The disappearance of the mid-range sets

[MAB]

On 3/26/2019 at 4:58 PM, Mylenium said:

Say what you will, unless you seriously believe that e.g. a 4 x 1 Medium Dark Flesh tile is worth even 7 Cents in that mix of small to medium sized parts in that set,

1

I do, 7c is on the cheap side. Bricklink prices are usually a very good reflection of the value of a piece as it measures what people have paid for it and the average price for a new medium dark flesh 1x4 tile is about 10c.

 

19 hours ago, Aanchir said:

And lately, I feel like LEGO listens to "their most loyal customers" (assuming you mean AFOLs) more than ever.

 

LEGO's most loyal customers are 5-12 year olds. The group membership is not static, as one leaves another joins, but as a group they are very loyal to LEGO.

Edited March 29, 2019 by MAB

[toastergrl]

On 3/26/2019 at 6:08 PM, Aanchir said:

As @Nabii stated on the Brickset Forums here, "As for davee123's dream option of raising $2,000,000 dollars for 20 molds to resurrect the old monorail parts, this is seriously underestimating mold costs at the precision required for LEGO elements." and "There are… good reasons that even well selling motorized trains are only borderline profitable."

I gotta admit - completely unrelated to the topic at hand, the linked post is fascinating and everything on his account is candid and brilliant and I stayed up until 1am last night just getting completely absorbed in everything he was sharing. Are there any other recorded instances of LEGO employees speaking about information that isn't necessarily confidential but they don't tend to share with us, aside from Mark Stafford's posts on here and Brickset?

I especially find his general sentiment re monorail fascinating - loving it but knowling it's basically impossible to do without a huge shift in the kind of transport projects invested in IRL. Calling it "elevated rail" is a new one, though, and brings to mind the roller coaster system introduced with 2017's TLBM. Knowing that new "systems" take significant lead-in time and engineering effort, I wonder if these two aspects are related and rollercoaster track-and-cart pieces are seen as the spiritual successor to monorail in-house. A quick search suggests 41347-1 Heartlake City resort uses the parts as a monorail, which lends crecedence to that idea!

(I'm not one of those monorail nuts - way too young for that, I just like LEGO in all its forms. :P )

EDIT:

On 3/26/2019 at 3:40 PM, Aanchir said:

Additionally, and I know this kind of thing tends to be controversial… but I've heard a LOT of complaints over the years from African-Americans in particular that they have a hard time seeing themselves in LEGO products. Dark-skinned LEGO characters currently tend not to appear outside of licensed or girl-targeted themes, and while their representation in those themes has improved considerably in recent years, a lot of the representation issues in the mainstream movies and TV shows LEGO bases their themes only further reinforce the imbalance between lighter-skinned and darker-skinned LEGO characters.

While the yellow skin tone of the typical LEGO Minifigure may be intended to be raceless, it hardly escapes my notice that a white, straight-haired brunette like me has a much easier time creating a sigfig that I feel closely resembles my real-life appearance (as seen in my Eurobricks avatar) than people with darker skin tones or the tight, dark, curly hair typical of people of African descent. At some point LEGO may have to seriously consider whether the intended racelessness of non-licensed LEGO characters is still making it easier rather than harder for current potential customers to relate to the characters on an equal level. Abandoning this status quo would be difficult, and it would be controversial, but at some point it may be necessary.

This in particular is also something really thought-provoking to consider. I absolutely think this is an inevitability because of one shot in the original TLM, although it might take the better part of a decade for the other shoe to drop with respect to regular minifigs like with City and CMF.

This is three original minifigure designs in a consistent, modernised, virtual theme, where Reddish Brown is used to represent a darker skintone and Yellow is used to represent a lighter one. To that end, Pandora's Box has been opened; they can't feasibly state Yellow is universal and raceless when this was approved by the people within the company responsible for managing the public image of the minifigure, in a way presented to the silver screen. (I consider the 2003 NBA series to be an interesting forerunner to this decision but not a clear indicator one way or the other as LEGO's brand police were not nearly as on-the-ball as they are today.)

Edited March 29, 2019 by toastergrl

[Aanchir]

15 hours ago, toastergrl said:

I gotta admit - completely unrelated to the topic at hand, the linked post is fascinating and everything on his account is candid and brilliant and I stayed up until 1am last night just getting completely absorbed in everything he was sharing. Are there any other recorded instances of LEGO employees speaking about information that isn't necessarily confidential but they don't tend to share with us, aside from Mark Stafford's posts on here and Brickset?

There are a couple that spring to mind, yeah:

• Jamie Berard made posted on the Brickset Forums several years ago to explain why reissuing the Cafe Corner was not likely to be feasible. Including some insights into the challenges that held back the LEGO Legends line from the early 2000s from achieving major success.
• Many issues of Hispabrick Magazine feature interesting or insightful designer interviews.

It's never a bad idea to do an occasional Google search for "LEGO designer interview"! Those can often have interesting details that haven't been officially stated elsewhere.

15 hours ago, toastergrl said:

I especially find his general sentiment re monorail fascinating - loving it but knowling it's basically impossible to do without a huge shift in the kind of transport projects invested in IRL. Calling it "elevated rail" is a new one, though, and brings to mind the roller coaster system introduced with 2017's TLBM. Knowing that new "systems" take significant lead-in time and engineering effort, I wonder if these two aspects are related and rollercoaster track-and-cart pieces are seen as the spiritual successor to monorail in-house. A quick search suggests 41347-1 Heartlake City resort uses the parts as a monorail, which lends crecedence to that idea!

Agreed. I think one of the strengths of the roller coaster track is its versatility — so far we've seen it used as minecart rails, fairground rides, narrow-gauge trains, and as various structural or decorative elements. Also, the fact that the cars themselves are not motorized and the parts in general are small enough to appear in sets at various price points greatly reduces the costs that made the original monorail sets so insanely expensive both for LEGO and the consumer.

Also, while it isn't an authentic monorail system in the sense of having a single rail instead of two, it does more closely resemble real-world monorails than the old system in that the cars wrap around the track, instead of merely sitting on top of it. I'm excited to see what other contexts it shows up in in the future!

15 hours ago, toastergrl said:

This is three original minifigure designs in a consistent, modernised, virtual theme, where Reddish Brown is used to represent a darker skintone and Yellow is used to represent a lighter one. To that end, Pandora's Box has been opened; they can't feasibly state Yellow is universal and raceless when this was approved by the people within the company responsible for managing the public image of the minifigure, in a way presented to the silver screen. (I consider the 2003 NBA series to be an interesting forerunner to this decision but not a clear indicator one way or the other as LEGO's brand police were not nearly as on-the-ball as they are today.)

I'm not sure I'd agree about this being a particularly egregious example, since it does technically adhere to the LEGO Group's general rule about minifigure skin tones — using accurate skin tones for characters that are based on real people, actors, and specific licensed characters, but not for generic or non-licensed characters. Even though Shaq and the two basketball players behind him are all NBA-branded, Shaquille O'Neal is the only one based on a specific, real-world basketball player. The other two are not named in the film and in fact do not even wear team-specific jerseys like real NBA players would wear.

Notably, the original NBA sets also adhered to this rule fairly strictly in their own right. Light-skinned real life athletes used Nougat (Flesh) as their skin tone, whereas Bright Yellow wa only used as the skin tone for generic players, even those with non-team-specific NBA jerseys. What's more, some of those yellow-skinned NBA minifigures like this one had seemingly African American coded hairstyles and facial features, suggesting that even at that time, LEGO was committed to the idea that authentic skin tones ought to be specific to likenesses of real-life people and pre-existing fictional characters).

Some much more obvious examples of The LEGO Movie going against LEGO's usual policy for minifigure skin tones are Vitruvius, Abraham Lincoln, William Shakespeare, and Michelangelo (the artist, not the turtle), Vitruvius, in this case, has a Medium Nougat skin tone despite being a wholly original character like Emmet or Wyldstyle. Part of me wonders whether this was a matter of his voice actor, Morgan Freeman, requesting a skin tone closer to his own — particularly since a lot of the concept art for Vitruvius had standard Bright Yellow skin. Conversely, Lincoln and the other real-life historical figures have Bright Yellow skin, not skin tones accurate to their real-life appearance.

On a similar note, some characters from the collectible minifigures like the Egyptian Queen, who had been effectively presented as generic character archetypes who happened to allude to historical figures in their original character names and bios, were identified in the movie by the names of the real-world people they were based on like Cleopatra, further muddying the waters.

Overall, though, I think the more pressing concern about the "yellow is raceless" rule is not inconsistencies in previous sets and media, but rather about whether this intent is in line with actual buyers' perceptions. After all, one of the major reasons for having a rule of this kind is to make the product easier for customers to relate to. If darker-skinned kids and adults struggle to relate to the product the way lighter-skinned kids and adults do, then that intended strength has arguably become a liability.

[toastergrl]

On 3/30/2019 at 12:46 PM, Aanchir said:

There are a couple that spring to mind, yeah:

• Jamie Berard made posted on the Brickset Forums several years ago to explain why reissuing the Cafe Corner was not likely to be feasible. Including some insights into the challenges that held back the LEGO Legends line from the early 2000s from achieving major success.
• Many issues of Hispabrick Magazine feature interesting or insightful designer interviews.

It's never a bad idea to do an occasional Google search for "LEGO designer interview"! Those can often have interesting details that haven't been officially stated elsewhere.

Good pointers! I'll give 'em a look, thanks ^u^

On 3/30/2019 at 12:46 PM, Aanchir said:

Agreed. I think one of the strengths of the roller coaster track is its versatility — so far we've seen it used as minecart rails, fairground rides, narrow-gauge trains, and as various structural or decorative elements. Also, the fact that the cars themselves are not motorized and the parts in general are small enough to appear in sets at various price points greatly reduces the costs that made the original monorail sets so insanely expensive both for LEGO and the consumer.

Absoluuutely. As I figure out exactly what kind of builds I want to make for my own personal and community display as an active AFOL as opposed to a passive instruction-following one (spoiler alert: very blue and spacey), I'm continually drawn to the rollercoaster system as a very fertile area of action function experimentation. I've already mentally prototyped a track switching system limited only by the fact I don't own any of the necessary parts. I may end up having to get the Creator Pirate Coaster before it sells out completely and LBG track becomes limited to approximately-£100 sets for the forseeable future (like a certain enthralling City leak which I will almost certainly probably pick up anyways)!

On 3/30/2019 at 12:46 PM, Aanchir said:

Overall, though, I think the more pressing concern about the "yellow is raceless" rule is not inconsistencies in previous sets and media, but rather about whether this intent is in line with actual buyers' perceptions. After all, one of the major reasons for having a rule of this kind is to make the product easier for customers to relate to. If darker-skinned kids and adults struggle to relate to the product the way lighter-skinned kids and adults do, then that intended strength has arguably become a liability.

You make a lot of good points to refute my perspective, but this is by far the most salient one. It doesn't matter whether I've managed to "gotcha" the LEGO minifig brand lawyers or not - the fact of the matter is that they're failing a reasonable chunk of their consumer base in a very invisible way, with the huge walls of solely yellow Make-Your-Own-Minifig stations in LEGO stores.

Speaking of, I recently went digging through Flickr for inspiration on builds. Is it just me, or are the huge Neoclassic Space displays where everyone's a white-coded fleshie fig extremely uncomfortable? If you're going to break the tenuous ambiguity of the existing yellow-faced spacer lineup, why would you subsequently lean into the racially suspect undertones? I can't presume guilt until it's proven because these people are almost certainly not intending to be exclusionary (and the parts are probably from Star Wars sets, which isn't exactly representational itself), but it's a hell of a blind spot to have for sure. Has there been any discussions amongst AFOLs regarding this kind of thing?

Edited April 5, 2019 by toastergrl

[MAB]

On 4/5/2019 at 7:43 PM, toastergrl said:

You make a lot of good points to refute my perspective, but this is by far the most salient one. It doesn't matter whether I've managed to "gotcha" the LEGO minifig brand lawyers or not - the fact of the matter is that they're failing a reasonable chunk of their consumer base in a very invisible way, with the huge walls of solely yellow Make-Your-Own-Minifig stations in LEGO stores.

 

This isn't true. Licensed parts do show up occasionally in the minifigure stands. However, even if they never appeared, it makes sense that the majority of heads / torsos are yellow skinned ones as that is the majority of LEGO's output.

On 4/5/2019 at 7:43 PM, toastergrl said:

Speaking of, I recently went digging through Flickr for inspiration on builds. Is it just me, or are the huge Neoclassic Space displays where everyone's a white-coded fleshie fig extremely uncomfortable? If you're going to break the tenuous ambiguity of the existing yellow-faced spacer lineup, why would you subsequently lean into the racially suspect undertones? I can't presume guilt until it's proven because these people are almost certainly not intending to be exclusionary (and the parts are probably from Star Wars sets, which isn't exactly representational itself), but it's a hell of a blind spot to have for sure. Has there been any discussions amongst AFOLs regarding this kind of thing?

2

It doesn't bother me. Similarly, it wouldn't bother me if someone made a MOC where all the minifigures had reddish brown heads. The reddish brown ones are quite uncommon, especially if you want fairly generic heads, and so tend to be more expensive. Cyborg, Winston (from Ghostbusters) and Finn have been sources for fairly plain reddish brown heads.

 

[toastergrl]

Huh, I didn't realise licensed set pieces could turn up in the stands. I thought it was all excess stock from the CMF series, along with a few specially produced pieces every now and again to draw the collectors in. The more you know!

It's cool that it doesn't bother you, but one person being comfortable doesn't mean everyone is. I know it's entirely feasible that plain minifig heads in darker tones are more expensive to get ahold of, but I'm talking large Neoclassic displays the kinds of which could only be built only by those with a very healthy hobby budget. If they have vast quantities of rare and expensive pieces, the outcome of not including reddish brown or dark nougat heads at all when there's a reasonable variation and representation in the faces of the Light Flesh (mustaches, grins, masc-coded and femme-coded, youthful cadet, grizzled adult...) starts to seem less like a factor of cost and more like an eyebrow-raising oversight.

[TeriXeri]

1 hour ago, toastergrl said:

It's cool that it doesn't bother you, but one person being comfortable doesn't mean everyone is. 

It doesn't bother me from the ethnic perspective, but more of my cohesiveness of my collection.

And I am okay with in-house themes having like robots, monsters or aliens being different colors or even transparent.

LEGO first introduced a robot minfig head with the 1994 Spyrius theme, later followed by 1995 Skeleton heads and other colors in later Space themes or Adventurer Mummy.

I suppose the first non-yellow "licensed" characters were 1999 Darth Vader and Darth Maul heads. Followed by the Harry Potter line in 2001.

Still it wasn't until 2003 for darker human skin tones (Cloud City Lando, and NBA Basketball) , and 2004 introduced Flesh tone via Spider Man/Harry Potter.

I didn't collect LEGO during 2001-2015. 

Edited April 8, 2019 by TeriXeri

[MAB]

12 hours ago, toastergrl said:

It's cool that it doesn't bother you, but one person being comfortable doesn't mean everyone is.

 

If you are not comfortable with it, then you can put one out there where there is a diverse ethnic mix. Or go further with all reddish brown, or all dark flesh, or whatever race you want to depict.

12 hours ago, toastergrl said:

Huh, I didn't realise licensed set pieces could turn up in the stands. I thought it was all excess stock from the CMF series, along with a few specially produced pieces every now and again to draw the collectors in. The more you know!

 

No. Although there are more CMF parts now, it used to be a lot of generic stuff in there. When these first started it was uncommon to get CMF parts.