Collectable Minifigures: Analysis by Theme

[ResIpsaLoquitur]

Just for fun, I decided to calculate out the percentage and numbers of the Collectible Minifigures by theme. In other words, what are we seeing in the CMF line? Is it an equal distribution of City, Castle, and Space figure, or is the deck stacked on one particular subtheme?

Actually, it's pretty City-heavy. Maybe you could tell that by looking at the lineup, but I was pretty surprised when I ran the final numbers, which I'll give in a moment.

I'll admit that my groupings of figures are a little arbitrary. I've identified the broad themes of minis as: City, Sports, Monster, Historical, Western, Space, Castle, Fantasy, and, um, Pirate. (Hey, Lego had its own gigantic Pirate line, so the guy in CMF Series 8 gets his own mention.) I originally just had "City" for all the modern occupational figures, but I was shocked at the number of sports figures, so I split them out.

Even then, I still had to make some arbitrary determinations of who fit where. For example: do we consider the Elf and Evil Dwarf to be Fantasy or Castle? I decided to stick them in "Castle" because they both seem to go into that sort of medieval look, while "Fantasy" would really be more for fantastic characters like the Mermaids, Minotaur, and Cyclops. Others got tricky: the two Robots, I put in "Space" for their sci-fi feel, but the Clockwork Robot went in "City" because he looks like a big toy. Santa and the Leprechaun, I put in "City" because they generally look like modern people you'd see in costumes (and Santa is re-appearing in next year's City Advent Calendar). Same with Grandma Visitor, although I can see an argument that she should go in "Fantasy."

Anyway, here's the numbers I came up with for up to Series 10 (but not the overall chart of who I put where--that's huge).

- City has 71 collectible minifigures. (44% of the line.)

- Sports has 29 CMFs. (18% of the line)

- Monsters have 9 CMFs. (6% of the line)

- Historical has 19 CMFs. (12% of the line)

- Western has 7 CMFs. (4% of the line)

- Space has 11 CMFs. (7% of the line)

- Castle has 6 CMFs. (3% of the line)

- Fantasy has 7 CMFs. (4% of the line)

- There's one Pirate. (less than 1%)

I guess we might disagree on some of the individual determinations of who gets categorized, but the numbers wouldn't change too much. The point is that the CMFs are pretty City-heavy; City plus sports combined gets you 100 figures total, or over 60% of the line. So...I guess if you feel like the CMF line is unbalanced, here's your evidence. (Not me--I get a lot of City stuff, so I'm fine with it.)

This is your useless information for the evening. Hope you find it helpful!

Edited April 13, 2013 by Rufus
Indexed

[TrumpetKing]

This is actually a really interesting fact, thanks for the information!

[Hey Joe]

Thanks, interesting.

Joe

[tomdobs55]

Very interesting, I'd like to see your whole chart. I'm fine with all the city figs, because thats pretty much all I build.

[Chocolatecake]

Have you tried to put them into nationalities, by that I mean the country/area you get in your mind when you see the figure.

I have counted a scot, a irish mythical figure, a bavarian, a hawian/polynesian etc.

And nice job counting the types of figures, I gave up because, some of the figures belong to more than one category.

I would also like to see your whole chart.

[ResIpsaLoquitur]

Oh, good...I can attach the spreadsheet here. It's in MS Excel format.

minifigures.xls

Edited February 15, 2013 by ResIpsaLoquitur