Alexandrina

Only off by about twenty miles!

It's definitely common usage in England to say "udders", so I'd imagine it would be similar a little way north

I've actually not completed anything for about ten years now! My personal standards get in the way and I discontinue projects before they're done, whereas when I was younger I'd churn out any old rubbish Finally have a proper set up though (I used to film on my bedroom carpet) so I can do a couple of tests. I've been wanting to have a crack at building only the foreground irl and keying in Stud.io renders of the larger set - so I don't need to physically build 50,000-piece monstrosities for the sake of two hours' filming! It can be surprisingly hard to get hold of main characters sometimes, especially if your Dark Ages coincided with the times Lego made the main characters readily available. Distinctly remember a period where it was impossible to get any of the main OT characters in anything but their Hoth/Jabba's Palace outfits, and C-3PO straight up wasn't available for a few years. Never thought I'd be so excited for a Landspeeder as when the 2010 set came out. Years later, I still don't have Han Solo in his standard outfit.

Honestly I kind of want to revisit the concept for a brickfilm one of these days. The basic concept was interesting (essentially, Ben Skywalker was told he could have Mara back, but he'd have to kill somebody else to pay for it - decent moral dilemma imo) but the execution was basically just an excuse for me to show off all of the book characters I knew. This was in the period where Disney had announced the sequels but not yet decanonised anything, and I was genuinely convinced that minifigures of Mara, Jaina, Kyle Katarn, etc. were just a few years away

I'd imagine if there was anything like that coming, it'd have been announced now - since it seems you can already pre-order the game. I'm actually annoyed it's not going to be on PS4, especially since both of the mainline games were. I can afford to buy the game itself, but I can't afford to buy a console for it!!

I can agree with this, for sure, but I would point out that you did bring up post-sequel media yourself. It's not especially relevant to the staying power of the sequels, but that cuts both ways. Honestly, my main point is that the prequels were roundly hated for a long time, well up to the release of the sequels (and at least in my experience, when TFA came out people said it was at least better than the prequels - it wasn't until the divisive TLJ and the lower-than-average TRoS that opinion really solidified to be anti-sequel). 2015 feels right too for another reason: it's around this time that the first kids from the Clone Wars' target demographic would have reached adulthood. I've found that Clone Wars fans are quite likely to overlook the flaws of the films and/or romanticise the entire era because of their nostalgia for the cartoon. I think it's safe to say that two things are true: the sequels have not been a merchandising success to the extent Disney would have wanted, and the prequels were generally considered poor right through into the sequel era. (I have a minor theory as well that a lot of hardcore Star Wars fans checked out around 2014/15 for different reasons unrelated to the quality of any of the films - specifically the decanonisation of the Legends novels. As most of the Legends novels were post-RotJ, and the Clone Wars era stuff tended not to be so thoroughly disregarded, this demographic is going to have had more overlap with prequel-haters than prequel-lovers. I know that my own interest declined when I realised that all of my favourite characters were going to be abandoned, and I'm still bitter that we never got any sort of resolution to Vestara's arc) Nowadays I'm not sure it would still hold true as too many years have passed, but I imagine that had Lego released a set or two based off the books in around 2012-2013, it would have been competitive with or even outsold the prequel sets on the shelf at the time. Especially if it included Thrawn!

I'm not sure this is necessarily a fair representation of the situation. For one, prior to 2008 when the Clone Wars cartoon started, there wasn't really any noticeable prevalence of prequel-era content in terms of supplemental media. Sure there were tie-in novels when the films came out, but the (overwhelming) majority of the books of the time were either post-OT or far pre-PT - and if you're counting the High Republic era as the prequel era then of course a ten-thousand-year span of time is going to have more content than a couple of years. Games, too, tended to lean towards being in other eras (there were exceptions ofc, such as the Battlefront campaign). Even after 2008, most of the emphasis on the prequel era was because that was the active era. (Some fan spaces were definitely prequel-heavy in this period - the brickfilming community, for example - but this again is likely a product of the fact that most of the active voices were young/teens at the time) Meanwhile, in the post-prequel era (let's say, since TROS came out in 2019) there's been a broad mix, but not only is most of the material based in some way on the characters created by Dave Filoni (who I'd argue is the worst thing to happen to Star Wars but that's neither here nor there), a lot of the series are very clearly working towards setting up elements of the plot of the sequels. Which given that Disney also won't permit anybody to make stories set after the films is a decent showing. And given that the sequels take place in a limited span of time, during which there are basically zero gaps in any of the new cast's activities, it would be hard to tell a story with Rey or Connix or Jessika Pava. I'd also note that there is post-sequel content in the works. And I would definitely disagree with the idea that people softened on the prequels before 2015. I remember that period well (it was the peak of my interest in Star Wars, to the point that I was writing 90-page screenplays in which Mara Jade was brought back to life) and the prequels as films were always seen as terrible. That is separate from the world around them, which has been appreciated at least for as long as I can remember.

I agree with this, for the most part. The minidolls are actually decent figures - they look good and handle well. Where they're lacking, for me, is in utility for stop-motion - as they have less mobility than standard minifigures, and less customisability, it's very difficult to make much use of them. For play and for display, though, they're fantastic.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. Honestly, most of the interesting prequel set material had been done by 2012 (barring a few inexplicable gaps that still haven't been filled, like Shaak Ti without the hideous Clone Wars eyes), and the original trilogy has been working its way back through old concepts for twenty years at this point - if these trilogies can keep going back on themselves without fans complaining, why can't the sequels get a few decent sets here and there? Aesthetically they were stunning films (I'm not going to bother getting into the weeds of story because it'll go nowhere productive) and I feel like Lego haven't really taken advantage of this.

Do you generally find you have enough loose hands to warrant a special place in your storage system? (Or do you take the hands out of the torsos?) I've always just kept my excess in a sandwich bag on my desk. They're the only parts I don't bother putting in my spreadsheet either, I just keep the odd ones I find somewhere separate so I can replace broken/missing hands in the future I do store mixed parts too, sometimes. I have one tray each for all animals, all food, all minidoll parts, all headgear accessories, etc, as well as one large tray for all 'castle' pieces (so wall panels in all shapes and patterns, turret bricks, castle roofs). I've also got a tray I call 'large miscellaneous', which is for parts that don't warrant a box of their own - for instance, the die from the Games sets or the turntable brick from Pretty Playland.

Not that I'm in favour of it (I agree with you; if you're going Classic Space, do it properly) but I'm actually going to find this quite useful - I have a couple of the orange helmets from the VIP add-on pack the other year, but no torso to go with them

There's a grey dog/wolf in 4756 as well, though I know it's not a great wolf (for my money 4756 is one of the ugliest Lego sets ever, mind) but if we can count the wolf as new despite it then we can count the cat too

In that case, does the wolf really count as new? Wasn't there a wolf in one of the Harry Potter sets way back when?

I don't think this is especially a new thing. I was a child getting into Lego Star Wars nearly twenty years ago now and even then, I had very few named characters in the early years of my collection. In the 2006 sets, for example, all the main characters are bunched into the big sets. The only named character in the cheaper half of that year's range was Ten Numb (who most people probably only know as a minifigure). 1HY 2007 was the same, and even later in the year you tended to get a named character in sets. In the first four years of being into Lego Star Wars, the only actual characters I had were Luke, Han, Leia, Chewie and R2 from the X-Wing, Grievous, Darth Maul, kid Anakin and half a Darth Vader figure that I don't even know the origin of. In terms of getting named characters, it's actually improved imo from this down patch. I've not really paid much attention to Star Wars sets recently (fatigue with Star Wars in general because I find most of the Dave Filoni era stuff really boring) but there look to be a good few decent offerings. But also - do kids not still prefer battlepacks? When I was young, it was all about building armies of clones and droids and things. I remember my friends and I being envious of the army in the pizzamovies films

Some of these look really interesting. Will have to pick up cat lady, wolfpack, pirate and pink-hair girl. Might leave the rest to chance, they're not terrible but also don't particularly excite me