buy into
toylines that can infinitely scale to match their deepest consumerist impulses. Either way,
hexbug nano is one the of the best toys ever. This is Jett Kuso and I’ll see you next time!