LEGO Store "Build a Minifigure"

[jonwil]

Scored some nice BaM from the Dreamworld LEGO store including the hair, torso and printed tile from the newest brick costume, a snake staff, the day-of-the-dead white acoustic guitar from last year, the green "boy scout" type torso with the red tie and a bright light orange hoodie torso with a white symbol on it.

Happy with what I scored.

 

[rebelpilot]

20 hours ago, wadapan said:

Hey everyone!

Hi. It's interesting to see your post. I've been perusing your site the past few days, it's a good resource and back up of all the BAM figures photographed by AG Lego for sale. 

You've catalogued it so extensively that I thought you might be Australian, but I now see you're British. 

A word of caution, AG Lego's BAM figure configuration is usually pretty uniform across their Australian stores but not always so. A good example of this is the teal brick suit. @cacacolito photo is the configuration I got at the time. And the AG Lego configurations do differ sometimes from Europe and North America, although less in recent years. 
 

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There are still a few bits of information that I'm missing, so if anyone reading this has any insights to share, I'd really appreciate it.

I read through a lot of your notations already and there is nothing that stood out to be incorrect. But if you have specific questions please ask. I presume you sourced (or secondary sourced) some of the Dreamzzz accessory swaps and the Puffer Jacket info from the discussion here in the forum.

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I still need to comb over a lot of this thread for anything I might have missed.

There's quite a few of photos in earlier pages of store displays which could be helpful. If memory serves they're from around the Covid period when stores didn't want people sifting through the parts. I also have some photos from the now defunct Brickset forums to reference earlier BAM stuff, I'll sort through it and see if there's anything you might find interesting. 

I bought my first BAM in 2020, basically when we got our first Lego store in my city, and I wanted to go back and see what I had missed. There was very little information to do so, bricklink now has a lot of the parts and/or figures listed but it certainly didn't then.  

edit: This is a post worth revisiting and the subsequent discussion. There's a good flickr page linked if you haven't seen it already. But trying to document some of the earlier BAM when it was more a random assortment of parts can be an exercise in madness. 

Edited Friday at 07:09 AM by rebelpilot

[wadapan]

5 hours ago, Josh06 said:

Hi, I have been trying to figure a lot of these out and have done lots of research as well, I did not know there was even any 2017, the 2018 2019 and 2020 have given me the most problems for sure, I am still confused by some of yours even, one for example is the mermaid with the lobster, it has always been shown with the yellow hair however in your list you show that yellow hair for another quarter ..it's all so confusing with these early ones

2018 was the first year there were exclusive parts. This thread seems to start in 2011, which maybe sounds about right for when BAM was introduced? A lot of the elements from 2017 through to ~2020 seem to be from the Collectible Minifigures series, only afterwards getting replaced with a mix of more generic prints and exclusive pieces.

So, as for that mermaid—New Elementary's image shows it with that cool yellow hair you mention, but I think that was entirely creative license on the part of the person who took the photo. If you have any other sources from before then which show that same combination, that might lend more weight to it being an official configuration? But keep in mind that the inventories given on my website are 100% confirmed to be accurate for those waves, I had an official source for those. So that hairpiece definitely came from a different wave. I chose to associate the dark brown curly hairpiece with the mermaid, because the curls are the closest thing to salt-swept hair, but it could have been any of the three wigs pictured really. The orange one would have more of an Ariel vibe.

4 hours ago, rebelpilot said:

A word of caution, AG Lego's BAM figure configuration is usually pretty uniform across their Australian stores but not always so. A good example of this is the teal brick suit. @cacacolito photo is the configuration I got at the time. And the AG Lego configurations do differ sometimes from Europe and North America, although less in recent years.

There's quite a few of photos in earlier pages of store displays which could be helpful. If memory serves they're from around the Covid period when stores didn't want people sifting through the parts. I also have some photos from the now defunct Brickset forums to reference earlier BAM stuff, I'll sort through it and see if there's anything you might find interesting. 

I bought my first BAM in 2020, basically when we got our first Lego store in my city, and I wanted to go back and see what I had missed. There was very little information to do so, bricklink now has a lot of the parts and/or figures listed but it certainly didn't then.  

edit: This is a post worth revisiting and the subsequent discussion. There's a good flickr page linked if you haven't seen it already. But trying to document some of the earlier BAM when it was more a random assortment of parts can be an exercise in madness. 

That Flickr is interesting! The fact that it correctly matches up the banana and trophy for the luchador—something which I hadn't even known about until getting my hands on some of the inventories—lends credence to those images being reliable. But then going back to 2024 Q3, I'm absolutely confident "boy and dog" and "girl in pink with apple" are wrong, because those magenta legs definitely go with the smoothie torso, and the apple also obviously seems to go with the smoothie torso.  2024 Q2 also has obvious errors with the space torsos, as the gold-handed one goes with the armor.

I suspect that until we know exactly what materials LEGO disseminates at the top level regarding these minifigures, then except for waves where LEGO has deliberately distributed the waves to influencers and the like, or where we can rely on secondary sources (like with Ninjago or Dreamzzz) to know what the minifigures are supposed to look like, then there'll just be no way of confirming. AG Lego made the cat/buzzsaw mixup as recently as 2024 Q4. But it does feel like they've become much more consistent in recent years, yeah. I'll make notes about things like Ted E Bear and Block Guy where there seems to be notable ambiguity, and add it in my next update.

Thanks for the help!

[rebelpilot]

17 hours ago, wadapan said:

Thanks for the help!

Well now I feel silly. I started going through pre 2020 parts and figures because I thought a lot of it was absent from your website, then I discovered the "Click here to view the raw inventories for the quarterly waves from 2017-2019."  In my defence I was primarily looking at the pretty pictures and not reading the text

Great job documenting all those parts though, really impressive. Check out this inventory if you haven't already done so, they all look to be there at a glance.

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That Flickr is interesting

I mentioned it because I thought it may be useful to you as a pre 2020 reference. But like you stated, there's some errors.

I'm confident the person poster doing the photography is cataloguing the BAM in accordance to how their local store arranges them (edit: confirmation) but I see several mistakes. Right from the top Z-Blob Wrestler has a black arm where it should be transparent green. For whatever reason, on occasion, kids love to swap hands (and in this case arm) in store, so it could have just been luck of the draw when they picked up that torso. But the doctor has black legs and the child head from the lime green bunny costume, the bunny costume then has the wrong colour legs and the honeybee girl has Izzy's head and on and on it goes. Most of them are right though. 

 

22 hours ago, rebelpilot said:

A good example of this is the teal brick suit.  

Back to my example of the discrepancies with the teal brick suit. I thought to check jaysbrickblog because I was sure his review featured the girl with the two buns hair as opposed to the boy with the sweeping Rex hair. I mention Jay because he would have purchased the figures from AG Lego based on location.

Well it turns out, oddly, he didn't review that release but he did feature the figures as assembled at the Legoland Discovery Centre. I mention this because the Legoland Discovery Centre in Melbourne was at the time owned by Merlin a completely different company from AG Lego. I wonder if the different store types (Lego stores, Legoland stores and Lego certified stores) are a reason for different BAM configurations?

Last I'll hopefully say about the teal brick suit is that the boy with Rex hair is a weird build. The hair is too long to connect right. If the hair and head is connected then the head can't be pushed all the way down on the neck peg and if the head is pushed down on the neck peg then the hair won't attach to the head correctly. In summary, it's wrong and I hate it 

It's a good thing I don't care that much about the suggested builds, I keep a lot of the costumed and themed minifigures like Halloween that way but I'm happy to swap in a part I like better. 

 

 

Edited yesterday at 05:36 AM by rebelpilot

[Black Falcon]

4 hours ago, rebelpilot said:

Well it turns out, oddly, he didn't review that release but he did feature the figures as assembled at the Legoland Discovery Centre. I mention this because the Legoland Discovery Centre in Melbourne was at the time owned by Merlin a completely different company from AG Lego. I wonder if the different store types (Lego stores, Legoland stores and Lego certified stores) are a reason for different BAM configurations?

Well apparently there is a certain way those pieces are supposed to be put together, but not every Store seems to follow them and actually figures have been put together in a different way in the same store in different times (might be just another employee did it)

[wadapan]

8 hours ago, rebelpilot said:

Well now I feel silly. I started going through pre 2020 parts and figures because I thought a lot of it was absent from your website, then I discovered the "Click here to view the raw inventories for the quarterly waves from 2017-2019."  In my defence I was primarily looking at the pretty pictures and not reading the text

Haha, no worries!

8 hours ago, rebelpilot said:

Well it turns out, oddly, he didn't review that release but he did feature the figures as assembled at the Legoland Discovery Centre. I mention this because the Legoland Discovery Centre in Melbourne was at the time owned by Merlin a completely different company from AG Lego. I wonder if the different store types (Lego stores, Legoland stores and Lego certified stores) are a reason for different BAM configurations?

Last I'll hopefully say about the teal brick suit is that the boy with Rex hair is a weird build. The hair is too long to connect right. If the hair and head is connected then the head can't be pushed all the way down on the neck peg and if the head is pushed down on the neck peg then the hair won't attach to the head correctly. In summary, it's wrong and I hate it 

The way I see it, there's three possibilities regarding the BAM configurations:

• LEGO disseminates official guidance on the builds to stores, but management might not necessarily do anything with it, or different regions might not receive it at all, as you say.
• LEGO didn't disseminate guidance in the past, but now does.
• LEGO still doesn't disseminate guidance, but greater communication between stores as well as stronger theming of the parts themselves means store employees are quickly able to agree on suggested builds. I think this is unlikely, just because things have been so consistent for the last couple of years.

I had noticed the teal guy's head wasn't pushed all the way down! Definitely supports the idea of that one being incorrect. Have added a note to that effect.

Anyway, I've now trawled this thread and have been able to identify a bunch more of the pieces I didn't have pictures for. Still a lot of more anonymous pieces missing. In particular, I'm very bad at looking up head prints, so haven't attempted to make guesses at those. But in many cases it's like, oh, this lavender torso was newly sighted this month, and there's only a single unaccounted for lavender torso in my inventories, and the timeline matches, so... that must be it! You can view my progress here. Still need to figure out a way of marking the new pieces.

Finally, I've added a brand-new page to the site, consisting of photos from PABfinder of BAM stations in situ during the pandemic. It gives a really nice overview of what stores were doing with the pieces. It's usually pretty obvious when they've just made something up!

[rebelpilot]

14 hours ago, wadapan said:

The way I see it, there's three possibilities regarding the BAM configurations:

• LEGO disseminates official guidance on the builds to stores, but management might not necessarily do anything with it, or different regions might not receive it at all, as you say.
• LEGO didn't disseminate guidance in the past, but now does.
• LEGO still doesn't disseminate guidance, but greater communication between stores as well as stronger theming of the parts themselves means store employees are quickly able to agree on suggested builds. I think this is unlikely, just because things have been so consistent for the last couple of years.

Yes.

Spoiler

*response in jest to multiple options when all of them can be true or viable

 

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I've added a brand-new page to the site, consisting of photos from PABfinder of BAM stations in situ during the pandemic. It gives a really nice overview of what stores were doing with the pieces. It's usually pretty obvious when they've just made something up!

I've not seen those German PABfinder images, they would have been of real interest to me a few years ago but it's quite illuminating comparing them to photos taken from U.S stores for example.

It's become more apparent to me that for each new release stores then were getting (as an example only) bags of 7 torsos, 7 headwear, 7 accessories etc. and as best they could, piece them together thematically. It's easy to get the same or similar result when the BAM parts were medieval, occupation or costume themed but can be fairly disparate when it's a bunch or City parts.

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I'm very bad at looking up head prints, so haven't attempted to make guesses at those.

To clarify, are you having trouble with a bunch of images you're trying to find part numbers to or you have a bunch of part numbers you're trying to match to images?

Whenever there's a new BAM release I'm pretty good at sussing out the old (non-exclusive) parts like reused heads and torsos. If you want some assistance DM me with the specific info you might not be able to message as a new member, just post it here.

Edited 17 hours ago by rebelpilot

[yeurc_h]

Thank you very much @wadapan for putting together your BAM pages. 

I have couple of questions/remarks on the 2017-2019 era:

- some minifigure reconstitution are most likely wrong, e.g. in 2019 Q3, 6218310 & 6123705 should be swapped. It is odd to have the panda head in 2019 Q1 as a minifigure accessory.

- how to identified the parts not listed in bricklink or brickset (mostly heads) ? e.g. 6265014 (head), 6255098 (legs) or 6222483 (torso).

- some parts marked as BAM in bricklink are not part of your list: the 2018's Chimpanzee, the 2019's sand blue shirt & the pirate head. Some of them could be hidden in the above unidentified pieces.

- the torsos with no back printing are wrongly referenced, it should be: 973pb3529c01  973pb4046c01 73pb3528c01 973pb3706c01  973pb3379c01 973pb4196c01 973pb3708c01

Best regards, Bertrand

[rebelpilot]

1 hour ago, yeurc_h said:

- some minifigure reconstitution are most likely wrong, e.g. in 2019 Q3, 6218310 & 6123705 should be swapped.

I'm operating under the assumption that each group is the collection of parts released that quarter not an assembly guide. Some do fit thematically but others do not.

 

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.....the 2019's sand blue shirt & the pirate head.

The sand blue mechanic shirt is in Q2 2018 and the pirate head in Q4 2018. Bricklink's BAM inventory is incomplete especially if they're re-released or reused parts, BL is pretty good with the exclusive parts.

 

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the torsos with no back printing are wrongly referenced, it should be: 973pb3529c01  973pb4046c01 73pb3528c01 973pb3706c01  973pb3379c01 973pb4196c01 973pb3708c01

This is addressed. The website states:

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There are reports that BAM prints (i.e. ones based on Collectible Minifigures) can actually vary from the original uses, for instance by missing back printing or other paint applications

I'm not responsible for the website so I don't want to speak for who is but if  the website scrapes Lego's data and Lego doesn't differentiate between the torso printing, then that's on Lego.

 

@wadapan I've DM'ed you.

[bob21115]

@wadapan I believe the missing Mini Skirt for 2021 Q2 334425 / 76778: MEDIUM BLUE MINI SKIRT, NO. 26 
https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=36036pb024&C=0#T=C&C=42