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Oh dear. I just watched the video. He used the D word (Dracula) and even worse he named the butler as "Lurch". I'm betting the LegoLegal team is building themselves a MOC about now.

No mention of the huge "The Munsters" T-shirt? :laugh:

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This set is so cool it makes me want to goto the Magic Kingdom in Disney and visit the Haunted Mansion. I love the green bricks, shutters and dead bushes. Nice touches.

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Well, when Diagon Alley was released, I felt (and said) that it was the finest LEGO set of any theme ever produced... I will now amend that statement and say that is WAS the finest because this set takes the crown.

It's certainly not surprising to me that both sets are DC "Exclusives" or what have you. The larger price point and narrower audience allows for more intricately detailed sets that while being seemingly more "niche" actually end up lending themselves to more crossover appeal. The possibilities that present themselves to Monster/City/Castle/Horror/MOCer/Piece collector fans are nearly endless.

I love that the designer wasn’t shy about his love for the Munsters and that the old TV show was clearly his inspiration for the model.

As for those that are crying foul because of an apparent “theft”…… Take a look at the “Haunted House” or similar MOCs just available here at EB:

Mos_Eisley http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=34686&st=0

Mos_Esley 2.0 http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=34708&st=0

Badsneaker http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=37078&st=0

The Brickster http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=50053&st=0&p=886456&hl="haunted%20house"&fromsearch=1entry886456

Badsneaker 2.0 http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=64696&st=0&p=1169153entry1169153

There is a LOT of commonality in the design/feel/look of these builds, the Victorian architecture, the colors, the gated entrances….

Can we stop looking for cloak and dagger, super sneaky problems and just “enjoy the enjoyment”?

*Steps off soapbox*

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I really like this set. But it is really the same house as the NILTC house from 2006. It is not just inspired by the same house, the way the bricks are stacked is completely the same in too many places to be a coincidence. Lego has so many elements and there are billions of ways to combine them, and Lego comes up with exactly the same details as this moc... This is plagiarism, legally perhaps but certainly morally. Unless they have struck a deal with the original creator (or unless both creators are the same person of course).

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I love that the designer wasn’t shy about his love for the Munsters and that the old TV show was clearly his inspiration for the model.

As for those that are crying foul because of an apparent “theft”…… Take a look at the “Haunted House” or similar MOCs just available here at EB:

Mos_Eisley http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=34686&st=0

Mos_Esley 2.0 http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=34708&st=0

Badsneaker http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=37078&st=0

The Brickster http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=50053&st=0&p=886456&hl="haunted%20house"&fromsearch=1entry886456

Badsneaker 2.0 http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=64696&st=0&p=1169153entry1169153

There is a LOT of commonality in the design/feel/look of these builds, the Victorian architecture, the colors, the gated entrances….

None of the above are similar to the D2C Haunted House. Yes, there are a lot of haunted houses. That's not the issue that anyone has with the set. The fact is it looks too similar to the NILTC specific haunted house to be random. The fact that all the houses you linked to are so diverse and different actually reinforces the idea that LEGO's house should have been more original, because if all of those builder's ideas are so different isn't it weird that LEGO's model is JUST like the NILTC house? Shouldn't LEGO's be its own thing too? Its not the color, its not the fact that its a haunted house, it is that so many of the details are identical. That's it.

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Ech...

I ktow the creator of this set pretty good. We are from the same LUG. Trust me or not he is very decent and honest person. He would never copy someones MOC without permission. He is very talented and very skilled to build his own creations. He loves vampires, monsters, zombies and all that stuff (it was his idea to put Zombie in first wave of Collectibles Minifigures, he is one of the creators of Monsters Fighters theme).

How many designers Lego have? How many sets we have every year? And how many talented AFOL-s we have? How many beautiful creations from them we have every year? There are thousands and thousands beautiful MOC-s every year and we have one hundred or one hundred and fifty sets every year? It`s inevitable that there will be similarities between MOC-s and sets.

Do you really want world when someone builds green victorian house and another person will have to pay to build similar house?

Well good luck with that :laugh:

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Happy to see they provide such a small theme as MH with a set like this! Really surprised about this move, since I honestly already put MH in the "one wave and goodbye" corner, between all those themes that don't get much sales and love and seem to be a filler for general diversity or something.

More action themes / small themes should have these exclusives!

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It is amazing how some people will see many similarities and others hardly see them at all. I notice similarities, but simply because it is a run-down Victorian styled house and those are very similar. You say Victorian house and you will think of something very similar to this. Yes, the color scheme is generally the same, but Victorian era houses always had bright colors and they probably wanted to use a rarer color (I think sand green was discontinued?, or will be soon) to keep the desire higher. If they went with a light stone gray color, the building would still look neat, but it wouldn't be as highly sought after. I hardly have any sand green bricks, so this would be a great parts pack, if it weren't for the price. The figures look great and the interior details are really fun. I just don't like the price.

I guess we will find out how much "plagiarism" there is if a lawsuit/settlement comes about somewhere down the line.

There is inspiration all around us. I don't see the similarities in that design like some others, but to each their own. I would guarantee you ask the designer the direct questions and he would have a response to what his/their inspiration was and more than likely has not even seen that previous model. Two people can come to the same result by different means. I have considered many different techniques with my MOCs without ever seeing some other designs that had similar methods. I only know this because I ended up seeing their design after the fact. Just because someone posts something first doesn't 100% mean they came up with the idea solely on their own.

I do understand someone being upset about their design being copied and if it is indeed copied, then hopefully TLG will credit them due respect/monetary contributions or something to make up for it.

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For christ`s sake would you people please just discuss the set and not this copying business. If you want to do that create a separate thread. Maybe the moderator should close down this thread if this copying nonsense continues instead of focusing on the set.

Now on to matters at hand. I wished the front gate was connected to the building.

Edited by kermit

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For christ`s sake would you people please just discuss the set and not this copying business. If you want to do that create a separate thread. Maybe the moderator should close down this thread if this copying nonsense continues instead of focusing on the set.

Maybe you should relax and not tell other members what to do. This thread is for discussing any and all aspects of the Haunted House, whether they interest you or not.

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I'm definitely buying this. It's just a neat looking set all around. Wish that they hadn't just recycled the vampire's from the other set, I mean for such a high price they could of at least given us some variation.

One of the things that bugs me is the doors. Lego needs to design a new door piece, I'm almost sick of seeing that door. Also I think the windows are too small, I mean they could have used the window piece that actually has shutters.

For the inside I really wish the stairs looked better. That's what bugs me about some of these big sets, the stairs just never look very impressive.

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I'm going to redirect to GRogalls picture of a Victorian house. The shape look familiar? How many MOCers here have seen a MOC here, or anywhere else for that matter and saw and used something from the picture. Who's to say the design for 10228 wasn't finished and in another level of the creation phase before this MOC came out? He said in the video he took inspiration from the Munsters house. Who says the MPCer did too?

One thing I wish would've been in the set was a fully enclosed fence. I'm not a MOCer so I have no extras pieces to enclose the fence. I plan on putting this in my town. The gate won't be very effective if those punk kids can just go in the side.

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This is message from the creator (Adam Grabowski/Misterzumbie):

"I built the facade of the house few years ago, just for fun, not more than a front wall, and the tower, including a bit simpler porch, and put it aside, since I was assigned to build the first prototype of the castle. That facade was meant to be shown in the video (it still exists), but we decided that we won’t use it, as we thought that some of the AFOLs would then be disappointed that they could have had that instead of the one you got (get). From the very beginning it was sand green, whyever.

I don’t know why. Later I tried dark red, dark sand, and other “dull colors”, but sand green was the best shot, so it stayed like it is.

After the actual haunted house was built and 90% ready I looked up BS to find Legohaulic’s house, just because I was looking for inspiration for alternative colors, that is when someone showed me the other houses, particularly the sand green one, and I knew then that you will be talking about it, trying to find a hole in the whole thing, and spend your God given time on such uncertain things.

What you see as similar, or the same, is the color, if the house was dark red, you would pass the sand green house up and wouldn’t even look closer to look for other similarities.

The base of the house is the “close your eyes and think of a Victorian house” thing. Google haunted house and the first gazillion images will show this building. The one that is in the Disneyland could be that, the one from Munsters could be that, and many others could be it.

The position of windows, doors, tower, porch, that annoys you so much is a pure necessity, in order of having it hinged it had to be split like it is split now, and since I always try to build symmetric shapes it came out like that.

Windows, well, look similar, maybe almost the same, but for me it was just an obvious choice of bricks. Not more and not less. I don’t think about stuff like that when I build, I don’t consider and check Brickshelf every time I put together 10 bricks in order to find out if I was the first person ever to come up with this or that Idea. I think “can this be shown in a building instruction? Can I have 10 different windows built with the same bricks for simplicity?

The porch was the same thing. It had to have pillars, so I built pillars out of pillars. Then I had to make the roof over that, it is three plates, and they needed a support. So I went with 1x3 plates, and two slopes, and had a 1x1 space. There are two solutions to fill in that gap, 1x1 round, or 1x1 lightbrick with something. Ready. No thinking there what so ever. No “OMG, am I the first to do that? What would people say?”…

Same goes on the pillars in the corners. There was this space there which meant that either there is something there, or one of the walls will be an odd number. So there you go, a pillar, and walls are even.

I built tons of stuff over the past years, literally hundreds if not thousands of different creations, I don’t remember ever looking up Brickshelf or Flickr for inspiration. I don’t even check fan sites regularly except of LugPol, and even there I go just to talk with friends.

Firstly, I won’t check other creations to avoid accusations like this one now (Do you really think that if I have had seen that green house before I built this model, I wouldn’t redesign every bit that seem similar, just to avoid this discussions like this one here?), and second, because fans build so much different than LEGO designers, and translating even the simplest fan generated ideas into a product takes longer than developing it from ground up.

Of course, being a former AFOL makes me a lovely target for “he copied XXXXX works and cashes a fat check for that”, but I assure you, my fan related actions are down to checking Brothers-Brick once in a while, and LugPol once a day.

If you want to know what I was looking at when building that house, check Addams Family and all episodes of Munsters. Or listen to that:

, I had it on repeat over few months. Yes months. You have no idea about our timelines, it is almost two years ago that I began to build the Mansion, and three or four years ago I build the first sketch. Maybe even longer. So yea… Think whatever you wish, and whatever makes you happy. I love the house, it was a chance to build something really unique, and most likely one off.

I never thought LEGO would ever make a Haunted Mansion, never thought that I can get that close to my beloved Addams Family and this genre at work. It was one of the coolest experiences ever. I wouldn’t jeopardize that little dream of mine by copying someone’s stuff, and I’m too much into all that “Horror Business” to make “my dream” someone other’s…

"

Edited by kris kelvin

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That's an interesting response, thanks for sharing it. It reminds me of the fact that professional authors never read fanfic of their characters for a similar reason. Whatever story they write there's a good chance that someone has already written something that has some similarities and their best defence from being accused of plagarism is simply to have a zero tolerance policy with regards to reading other people's take on their own intellectual property.

Assuming everything he says there is correct (and I see no reason to assume otherwise but I really don't have enough knowledge of Lego design to really have an opinion on the build aspects of it) it's a shame tat something that is obviously a massive deal for him has been soured somewhat by these accusations.

The thing I find most annoying about those issues is the fact that some posters seem to switch between "these look very similar, but we can't make any judgements because we don't have all the facts" to declarative "stolen design" statements... sometimes within the same post! It's pretty clear a lot of people are making judgements even though they aknowledge they don't have all the facts. Welcome to the Internet I guess :laugh:

I love this set. I have no real interest in the modulars. I mean I appreciate them and understand why people love them. But they're not for me. This however is great. I'm not wild about the whole Munsters/Universal Movie Monster thing, but still it has enough going for it (and the reasonable UK price doesn't hurt) that this has rocketed to the top of my MUST HAVE list. What I'm hoping is that if it's a big success (and I really can't see why it won't be) we'll see similar big exclusive theme sets in the future.

Edited by Ash

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I can only say: well said Adam Grabowski/Misterzumbie!!!

Not so many years ago Lego development of new sets was a completely secret and closed part of LEGO with just about no contact with the fan community. These past years more and more things have become more open, we see set designers in videos presenting their creations, we hear about the thoughts behind the models and even know who designed what. Good AFOLs have even become part of the design team.

All this have given us better and better models (in my opinion) and a almost golden area of LEGO at the moment.

BUT if things start to go Apple in the community (patent demands on just about anything from technics, designs, colors and even basic shaps) and people start to accuse LEGO of replicating builds or certain build technics all the time. The only thing that will happen will be that LEGO again shuts of all communication about new designs/designers to protect themselves against accusations and that would be a shame for all including LEGO and the AFOL's.

Just my two cents.

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This is message from the creator (Adam Grabowski/Misterzumbie):

Kris,

Thank you for sharing Adam's response. We have to take him at his word.

However, the resemblance was and is, frankly, extremely uncanny between the NILTC model and the production set. It was not simply the color but the design techniques that led me down this path, and the assumption of some connection was not unfounded in the least until more evidence came to light. Now that Adam has responded, we know the rest of the story.

Adam - we'd love to see the sketch model. I don't think anyone will be disappointed as much as impressed.

-John

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I take him at his word and when you get down to it sometimes one brick solution is the best and obvious solution.

Using the windows for example, if you want them to stick out a bit because its more interesting than flush with the walls you can either do what was done, use jumpers to offset by half a stud, or use a bricks with one stud on the side to hold plates and tiles in place. Since this is hinged, jumpers don't look as good from the inside, the plate/tile solution wouldn't work because he wanted to hold the shutters in place. So you're left with the obvious solution, which is what was done. Its like the front doors on the modular Town Hall, someone else came up with that solution, but its the best and obvious one.

So aside from obvious structure solutions, I saw plenty of detail differences between the two houses so I look at the similarities as coincidences.

Edited by gotoAndLego

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I, too, appreciate the response. Like John, I feel like the resemblance was strong because of several unique and specific stylistic and technical piece usages that I felt weren't necessary for the build. I am happy that there are people listening and that they care about the community's thoughts on the project. I don't feel the comparisons of the set and the NILTC MOC were spurious or unwarranted but I think John would agree with me that there was no intention of attacking an individual personally or maliciously. I apologize if it ever came across as such.

In the end, all that was needed was a response as we received.

Edited by Tervlon

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That was a very interesting response, thank you for posting it. I still don't understand why people are so quick to assume that LEGO designers are copying design techniques from the fans. As pointed out in the response, fan creations are built very differently than official LEGO models. It's not like the designers aren't talented enough to make a competent haunted house on their own.

Hopefully, this will put an end to the accusations. For what its worth, the set is still looking like one of the year's best! I'm sure I won't be the only one eagerly awaiting its release in September.

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That was a very interesting response, thank you for posting it. I still don't understand why people are so quick to assume that LEGO designers are copying design techniques from the fans. As pointed out in the response, fan creations are built very differently than official LEGO models. It's not like the designers aren't talented enough to make a competent haunted house on their own.

Hopefully, this will put an end to the accusations. For what its worth, the set is still looking like one of the year's best! I'm sure I won't be the only one eagerly awaiting its release in September.

There was more to it than assumptions, and the case was specifically laid out and nothing more than an explanation was asked for. I am glad we received it.

I agree with you, this set is gorgeous and is one of the best of this year's selection.

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Thank you for the response. It is nice to hear the creator's thoughts/viewpoint on the issue.

I didn't see any resemblance originally and I will continue to not think about it.

The House itself is beautiful. I can't wait to own it. Hopefully a good sale will come along.

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The house is fantastic - a definite buy for me.

As for similarities... I'm really disappointed at many AFOLs right now (not that you care about my opinion). LEGO is a profit driven business like any other, but at the same time they are one of the most moral companies out there.

100 of us could make an X-Wing completely independently and then whine that someone else "stole" their design. This is the classic haunted house look - instantly recognizable; I thought instantly of the Munsters and Addams family (both from the movies and the show) and many other classic horror movies... that's just what a freaking haunted house looks like, and they are both amazing, and they are both derivatives of the real thing, nothing else.

I have this problem in software engineering, too. Sometimes code is just "obvious" from what it has to do, but people try to patent relatively simple things and causes problems all the time, whether it was "clean room" code or not. That's why you can't patent "look and feel" in software programs anymore.

Edited by fred67

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Just watched the designer video - the man clearly has a passion for what he is doing. Very insightful video and it is nice to learn about why he designed certain things the way he did.

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I like how it splits open so that you can access the interior for both display and play purposes.

The distressed look of the house really invites anyone to "renovate" this model to fit their own personal preferences.

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I, too, appreciate the response. Like John, I feel like the resemblance was strong because of several unique and specific stylistic and technical piece usages that I felt weren't necessary for the build. I am happy that there are people listening and that they care about the community's thoughts on the project. I don't feel the comparisons of the set and the NILTC MOC were spurious or unwarranted but I think John would agree with me that there was no intention of attacking an individual personally or maliciously. I apologize if it ever came across as such.

In the end, all that was needed was a response as we received.

I too agree with both of you...default_classic.gif

And I am very happy to see that the designer took the time to make this answer, thank you! That's what I call "Customer Orientation"!!!

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