icm

Might as well say why not just make a Muppets CMF instead? Or Disney? Or Looney Tunes? Most of the characters are animals themselves anyway. Like @MAB said, an unlicensed series of animal costumes is very different from a licensed series of IP characters, most of which are stylized or anthropomorphic animals.

Seeing AustrianBrickFan's speed build of the Force Burner snowspeeder, I do think that the new windscreen and the tweaks to the nose and the front tips of the wings really do go a long way towards making the ship look a lot more like an authentic T-47 than the older models, even though the basic wing build remains the same. The nose underside is still steep and tubby, so I hope they change those up for the next ESB snowspeeder.

A minifig scale version of Hagrid's motorcycle and sidecar sounds like a great set for $20. Finally, a direct remake of the old Sorting Hat set from 2001! I had that one, so I'll probably get this one. I wonder what scale the Ford will be this time, or what else it will come with, to justify that price point. The minifig-scale car on its own is worth $15, and the last two large sets it came with were the Whomping Willow and castle wall ($70 in 2018) and the Dursley House ($80 in 2020). So is it a big car this time (but still much smaller than any contemporary non-F1 Icons car), or is it part of a larger scene that the leaker doesn't know about yet?

I was responding to @Lion King's question.

For what it's worth, LKC is very different in its plan and features from any previous Lion Knights-associated castle in the eighties or nineties, and MTS is very different in the building choices and architecture than the Medieval Market Village it's usually compared to. Neither LKC nor MTS is a direct remake like the Galaxy Explorer, Blacktron Renegade, Blacktron Cruiser, Eldorado Fortress, Forest Hideout, or Majisto's Workshop.

Wow. I had no idea you couldn't even download the instructions from the Lego web site. I just went to Lego.com to search for the instructions for those two sets, and all I found was that small PDF that says to get the app. Good thing Brickset knows where to get the real instructions from. It's just bananas that Lego doesn't even have PDF instructions for Super Mario sets in an easily accessible place on their website. Absolutely bananas.

If it's any consolation, the later waves of Super Mario sets at least have PDF instructions. Still sucks that there aren't even PDF instructions for the early waves. Do the new ones still not have paper instructions in the box? That's awful. Edit - Looking at speed builds on YouTube, it looks like newer sets do have paper instructions. Which Super Mario sets did you buy, and which year did they come out?

But not new at full price, so it doesn't really count that I like it and will buy it. Someone else has to buy it first new at full price before I can get it used at half price without minifigures!

Maybe, but I hope it'll be a lot easier to find a couple of half-price sets without figs than to PAB the parts. I recently bought the Siege Encampment for $280 sticker price + $20 shipping + sales tax after I missed pre-ordering it for $230 sticker price + sales tax because I priced out ordering the parts list on PAB and Bricklink and found that would cost a lot more. Of course, that's without substituting any of the more expensive parts, beginning with any loose parts from my bins, or leaving off parts of the set that are less inspiring. The limiting factor with parting out the Siege Encampment, or the new CTT, on PAB or Bricklink or even the bulk bins at Bricks & Minifigs is time - time to curate a parts list, time to go through my bins and see what I already have, time to find the best price for parts+shipping on PAB or Bricklink, time to very carefully sift through the bins at B&M. I don't have time for that. It'll be a heck of a lot easier to start with one or two sets if I can get them. Incidentally, for the last year I've been slowly working on a customized version of the 42180 large Technic rover from 2024, in order to make it much more well-suited for minifigs and more integrated into the broader CS'24 theme. Eventually I want to make instructions for that and put them on Rebrickable. But I haven't had time to finish my mods to that set in real life yet, much less build a digital version and make instructions for it. When the time comes, it'll be fun to take pictures of my 42180 CS'24 Mars heavy exploration rover modded from Technic alongside my 75413 Classic Space Moonbus modded from Star Wars.

I realize I'm in the minority here, but every review I see of the CTT just makes me want it more. The base model makes a terrific Classic Space Moonbus, and perversely, even the fragility of that model makes me want it more. You see, Bricksie just posted another video where he gives it a pretty good shake and the whole superstructure falls off, but the base section stays pretty firmly attached to the wheels. I look at that and I think: take that base and the superstructure parts that fell off and you're 90% of the way toward a nice big flatbed cargo vehicle for a CS Moonbase. Imagine a two-vehicle convoy of these things heading over the lunar terrain to a dig site where they're excavating a Monolith. One CTT is the base model, carrying a full crew of scientists and engineers. The other CTT is the flatbed cargo vehicle, carrying a load of scientific equipment and digging tools. Now I've talked myself into wanting TWO of these ... IF AND ONLY IF I can find them for half-price or less without minifigures!

No, the CTT was in other merchandise at the time, including the very popular Dorling Kindersley Star Wars Incredible Cross Sections book for Episode III. Lego was not the only company making merchandise of the CTT in 2005.

Not to mention that the CTT was in the Episode III cross sections book, and was reprinted in two editions of Complete Vehicles The only complaints about the Justifier's structural integrity were that the top wing flaps weren't secured on both ends, but the technic structure of the whole thing was sturdy.

I passed on pre-ordering the Siege Encampment in February because I didn't have the Lion Knights' Castle and the Medieval Town Square, but when I learned that the LKC and MTS were retiring this year I got an intense case of FOMO and bought them during the June double-points period for effective 10% discounts of $40 on the LKC and $23 on the MTS. Of course, that meant I had to have the Siege Encampment too. I took some time to copy the parts list from the PDF instructions into a Bricklink parts list and get price estimates for parting it together from Bricklink or Pick-a-Brick. Either way would cost $500-$700 if I didn't start with as many parts as I could pull from my bins, and I don't have an extensive collection of loose parts to begin with. So I told my wife about the Siege Encampment and said it was "the one that got away." I wasn't willing to pay the high resale prices on eBay and Bricklink, even though either would still be a more economical option than parting it together from Bricklink or Pick-a-Brick. But this evening I saw a copy listed on Bricklink for $280+$20 shipping, which is less than I've seen for any sold copy on eBay. It's still terribly horribly overpriced by parts count and weight compared to other large sets I own, but I suppose a 30% markup ($300 plus tax instead of $230 plus tax at pre-order) isn't too bad for a set like this, and the $70 markup is nearly covered by the $63 discounts on the LKC and MTS, if I pretend I bought those at full price earning no VIP points. (Of course, at the usual single VIP points it would have been equivalent to a $31 discount on those, which doesn't nearly cover the $70 markup ... I better not think too much about this, that way lies madness). Yay, it's not the "one that got away" after all; I don't have to add this to a growing list of white whales I'll never catch (principal among them the 10210 Imperial Flagship). ... I've been whaling a lot in the past week or two, actually. I was lucky enough to snag a used copy of the 76139 1989 Batmobile for RRP+tax, and a used copy of the 76052 Classic TV Series Batcave for under RRP. I didn't expect to ever find those for a reasonable price. Edit - looks like I just made Duke rank. Cool cool cool.

@Mandalorianknight, I laid it out in detail in this post from Monday, but I hadn't quite settled on the concept of a Moon bus yet. I think that with red tiles swapped for blue and a few small changes in cosmetic details, the new CTT could be a good neo-Classic Space Moon bus that would fit in well with the look of the 10497 Galaxy Explorer. There were several medium-sized Classic Space sets that were mostly gray, so it wouldn't be out of place among them. Picture this rolling across a gray Moonscape with lots of craters, delivering scientists and equipment from a spaceship at a landing pad to an excavation with a Kubrick/Clarke-style Monolith! Not that I'll ever build such a big scene, but that's what it suggests to me.

I still think it will make a nice moon bus for my army of white Classic Space astronauts, if I can get it without figures for maybe $60-$70. But if the build and value are this bad for the intended purpose, it's likely to warm shelves so hard I'll be lucky to find any used copies at any price. moon bus - Moon bus - MOON BUS!!!