Do You Consider the Unikitty Blind Bags to be CMF?

[jjackbat]

I'm not a huge fan of them but definitely having all similar pieces makes them more of a pain to find specific ones. This is one series I personally haven't fought to collect them all.

[x105Black]

I still wouldn't call Unikitty a minifigure, despite her inclusion in the CMF series for The Lego Movie 2.

Ultimately, a matter of opinion.

[MAB]

Although they still distinguish between minidolls and minifigures, and minidolls are more of a minifigure than unikitty.  In the description of Sweet Mayhem's Systar Starship "Includes 5 THE LEGO® MOVIE 2™ characters: a LEGO Emmet minifigure and Lucy minifigure, plus a Sweet Mayhem mini-doll figure and brick-built Heart and Star toy figures." And SW droids are still not minifigures, being mentioned separately to minifigures. But then in the Lucy Box, they also imply unikitty is NOT a minifigure: "Includes 2 THE LEGO® MOVIE 2™ characters: a new-for-January-2019 Lucy minifigure, plus a brick-built Unikitty toy figure."

 

Have the new packets been seen yet? Do they say "1 LEGO MINIFIGURE" (like CMF of old) or "1 LEGO CHARACTER" (like the unikitty series.)

[x105Black]

18 minutes ago, MAB said:

Have the new packets been seen yet? Do they say "1 LEGO MINIFIGURE" (like CMF of old) or "1 LEGO CHARACTER" (like the unikitty series.)

Good point.  I'm hoping that the distinction is there, personally, because it will validate my point and give me good feelings.

[Maple]

I have never seen 80% of a group be incredibly wrong. 

It's a CMF series. Uni-kitty is one of the minifigures in The LEGO Movie 2 CMF range (which is really bad) so it counts as a minifigure.

[MAB]

18 minutes ago, Maple said:

I have never seen 80% of a group be incredibly wrong. 

It's a CMF series. Uni-kitty is one of the minifigures in The LEGO Movie 2 CMF range (which is really bad) so it counts as a minifigure.

Do you have a picture of the bag or box confirming that this is the official name? After all, LEGO don't use "CMF" at all in their descriptions. They call them "Minifigures Series". I'm not disputing it is a Minifigures series rather than a Characters series, but it seems strange that they would put something that they seem to have always avoided calling a minifigure in the product descriptions into a minifigure series, or into a bag where the contents explicitly state that it contains a minifigure.

If they do call a brick-built animal such as unikitty a minifigure, then they might as well use the same term for droids and so on.

Edited December 21, 2018 by MAB

[Blondie-Wan]

15 hours ago, MAB said:

Do you have a picture of the bag or box confirming that this is the official name? After all, LEGO don't use "CMF" at all in their descriptions. They call them "Minifigures Series". I'm not disputing it is a Minifigures series rather than a Characters series, but it seems strange that they would put something that they seem to have always avoided calling a minifigure in the product descriptions into a minifigure series, or into a bag where the contents explicitly state that it contains a minifigure.

If they do call a brick-built animal such as unikitty a minifigure, then they might as well use the same term for droids and so on.

Agreed, but have they always used the stricter definition of “minifigure”? Was there a time when they were a little looser with the term - counting skeletons, battle droids, etc. as “minifigures”?

[x105Black]

Regardless of what LEGO's definitions are (changing or not), I refuse to acknowledge anything but a minifigure as a minifigure.  Brick-built characters are brick-built characters.  Bigfigs are bigfigs.  Minidolls are minidolls.  And minifigures alone are minifigures.

But it's all semantics really.  I choose to care about the differences because it helps me to identify and tell the different types of characters apart from each other.  I will continue to use the terminology that I feel fits the character best whenever I talk about it because that's what makes sense to me.

But ultimately I don't really care that much.  If it's a character I want, I will get it no matter what they're calling it.  And I'm not going to go out of my way to correct people for saying the wrong nomenclature for the individual type of character.  I may have in the past (when people were calling the Unikitty blind bags a CMF series, which it clearly is not), but I will pull back because it's relatively unimportant and pedantic.

[Aanchir]

On 12/22/2018 at 4:55 AM, x105Black said:

Regardless of what LEGO's definitions are (changing or not), I refuse to acknowledge anything but a minifigure as a minifigure.  Brick-built characters are brick-built characters.  Bigfigs are bigfigs.  Minidolls are minidolls.  And minifigures alone are minifigures.

But it's all semantics really.  I choose to care about the differences because it helps me to identify and tell the different types of characters apart from each other.  I will continue to use the terminology that I feel fits the character best whenever I talk about it because that's what makes sense to me.

But ultimately I don't really care that much.  If it's a character I want, I will get it no matter what they're calling it.  And I'm not going to go out of my way to correct people for saying the wrong nomenclature for the individual type of character.  I may have in the past (when people were calling the Unikitty blind bags a CMF series, which it clearly is not), but I will pull back because it's relatively unimportant and pedantic.

I'm sort of in the same boat, except that while I try to avoid terminology that might be construed as misleading, I hardly care at all about differentiating between different types of figure — in fact, a lot of the time I'll just say "fig", "figure", or "character" to describe LEGO people in general.

From my experience, there are way too many edge cases (babies, skeletons, Life on Mars aliens, upscaled or downscaled characters like Ant-Man/Giant-Man, brick-built robots/droids, etc) for establishing a clear-cut definition of "minifigure" to even seem worth the effort. I mean, let's face it: no category that includes skeleton knights but not skeleton soldiers, or C-3PO but not R2-D2, really has any useful value in terms of keeping track of a collection or wanted list.

[Anonknee Muss]

I read somewhere of a definition of a Minifigure. Said Definition would not class UniKitty as a Minifigure therefore not a CMF Series, not even the packaging says CMF.

[Robert8]

No Minifigures logo 

[x105Black]

Looks like they contain "1 LEGO character" not a minifigure...

[MAB]

I think that is a clear indication that LEGO has a definition of what a minifigure is and Unikitty does not fit it. It is not a surprise to me that they have gone with calling these CHARACTERS rather than MINIFIGURES.

[Aanchir]

It kind of interests me also to see that this series is branded as part of the core LEGO Movie 2 theme, rather than a subtheme of Minifigures — much like how 4+ sets beginning in 2019 are branded as part of their core themes rather than subthemes of Juniors, or how the new Batman and Spider-Man sets are branded as IP-specific themes rather than as subthemes of DC and Marvel Super Heroes. Perhaps LEGO found that having IPs branded as subthemes of bigger, non-IP-specific themes was confusing people. If that's the case, then we can probably expect similar branding on other future licensed minifigure series, even those that don't include brick-built characters.

[MAB]

Yeah, although online they will probably be in both categories. For example, the "Unikitty! Collectibles Series 1" can be found when browsing both the Unikitty! theme and the Minifigures theme. I think the Juniors sets are the same - although The Joker Batcave Attack is in the DC Super Heroes section, it can also be found via the Juniors selection too.

You are probably right about licensed Minifigure themes too. Currently, the Harry Potter series is formally in the Minifigures section, but also viewable from the Harry Potter section. It would make sense to do it the other way around (not that it matters much).

[Digger of Bricks]

Having just remembered the UniKitty "CMS" the other day after having forgotten all about it, I started pondering the possibility of seeing further other-than-Minifigure-based CMS in the near future. Particularly, I was contemplating if Lego would ever consider a Collectable Minidoll line in the vein of the traditional non-licensed line of Collectable Minifigures, something I'm sure others have speculated upon here in the past. I mean, does anyone here currently see that ever being a viable possibility nowadays, as a UniKitty-like outlier fourth CMS to be released alongside Lego's traditional three annual CMS? 

[MAB]

I doubt they would do a minidoll version of CMF as it would compete with the "normal" CMF. It would also be seen by many as the series of CMFs for girls, as minidolls are for Friends and the girly Disney type sets, not for boys.

I imagine there would also be complaints about why have they done such and such as a minidoll but not as a minifigure.

Plus the other thing is cost. I think minidolls cost more to produce. They are always consistently more expensive than minifigure parts if bought through B+P, and the Friends advent calendars (when they had minidolls) never includes as many figures as in the City and SW ones.