LEGO Ideas Discussion

[JintaiZ]

1 hour ago, Another Brick In The Wall said:

The choice of Home Alone over Mary Poppins is a real head-scratcher.  Mary Poppins figurines go for over $200 (and apparently are hard to find) so the market for a large-scale AFOL Mary Poppins set is they definitely there.  Perhaps it was a matter of Disney not  wanting third parties to benefit from their IP (Steamboat Willie being a one-off).  

Just out of interest how many IDEAS/CuuSoo sets have reached 10K votes, not passed review, but then released under another Theme?

• Monster Fighter's Haunted House
• Batmobile Tumbler
• Ghostbusters Firehouse (???)

I am sure there have been others. 

Firehouse was with the Ecto-1.

So the ones that got released but did not get approved are:

Fiat 500 - 10271

Tumbler - 76023

I am your father - 75294

Hulkbuster UCS - 76105

Avengers Helicarrier - 76042

Doctor Who??? - 21304

Adventure Time??? - 21308

Piano??? - 21323

That's a lot after all...

[MAB]

1 hour ago, Another Brick In The Wall said:

Mary Poppins figurines go for over $200 (and apparently are hard to find) so the market for a large-scale AFOL Mary Poppins set is they definitely there.

There may be a market but how big is that market? I imagine it is not too dissimilar to The Wizard of Oz, which LEGO shoe-horned into other themes rather than going for a standalone product.

[Another Brick In The Wall]

55 minutes ago, JintaiZ said:

Firehouse was with the Ecto-1.

So the ones that got released but did not get approved are:

Fiat 500 - 10271

Tumbler - 76023

I am your father - 75294

Hulkbuster UCS - 76105

Avengers Helicarrier - 76042

Doctor Who??? - 21304

Adventure Time??? - 21308

Piano??? - 21323

That's a lot after all...

But some of these were IDEAS projects from other designers. 

Also, I'm pretty sure the Monster Fighter's Haunted House (10228) was a CuuSoo project.  

Edited October 1, 2020 by Another Brick In The Wall

[JintaiZ]

4 minutes ago, Another Brick In The Wall said:

But some of these were IDEAS projects from other designers. 

Also, I'm pretty sure the Monster Fighter's Haunted House (10228) was a CuuSoo project.  

Right. However, they had the concept first (or almost the same time)

[Another Brick In The Wall]

35 minutes ago, MAB said:

There may be a market but how big is that market? I imagine it is not too dissimilar to The Wizard of Oz, which LEGO shoe-horned into other themes rather than going for a standalone product.

As opposed to Home Alone? Mary Poppins has much greater nostalgic appeal, enough for it to become an MCU meme.  Also, backed by a much more recent film, 

Edited October 1, 2020 by Another Brick In The Wall

[Lego David]

2 hours ago, Another Brick In The Wall said:

Just out of interest how many IDEAS/CuuSoo sets have reached 10K votes, not passed review, but then released under another Theme?

• Monster Fighter's Haunted House
• Batmobile Tumbler
• Ghostbusters Firehouse (???)

I am sure there have been others. 

Wasn't the Jurassic Park: T-rex Rampage (75936) from last year also initially from a LEGO Ideas submission?

 

[Another Brick In The Wall]

54 minutes ago, Lego David said:

Wasn't the Jurassic Park: T-rex Rampage (75936) from last year also initially from a LEGO Ideas submission?

 

Good catch. The same model was rejected twice!

[MAB]

57 minutes ago, Another Brick In The Wall said:

As opposed to Home Alone? Mary Poppins has much greater nostalgic appeal, enough for it to become an MCU meme.  Also, backed by a much more recent film, 

I wouldn't really know how to measure nostalgic appeal or to convert the number or spread of memes into LEGO sales. We don't know why Mary Poppins did not get approve, it may have nothing to do with projected sales.

[Blondie-Wan]

3 hours ago, JintaiZ said:

Firehouse was with the Ecto-1.

So the ones that got released but did not get approved are:

Fiat 500 - 10271

Tumbler - 76023

I am your father - 75294

Hulkbuster UCS - 76105

Avengers Helicarrier - 76042

Doctor Who??? - 21304

Adventure Time??? - 21308

Piano??? - 21323

That's a lot after all...

It really isn’t, since there are very clear differences between some of these ideas and the sets that came out. The early Adventure Time proposal you linked to and the set that was eventually released are both Adventure Time, using some of the same main characters, but are totally different - the declined idea uses minifigures for the characters and the focus of the build is Finn, Jake, and BMO’s treehouse, whereas the released set eschews the treehouse and any other structures entirely and instead focuses completely on larger-scale, brick-built versions of several AT characters. The proposed-and-declined Piano and the one that was recently released are both Pianos, but in wildly different scales, with entirely different levels of functionality; one is a wholly nonfunctional, tiny thing scaled for minifigures, while the other is a much larger, much more expensive set with movable individual keys, actual (app-based) music, motorization, etc. And in both of these cases, the sets they did release were still Ideas sets, anyway, so Ideas users still got credit and compensation for the released sets; it’s just different users from the ones who submitted these.

With Doctor Who, the released set is much more like the declined proposal here - but it’s also an Ideas set, one whose submission was part of the very same batch as this one, and if they had accepted this one it would simply have meant declining the other one. They had two very similar projects that both featured a minifigure-scale TARDIS and accompanying minifigures of Doctor Who characters, at the same time, and they could only approve one of them.
 

And all of the other examples are cases where they already had an existing license, which complicated things to the point that they eventually had to institute a new rule disallowing submissions from extant licensed themes anyway.

[JintaiZ]

1 minute ago, Blondie-Wan said:

It really isn’t, since there are very clear differences between some of these ideas and the sets that came out. The early Adventure Time proposal you linked to and the set that was eventually released are both Adventure Time, using some of the same main characters, but are totally different - the declined idea uses minifigures for the characters and the focus of the build is Finn, Jake, and BMO’s treehouse, whereas the released set eschews the treehouse and any other structures entirely and instead focuses completely on larger-scale, brick-built versions of several AT characters. The proposed-and-declined Piano and the one that was recently released are both Pianos, but in wildly different scales, with entirely different levels of functionality; one is a wholly nonfunctional, tiny thing scaled for minifigures, while the other is a much larger, much more expensive set with movable individual keys, actual (app-based) music, motorization, etc. And in both of these cases, the sets they did release were still Ideas sets, anyway, so Ideas users still got credit and compensation for the released sets; it’s just different users from the ones who submitted these.

With Doctor Who, the released set is much more like the declined proposal here - but it’s also an Ideas set, one whose submission was part of the very same batch as this one, and if they had accepted this one it would simply have meant declining the other one. They had two very similar projects that both featured a minifigure-scale TARDIS and accompanying minifigures of Doctor Who characters, at the same time, and they could only approve one of them.
 

And all of the other examples are cases where they already had an existing license, which complicated things to the point that they eventually had to institute a new rule disallowing submissions from extant licensed themes anyway.

But then what about Fiat 500F/10271?

[Blondie-Wan]

14 hours ago, jonwil said:

I think the one thing that has surprised me about recent Ideas set approvals is the Home Alone house. It seems (on the surface) not to make sense. Its massive (and would still need to be fairly large to capture all the detail needed) and I didn't think the movie was popular anymore.

I did. I’m not a particularly big fan of Home Alone myself, but I’m certainly aware of its enduring popularity, and its status as a perennial favorite and arguably classic. I honestly wasn’t too surprised by its approval - certainly not as much as I was by that of Seinfeld (not because of its own popularity, which is massive, but because of brand fit and all that).

14 hours ago, jonwil said:

As for Sonic, I suspect its passed the business case (i.e. the "is this a viable product" test) and its the licensing (both negotiating with SEGA and any conflicts with their Mario line and its license) that are still up in the air.

 

I do think that for these IPs like Spongebob, Futurama, Queen, Tesla, SpaceX, Zelda, Indiana Jones, Ratatouille, Up etc that come up multiple times, if they have done the analysis and decided that the IP as a whole isn't feasible (rather than just that one specific design that is up for review) they should come out and say so and stop allowing these IPs to even be submitted to the site at all.

 

That’s just not feasible. Their teams can’t just compile a list of every one of the millions of IPS that exist in the universe and spend goodness knows how much time and money investigating each and every one to know in advance which ones are acceptable and which aren’t. It makes much more sense to wait until there’s a specific reason to look into the possibility of acquiring a particular license (said reason being that someone has proposed it on LEGO Ideas).

And I know you said “these IPs... that come up multiple times”, but not all of those have. I don’t think there’s ever been a previous SpongeBob Squarepants project that’s made it to review, and I know there hasn’t been one for Indiana Jones - there have been prior IJ submissions on Ideas, but none that garnered 10k before this one. And we don’t know exactly why these were declined; it’s possible that other projects for these IPs might have been approved, just not these specific ones. Note that both of those IPs have previously existed as (apparently quite successful) licensed themes already.

Similarly, all the other IPs you mention might still be feasible. As noted previously, Adventure Time had one project declined, and then a different project based on the same IP was approved a few years later. It might very well be that it’s entirely possible a Ratatouille Idea or a Futurama Idea can get through, and we just need the right one to come along.

25 minutes ago, JintaiZ said:

But then what about Fiat 500F/10271?

Who knows? Maybe the license just wasn’t available when the Ideas project was under consideration. Maybe LEGO wasn’t ready to do a large-ish Fiat set (whether as part of Ideas or not) at the earlier time. Maybe they were already planning the set we got and had to decline the Ideas submission for that reason. It could be anything.

[MAB]

1 hour ago, Blondie-Wan said:

The proposed-and-declined Piano and the one that was recently released are both Pianos, but in wildly different scales, with entirely different levels of functionality; one is a wholly nonfunctional, tiny thing scaled for minifigures, while the other is a much larger, much more expensive set with movable individual keys, actual (app-based) music, motorization, etc. And in both of these cases, the sets they did release were still Ideas sets, anyway, so Ideas users still got credit and compensation for the released sets; it’s just different users from the ones who submitted these.

 

And remember that the designer of the original little piano that made it to 10,000 also submitted the same design to cuusoo (after LEGO dropped cuusoo in favour of IDEAS), so there was no way LEGO was going to approve that model.

[JintaiZ]

@Blondie-Wan - Back to when the project was first submitted, the FIAT license was allowed.

[JintaiZ]

7 hours ago, Lego David said:

Wasn't the Jurassic Park: T-rex Rampage (75936) from last year also initially from a LEGO Ideas submission?

 

Yes

[MAB]

19 hours ago, Lego David said:

Wasn't the Jurassic Park: T-rex Rampage (75936) from last year also initially from a LEGO Ideas submission?

 

No it wasn't according to LEGO. Like the GB HQ and other similar sets, it would have been in development before the review, before reaching 10K and probably before submission. It is true that a similar design was submitted to IDEAS and reached 10K but not true to say that LEGO based their design on it.

[Lego David]

8 hours ago, MAB said:

No it wasn't according to LEGO. Like the GB HQ and other similar sets, it would have been in development before the review, before reaching 10K and probably before submission. It is true that a similar design was submitted to IDEAS and reached 10K but not true to say that LEGO based their design on it.

If I recall correctly there was one back in like 2015, long before the LEGO set would have been in production. 

[icm]

The official story is that the set was developed from a big gray T-Rex that Mike Psiaki built for fun shortly after being hired, which then sat on the shelves for years until it was picked up for development into the Jurassic Park D2C.

[MAB]

45 minutes ago, Lego David said:

If I recall correctly there was one back in like 2015, long before the LEGO set would have been in production. 

Production, maybe, but not necessarily before development started.

Note the release dates of Jurassic World sets, they had lots in 2015 then nothing until 2018. For all we know it was developed early on but not early enough for the 2015 releases and then not suitable for release alongside the 2018 releases if they didn't want it going up against the big Lockwood Estate set. 

This will always be the problem when fan designed licensed sets are allowed in IDEAS, especially for licenses that LEGO already has. At some stage, someone will have made a submission similar to something that LEGO brings out later.

[Modal]

I’m honestly not that bummed about the latest IDEAS group, as the only one I had any interest in was the train station. They should just approve every Bricky Brick set imo lol

Also means there’s less time to wait for the next group approvals!

[Robert8]

After today's leak revealed the Sesame St set will have 5/6 new molds, I imagine a lot of rejected projects will be submitted now that everyone knows about TLG (secretly) changing the rules

[adwind]

5 hours ago, Robert8 said:

After today's leak revealed the Sesame St set will have 5/6 new molds, I imagine a lot of rejected projects will be submitted now that everyone knows about TLG (secretly) changing the rules

Just curious what ideas do you think were rejected exactly because of the need of new molds? 

[JintaiZ]

2 minutes ago, adwind said:

Just curious what ideas do you think were rejected exactly because of the need of new molds? 

Anatomini???

[Exetrius]

17 minutes ago, adwind said:

Just curious what ideas do you think were rejected exactly because of the need of new molds? 

Space Mariners (back in the day, haha), possibly.

[adwind]

Just now, Exetrius said:

Space Mariners (back in the day, haha), possibly.

Might be the case :) But basically there's not much (if any) that came to my mind.

I though Winnie The Pooh will be rejected because of the molds need but luckily it was not

[Robert8]

It's hard to pin point a specific project that was rejected because of that particular reason, because they never clarify why each project was rejected

 

But I guess more than one project was rejected because they couldn't accurately reproduce licensed characters in LEGO form without new molds. 

 

 

Edited October 3, 2020 by Robert8