Are there too many licensed LEGO themes?

[MaximillianRebo]

I grew up with the big 3 of Space, Castle and Pirates and full disclosure - when the first Lego Star Wars sets launched I pooh-poohed them as Lego 'selling out', even though I also grew up with Star Wars and had many of the Kenner toys. I got older, and I got over it, and accepted that both could live side by side. I agree that a lot of this dislike of licensed sets and digs at them lacking 'creativity' is masking a big chunk of nostalgia and a desire to go back to 'the good old days' of Lego. Or ... this is just a lot of trolling to bait people (me included) into engaging.

Edited April 8 by MaximillianRebo

[SpacePolice89]

7 hours ago, MAB said:

and cars that look just like formula one cars and even have real world advertising on them. So creative.

The F1 sets are licensed 

[imposter]

LEGO CITY is creative theme. 

Arctic, Deep Sea, Jungle, Space, Police, Soapbox Racing, (Burger Truck), (Robot World Rollercoaster)...

CITY is creative. SW for example is not. 

[MAB]

In official sets LEGO has inspired creative play for kids by recently doing the mashups of lightside/darkside.

If it is creative to put a bit of helicopter on a fire truck, then it is just as creative to mashup an X-wing and a Tie fighter.

Edited April 8 by MAB

[Mylenium]

Holy smokes... As Ron Burgundy says: "That escalated quickly!" *lol* I go to bed and there's another one and a half pages of posts... :-) Anyway, I'm too lazy to go over everything with a fine-toothed comb, but from what I gathered, the problem is indeed that a) many advocating for unlicensed themes still simply mean old themes and b) they still want their "creativity" to be an extension of those themes rather than being free designs. On that note, another provocative theory to throw out there would be that if it really were about base level creativity, we perhaps would and should request buckets and buckets of Classic sets every year only containing bricks, but no actual models and on top of that we should make sure they exist in all colors. How's that for thought? Again apologies if I offended anyone and sorry for my fragmented thoughts on the matter, but I feel we won't come to an agreement here. Generally, though, I feel we're not truly talking about design or for that matter licensed IP being the issue, but people having locked themselves into certain preconceptions about LEGO and their creative process.

Mylenium

[imposter]

Castle = creative theme

SW = no surprises

HP = no surprises

CITY = creative theme

 

Problem is that we have too many of those themes based on: GAMES, MOVIES, TV ... Transformers is COOL but there are no surprises coming (Soundvawe) or Bumblebee or Optimus Prime. That is a problem!! Think about. 2026 will be last year for Dreamzzz... so then we have only CITY and maybe Ninjago (mech theme).

[Alcarin]

11 hours ago, BrickBob Studpants said:

Word. Some people seem to be blinded by nostalgia and conveniently forget that the 80s were 40 years ago. Tastes change, and kids don't necessarily like the same things their parents did. There might still be a market for classic themes, but you can't expect kids nowadays to go nuts for themes that were popular back then. The recent throwback sets were likely mostly bought by adult fans and not kids.

Overall, I kinda find it tedious and somewhat childish to try and pit licensed and in-house themes against one another. They can easily co-exist peacefully, and I fail to see why everything has to be turned into a battle, similar to Marvel vs DC nonsense or silly console wars, except within the same company

 

Yeh, but think of it like this... I want to buy LEGO for my nephew aged 9.... he loves CASTLE, he loves WESTERN... he doesnt like NINJAs... What can I buy for his 9th birthday that is not either heavily overpriced (lion Knights Castle) or not of his liking(NINJAGO etc...) Give me a 40-60$ set for Castle loving kids today that has atleast mostly traditional Castle setting...

 

Then we can move to Western and Pirates, and so on and on... 

Basically this is what is missing... 

Edited April 8 by Alcarin

[imposter]

Some kids today don't know what is CASTLE. They don't understand the concept. 

Nexo Knight tried to bring Castle to 21st century BUT failed.

Edited April 8 by imposter

[BrickBob Studpants]

10 hours ago, Lion King said:

and I’m pretty sure you know who htis is…. It could be Turtle. 

…there is no „could“ here, it 100% is Turtle. This was obvious from day one  Same grammatical errors, same habit of posting random YT links, same preference for listing things, same writing style, same insane takes

[imposter]

Comment:

I love some of the licensed sets, but I'm way more in the camp of originality. Some of my favorite sets of the past few yesrs have been Creator 3 in 1 animals, Lego City vehicles (donut truck, burger truck), Dreamzzz. The creativity is so much higher with the original themes. I sincerely hope Lego doesn't abandon their own themes and keeps innovating.

[Alcarin]

3 hours ago, imposter said:

Some kids today don't know what is CASTLE. They don't understand the concept. 

Nexo Knight tried to bring Castle to 21st century BUT failed.

True, some probably dont, but some do... and its impossible to buy them anything in a normal price range of 40-70$ for Xmas or birthday.... same goes for Pirates, for Indians, Cowboys etc...

[Karalora]

4 hours ago, imposter said:

Castle = creative theme

SW = no surprises

HP = no surprises

CITY = creative theme

Whose creativity is the issue here? The designers' or the end users'? Because there is nothing preventing anyone from picking up a LEGO set in any theme, licensed or unlicensed, and experimenting like mad with the pieces.

[Alcarin]

53 minutes ago, Karalora said:

Whose creativity is the issue here? The designers' or the end users'? Because there is nothing preventing anyone from picking up a LEGO set in any theme, licensed or unlicensed, and experimenting like mad with the pieces.

Actually thats a tough subject... its partially problem of both sides...

 

The designers side creating such nice creations that its hard to imagine more and better that buildable, and part of kids problem... See when I was a kid, and got those "plain" looking Castle sets I was always wanting to build more and better and bigger armies etc... now the sets like Lion Knights Castle looks so amazing It would take me ages to design something better really... and so it happens for kids also. 
 

I think LEGOs doom for creativity comes from the fact that sets look better than creations themselves from kids and teens.

[Karalora]

11 minutes ago, Alcarin said:

I think LEGOs doom for creativity comes from the fact that sets look better than creations themselves from kids and teens.

They can be intimidating in that way. My own personal experience as a rather tepid MOC-er is that there isn't a good, established way to transition between building sets from the instructions and designing your own creations from scratch. Most of the "building advice" I've seen tends to start from the assumption that the person reading is already an accomplishing MOC-er and just needs some fresh ideas for interesting parts usage or broad aesthetics. What I would love is some kind of "Master Builder Kit" that included a bunch of different parts and instead of instructions for a model, a "textbook" of sorts with demonstrative lessons for practice with those parts.

But that's an entirely separate issue from licensed vs. unlicensed.

[Yperio_Bricks]

3 hours ago, Alcarin said:

True, some probably dont, but some do... and its impossible to buy them anything in a normal price range of 40-70$ for Xmas or birthday.... same goes for Pirates, for Indians, Cowboys etc...

Actually it is possible to buy such sets. Just not from the LEGO company

Pirates, Castle, Trains, etc. 

Other - much smaller - companies are able to give the people what they want. They even have battlepacks! I know, I know, that's impossible for Lego to do.

[imposter]

There is coming NEW Creator Castle. About 100 € or a bit more. Horse Knight's Castle. Children could buy that one.

[MAB]

2 hours ago, Yperio_Bricks said:

Other - much smaller - companies are able to give the people what they want. They even have battlepacks! I know, I know, that's impossible for Lego to do.

Those other companies are able to give some people what they want.  LEGO's financial report suggests they are still giving many people what they want.

[icm]

I had ambitions of writing a big long novel of a post in this thread, but realistically I'm not going to be able to take time for that, so here are a few quick thoughts (ok, maybe this is a long post after all):

Another distinction we need to keep in mind here is the creativity of the set designers vs the creativity of the theme lead or the bean counters who fix budgets and specify the design briefs. For instance, take the Hulk monster truck. On the one hand, that's not a very creative idea. Build a monster truck in Hulk colors and sell it for an outrageous price. However, that's not the set designer's fault. Set designers have to work to design briefs and budgets that are fixed for them beforehand, and they have to work within the constraints of the part stocking system and guidelines for sturdiness and durability. Within those constraints, they have very broad latitude to do what they want. So, given the brief of a Hulk monster truck, Adam Grabowski went ahead and had fun building a nice little monster truck. The creativity displayed there is in the technical execution, and as consumers without access to the details of the design process we don't see most of the creative decisions that go into that set design. Now, as for the design brief itself: was that a creative idea, or not? On the one hand, obviously not! On the other hand, isn't that kind of a fun, wacky, zany, creative idea that's more off-the-wall and out-there than something plucked straight from the MCU or the comics pages?

This leads into my next point. There's creativity of concept, and creativity of technical execution. I concede that unlicensed themes have more creative freedom of concept, but I contend that licensed themes drive more creativity of technical execution. This is because licensed themes, and licensed sets in mixed licensed/unlicensed themes, and sets closely based on real-world inspirations though without formal licenses (e.g., Architecture and Botanical sets, the nice Creator 3-in-1 models of real-world animals like the tiger, the fox, the giraffe, the flamingo, and the panda), have canonical source material that they need to match, and it looks or feels wrong if they don't match. It takes much more technical creativity to design an 8w Speed Champions model of a Ferrari F40, or to design ten distinct 8w Speed Champions models of individual Formula 1 race cars, than it does to design a generic 8w sports car or a generic 8w Formula-style race car. Similarly, it takes a good deal of techncial creativity to take advantage of new parts, techniques, and building standards to design a new version of a Star Wars standard that is more detailed, more accurate, sturdier, or with better play features than the previous version, while still looking like the source material - or to design a new version that is smaller and less expensive without sacrificing too much detail, accuracy, or playabiliity. This is true across all scales and price points of licensed and quasi-licensed sets. Fidelity to the source material drives technical innovation and spurs creative building solutions. This is true even in unlicensed themes like City and Friends, as the level of detail and innovative technical solutions in those themes have been elevated by having to make their generic cars compete with the licensed cars from Speed Champions, and when the Speed Champions design lead moved to City. Creative building solutions from licensed themes are then picked up by unlicensed themes, elevating build quality across the board. The high standard of building we expect from official Lego sets today is a direct result of the proliferation of licensed and quasi-licensed products.

Now, what about the creativity of the end user? As an extremely online AFOL with no kids, my best points of reference are Rebrickable and Flickr or Instagram. I see no difference in the creativity of alt builds for licensed sets and unlicensed sets. Virtually any set can be rebuilt into a form that is completely different from the model in the instructions, with no source pattern to follow; virtually any set can be rebuilt into a form that emulates a completely different source material than the model in the instructions. True, cars are best suited to rebuilding into other kinds of cars, and starfighters without wheels aren't very well suited to rebuilding into cars, but those are basic limitations of the available parts without regard to licensed status. It's a function of the versatility of the parts used in the primary build, not of licensed or unlicensed status.

But I will venture to state that licensed sets are often more versatile for rebuilding into a wide variety of different things than unlicensed sets are. That's because licensed sets, to achieve a close resemblance to the source material, are often forced to use versatile parts in creative ways, whereas unlicensed sets can often use very specialized parts in very straightforward applications that don't lend themselves to reuse. The example I'm thinking of is quite old by now, but it illustrates a wide gap in versatility of parts in licensed vs unlicensed themes that were almost contemporary. Which set is more versatile for rebuilding into something completely different, the Insectoids 6907 Sonic Stinger from 1998, or the Star Wars 7141 Naboo Fighter from 1999? I know from experience that the 7141 is pretty versatile. I rebuilt it into a fighter jet, a light freighter spaceship, a dragster, a mech, a boat, etc. I can't imagine doing that with the 6907.

 

 

[icm]

I don't really have the expertise or knowledge to say much about the creative freedom of the theme lead or whoever it is that picks the design briefs and sets the budgets, but here's my thoughts on that:

Long-running licensed themes with plenty of fresh new content and a deep back catalog of source material have a lot of freedom to pick and choose what to include in the makeup of each release wave or of each year's set lineup. We see this in the arguments over what to include in each year of the Star Wars theme. Material featured in new media is either entirely new (the Skeleton Crew ship) or a remake after an increasingly long remake interval (the Ahsoka shuttle, the Ghost), and material from the back catalog can feature very deep cuts (the Coruscant Guard gunship, the rumored UT-AT). Moreover, as much as we like to complain about buildable droids, creatures, helmets, dioramas, etc., on the forums, those are new set ideas and new set categories that haven't been done before, even if we don't like the results and we wish there were more traditional playsets instead. To play devil's advocate here, I'd argue that the LSW design team is actually showing tremendous creativity in pushing out all these buildables and other non-standard set formats that we on the forums don't like very much.

Long-running licensed themes with little to no new content and a shallow back catalog of source material have less freedom to shape new and unexpected set lineups each year. We see this in the Harry Potter remake cycle, where the high degree of commonality and continuity from film to film means there's not much that can be done with new set concepts. However, the designers there still generally do what they can. I'm particularly impressed with this year's iteration of the Flying Lesson. That is a nice castle tower that can be used in a lot of Castle settings outside Harry Potter. It may be more expensive than previous versions of the scene (the first Flying Lesson set was basically a polybag), but it's a creative concept with a clever design and a versatile application.

Long-running licensed themes with a huge catalog of source material can basically do whatever they want to shape a release wave. Speed Champions can basically do any fast or sporty car ever made.

Technic is an unusual case. Its history is unlicensed, but the licensed fraction has grown to be the majority of the theme, and lots of people complain about too many identical licensed cars and not enough construction machinery or mechanical innovation. I concede that the variety of models in the Technic theme in the past few years has fallen quite a bit since a golden age of ~2005-2017, but I've gone through the entire back catalog of Technic on Brickset and I can't see much difference between the variety of sets available today and the variety of sets available in any ~3-year window of the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s. Technic in that period had just as many repetitive small/medium cars and motorcycles as it does today, it's just that today's sets carry licenses that don't seem to affect the cost much. The mechanical complexity of today's "car transporter gang" (as RacingBrick calls them) is equal to or greater than the mechanical complexity of the small/medium cars and buggies of classic studded Technic, and there are about as many year-to-year changes in mechanical features and authenticity. Same goes for the motorcycles. Although we don't get as much construction machinery as we used to, the truth is that Technic's bread and butter has always been small, boring, repetitive little cars and buggies, especially if you count the Racers sets of the 2000s that were temporarily branded under a different theme before being brought back home to Technic after ~2013. We still get interesting small, medium, and large Technic sets that either have no license or have a license that either doesn't really impact the set itself (the Mack garbage truck, the Airbus helicopter) or actually elevates it (the Mars Perseverance rover).  I refer to the small propeller plane from 2025, the cargo spaceship from 2024, the Sun-Earth-Moon orrery from 2024, the fire plane from 2023, the Perseverance rover from 2023, the Airbus helicopter from 2022, the wrecker truck from 2021. Those are as creative and mechanically interesting as any of the great Technic sets from the past.

 

[JesseNight]

22 hours ago, MAB said:

Everybody won't try to make the same stuff though, as there is typically lots of material to choose from. And in unlicensed themes there is not full creative freedom. In castle, aside from the original yellow castle, the output tended to be grey and occasionally black bits of building, horses and carts, the occasional dragon. There is very little creative freedom to design something genuinely different as if it doesn't fit the theme, it won't be accepted and also probably wouldn't sell if customers didn't understand what it was meant to be.

Of course, and maybe my wording is a bit wrong.
To stay on the castle example... If you have an open Castle theme, there's a lot of variety. Look at all the different castles we've had through those years. Sure it still has to look like a castle, but it leaves a lot of freedom within the rules of the theme.
If you want to make the Harry Potter Hogwarts castle however, people expect accuracy to what they have seen in the movies. You can still make a different castle that will fit that world, but people have high expectations on what they know and will all try to replicate it rather than creating their own interpretation of "a castle".
That's the difference.
I feel I'm starting to sound like my grandpa when I was a kid

22 hours ago, Yperio_Bricks said:

This is simply not true. Look at Star Wars mocs for example. There are so many mocs of stuff you never saw in a movie or show. The Star Wars galaxy is so big and so diverse, it's just a giant canvas for peoples imagination and creativity. People make up their own characters and planets, species and vehicles, events and stories all the time. But according to some, these people are not creative in any way because they build Star Wars mocs?

I think there are actually less "rules" for Star Wars mocs than for Classic Space mocs. Just sayin'

That's a good point, I suppose I haven't seen a lot of these mocs yet. I guess the SW universe has grown a lot beyond the movies nowadays (but that's where I lost my interest a bit).

[danth]

Apologies, but this will be meandering because this is a complex topic.

I personally think there are too many licensed sets. Mainly because I don't like them. And I would just buy non-licensed sets and ignore the licensed sets, but they don't make the non-licensed themes I like anymore, and the ones they do make have things I don't like about licensed sets.

And, as we all know, but some of us lie about, licensed sets prevent similar non-licensed sets from existing. Lego employees have admitted that the Star Wars license prevented Space themes; see my signature if you want the proof.

Anyway, let's take Star Wars as an example. As people have pointed out, it's the same boring gray space ships over and over. Maybe that wouldn't be true if the Star Wars universe wasn't creatively bankrupt, but it is. Sure, there are some yellow or blue Prequel space ships but they're still repetitive and I don't like those designs. But also, I just don't like Star Wars. Except for the 40+ year old originals, the movies suck. I don't want to buy sets from bad movies, or from ancient movies. And neither do kids. Sure, the TLG cheerleaders like to pretend that every generation of kid needs a new X Wing Lego set, but they don't. Kids aren't into Star Wars. It's their old nerdy dads who want to buy those sets. And it's really sad because how many X-Wings do you need collecting dust, or even worse, sitting in a box? Because let's face it, adult collectors buy a lot of the SW sets and don't even build them. 

Oh, and no, fire trucks are not as repetitive as X-Wings. Fire fighting vehicles have been radically different from year to year, whereas an X-Wing is a particular ship.

Still, I'll occasionally buy a licensed set if it's particularly good and cheap, and I have money burning a hole in my pocket, or if I like the parts, but I generally find no use for the minifigures. If the minifig is obviously a recognizable character, I don't really want to use it. For instance, I like some of the super hero car sets, but if I get them, I'll toss the superheroes or villain minifigs in a bin. I just want a normal, generic driver. I also don't like super specific minifigs in non-licensed themes, for instance some of the Monkie Kid minifigs are too weird to be generally useful.

Another HUGE problem with licensed sets are STICKERS. When you're trying to match a particular paint job or detail on a particular design, sometimes you have to resort to a print or a sticker, and Lego is too cheap to do prints, or at least knows that license collectors don't really care and will buy regardless. Even with designs that could be approximated with parts, Lego will often resort to just lazy tiles or smooth curves with stickers slapped on top. And that particular style of "tile/curve with stickers slapped on" has infected even non-licensed themes like Monkie Kid. And I hate it. For non-licensed sets, where Lego can create whatever design they want, they could just use generic prints and textured bricks (grills or whatever), but they resort to stickers almost like an addiction now. Not to say that stickers didn't exist before licensed sets, but I managed to have an entire childhood of Lego sets that had almost no stickers. So something has changed.

Anyway, with regards to creativity. I will just say that we went from having every box from every main theme having "back of the box" builds, to none of them having those. And from no sets having named minifigs with known stories, to almost all sets having named characters with known stories (barring City and Creator and whatever else I'm forgetting). Each set challenged you to build other things without instructions. You had to make up identities and stories for old sets. You still can with new sets, but you don't have to. I think it's disingenuous to pretend that isn't a significant change with regards to creative play.

People have pointed out, most modern non-licensed themes have named characters with known stories. Yep. That's true. I prefer themes like City without all that, personally. At least with Friends you can just ignore the names and stories. For Ninjago it's a little harder. If you have a green ninja piloting a mech, you have to ask yourself, what series of events led to this? Monkie Kid is even harder to explain. Why is a pig chef on the moon? Some things make little sense outside of the official story. I think this segues into something that was brought up earlier. Unlicensed themes are too weird now. WTF is Dreamzzz anyway? It's mechs, but also monsters, but also elves and hot air balloons. Why can't we just have something normal? I think Ninjago is mostly okay in this regard, mainly because we're used to sci-fi ninjas thanks to things like Ninja Turtles or Power Rangers or anime. It's a genre most people are familiar with. But Dreamzzz is just weird. I'd say Nexo Knights was also a little too wacky as well. You can do sci-fi and fantasy mixed, but I don't think it quite nailed the execution.

And lastly, I'll just say I don't care about Lego's profits. At all. Why would I? I'm a Lego fan, not a TLG stockholder. 

I would love it if they lost the Star Wars license. Then maybe they'd have to shrink, and make up for lost branding with increased quality. Like space sets with bold colors and no stickers. If Cobi and Mega and Funwhole can make sets with no stickers and better PPP, then maybe Lego could too, if they were forced.

And before someone asks, yes, I do like the new City Space sets. They shouldn't be City sets, because they have freaking aliens, and they should have bolder colors. But they are largely the kind of set Lego should make more of.

Edited April 8 by danth

[icm]

48 minutes ago, danth said:

Sure, there are some yellow or blue Prequel space ships but they're still repetitive and I don't like those designs.

People have pointed out, most non-licensed themes have named characters with known stories. Yep. That's true. I prefer themes like City without all that, personally. At least with Friends you can just ignore the names and stories. For Ninjago it's a little harder. If you have a green ninja piloting a mech, you have to ask yourself, what series of events led to this? Monkie Kid is even harder to explain. Why is a pig chef on the moon? Some things make little sense outside of the official story. I think this segues into something that was brought up earlier. Unlicensed themes are too weird now. WTF is Dreamzzz anyway? It's mechs, but also monsters, but also elves and hot air balloons. Why can't we just have something normal? I think Ninjago is mostly okay in this regard, mainly because we're used to sci-fi ninjas thanks to things like Ninja Turtles or Power Rangers or anime. It's a genre most people are familiar with. But Dreamzzz is just weird. I'd say Nexo Knights was also a little too wacky as well. You can do sci-fi and fantasy mixed, but I don't think it quite nailed the execution.

With regard to yellow or blue prequel spaceships from Star Wars, isn't that a bit of a No True Scotsman argument? I don't like those designs, therefore I think they're repetitive. The point is that when you look at Star Wars designs outside the Original Trilogy that are variations on a theme, and you take them on their own terms, you can recognize quite a bit of difference between them. Going in the opposite direction and considering unlicensed sets, when I was a kid browsing Brickset I actually used to find a lot of the old pre-1999 Space, Castle, and Pirates sets (and a lot of the newer sets in those themes, actually) quite repetitive and boring. It's only as an adult that I've learned to appreciate a lot of the old Space, Castle, and Pirates sets on their own terms. With modern sets, I'm a spaceship and airplane guy and I'm not very interested in mechs, characters, or creatures (big articulated figures in general). I can quite happily go on and on about the creative and interesting differences between various spaceship and airplane sets, while I find mechs, characters, and creatures very dull and repetitive. However, someone with different tastes would say quite the opposite, and when I consider the mech-like builds in various themes on their own terms, I can recognize a lot of variation and innovation between different builds.

With regard to unlicensed themes being too weird, I mostly agree with that. When everything in a theme is a zany mashup, nothing stands out and it all feels very similar, despite being very different. I prefer orderly "low-entropy" original themes to disorderly "high-entropy" original themes. When free-playing with Lego sets, it's easier to mash up different items from orderly themes into a disorderly, zany play pattern in the natural, organic process of play (chase your City car with your T-rex, then chase your T-rex with your X-wing) than it is to make things in an already zany set a little less wild. For example, Mr Oz's Space Car has an alt build on Rebrickable that separates out the Car from the Space parts and uses the Space parts to build a pretty decent Mars Perseverance Rover, but it takes some effort to do that. The builds from short-lived disorderly themes like Dreamzzz and Nexo Knights often feel coarse and unrefined, because there are few constraints that lead designers to elegant solutions.

I do hope Lego can get its mojo back with evergreen in-house Castle, Pirates, and Wild West, but as I've said before in this thread, there's some pretty stiff competition there. That reminds me - I need to stock up on alt-brand Castle and Pirates before tariffs wreck everything, if it's not already too late!

Edited April 8 by icm

[Lion King]

My quesiton: is lego able to keep up with licensing fees when there are so many licensed themes? Some of licensing fees might be too expsnive for Lego to pay. 

[danth]

5 minutes ago, icm said:

With regard to yellow or blue prequel spaceships from Star Wars, isn't that a bit of a No True Scotsman argument? I don't like those designs, therefore I think they're repetitive. The point is that when you look at Star Wars designs outside the Original Trilogy that are variations on a theme, and you take them on their own terms, you can recognize quite a bit of difference between them. Going in the opposite direction and considering unlicensed sets, when I was a kid browsing Brickset I actually used to find a lot of the old pre-1999 Space, Castle, and Pirates sets (and a lot of the newer sets in those themes, actually) quite repetitive and boring.

What I meant was literal repetition. According to Brickset, there have been 15 minifig scale or larger X-Wing sets. That's not counting microfighter or 4+ sets (with minifigs but not true minifig scale), which would bring the total to 19. And 12 Jedi Starfighters, not counting Interceptors.

Space sets had no repetition like that, except for possibly the Aerial Intruder being an almost recolor of the Stardefender 200.

[icm]

Ah, but those X-wings aren't yellow or blue prequel spaceships, are they? ;)