Gorilla94

I heared rumors of a Lego Batman movie 2 2022... they are Fake, aren't they? I mean they can't make a Sequel with Universal having the Lego Film rights and WB owning DC, can they?

To be honest, I don´t see it that way at all. I don´t get how my posts made me look like I want just a bunch of UCS-Sets. At a certain point a set is fine (in terms of what it represents as licenced fan merch as well as a generic toy and what is charged for what is offered) and just looses it´s cuteness by getting bigger and bigger. The bag end set nailed this point pretty much with the only downside being the stickers for the maps and the book. Size says pretty much nothing about quality. The small set with Bilbo, Gollum and the Ring is indeed one of the best in my opinion. The question is what is possible with a sceene. A Laketown-set for the third movie could have been done as a extremely small pack just including bard and the ballista or a still very, very small one including Bain, too. That´s cute and nice to get. It could also have been the flagship set including Smaug and a really big and detailed tower (the 80€ Set could have been a proper Erebor set without Smaug then - while Smaug is awesome the builds were a huge dissapointment - Dale can be skipped... nobody asked for the terrible overpriced tan ruin... in the end it would have been easily possible to do a wave still with the poorly chosen pricepoints but at least with better sets simply changing which set gets which setting). As a 30€ set it´s just "meh" offering nothing more than the small set except for Orcs without ears and Tauriel ... and there is a reason why this character is that cheep on bricklink and there are "non-Tauriel"-cuts of the movie. I might not have expressed myself correctly. What I meant was that somebody must have come up with the Idea that there isn´t enough money in the licence to go on with making sets. If it was different we would have such sets and less "new approaches" like nexo knights. That´s true. But with this, barrel escape also in wave one and then the release of Smaug in wave 3 it already doesn´t fit much with the releases of the movies. So I don´t see where the point is in making it an important factor if sceenes are right now in the cinema, if a character like Thror would be a desirable figure.

Seems to be the weakest numbered cmf until now for me... My highlight are the Aztec warrior and the castaway. The crab is probably the most adorable Lego animal I've ever seen. Bee keeper is cool with his accessory, too. The printed ladybug tile is cute. The violine is awesome.. Torso and Legs of the Centaur girl are nice to get... the rest I don't want for free :/ I am glad that there are only 12, if that is the new quality standard. Now I can stop collecting them all much easier. Would look stupid on display anyways to have 12 next to 16.

That's true. But I don't get why it has to be exactly this amount of sets for these pricepoints and in this case why a 300 parts set for 30€ has to be the the laketown set if it is clear that it won't be very good. I know that there are buisness decisions but in this case it would surely have been better to let someone with love and understanding for the material (both Lego and the licence) make the decisions from scratch instead of telling a designer which impossible Job je has to do with theme and price range and then claim that there is no demand for middle Earth/Castle sets, when few want that stuff. Pretty much nobody from this threat would have skipped Beorns hut and did a dolguldur-ambush-set with him instead... making a headpiece with just one angry expression instead of a usefull hair mould and a standard head with two expressions. Hobbit wave 1 included the spiders from desolation of smaug already. Smaug did not appear until a set for the 3rd movie. It is not like it would not have been possible to take some freedom releasing sceenes or combine them. The movie-3-Laketown set has hardly any relevance for the plot except for the ballista and the sets from wave 2 were still brand new on shelves. You could have easily put it on a roof in the first set, add Bain and there would be nothing missing. Should not cost more than 5€ extra... and to be honest i would not increase the price with the thought in mind, that the set isn't that gorgeous/iconic/impressive and not that desirable figures are included. I know, that this has nothing to do with piece count or production costs, but it is important when it comes to buyers decision.

There are also certain reading devices you can plug in to your PC. They have a bunch of movable dots in a flat surface to form the points of tactile alphabet. That way you can read a bit, click to move on with the text and read the next few words.

Oh didn´t notice that special gear until now and thought it was just a random guy taking a walk with his dog. That´s nice. I don´t think you can compare the baby mould with that dog gear. Babys made of standard minifigure heads and some third party pieces are probably the oldest custom figures I ever saw. From the superhero fan, who plays the sceene in Spiderman 1, where Peter saves a child from a burning building, to the classical mommy-daddy-child-roleplay scenario... Pretty much everyone ever using minifigures wanted to have a baby minifigure at some point, so I´d compare its release to the release of short legs in terms of importance for the main audience. I´d say it is not more or less likely than before. We will most likely see the dog gear again in the future (not neccesarily with a blind character but also a special police dog). We didn´t get a wheelchair cmf, too. An armlet would be indeed a good use of cmf arm printing (In fact that is something that should already have been in the city set - I mean come on. This is a case where it is much more needed than for example a wookie-figure with a brown armlet you don´t really notice a while ago) and If I had to choose between a boring city character with terrible accessory like the Series 19 Programmer and a blind character (that will just because of that make many people happy already) with a cute animal that is cool to get for everyone, I´ll prefer the second figure to be released for sure. If such a figure still get´s something like the programmer´s legs it would be a pretty popular one. I think a reuse of the old goat or the introduction of a new sheep with a cmf is a little bit more likely now with the ideas blacksmith set. I can´s see them just cutting the goat from the design or change it to a pig... On the other hand we are waiting for a shepard since what... series 15?

Hm... I trink that's a question of personal taste. I'd completely agree with you on the Vader Helmet. There isn't anything comparable to it. Stuff similar to the Witchking and Sauron helmets on the other Hand is used for lots of fantasy bad guys (like the Overlord from the Video games for example, the WoW Lich king or a certain Inquisitor outfit in Sacred 2) or even for the knight from Overwatch. It isn't that random in the fantasy genre like orcs but for sure not that much of a unique thing to fantasy like Vaders Helmet is to scifi - other than Sauron's Mouth's helmet wich is without the eyes indeed very unique... and ugly (like i said, it is perfect in the movie and a perfect representation of the charakter in Lego Form, but it is still ugly unlike the Witchking wich is just cool and because of that much more desirable as a toy). I agree in some points while I would not call it fantastic. Never said the Mines of Moria is a straight F in school grades. Dwarf, Elf and the Troll are definitely selling points. The clone orcs with terribly ugly faces and unprinted legs not so much. And I think we can certainly say there are more exciting things to get for a child than a kid with a scarf, too (not that I wasn't glad we got Pippin as a figure). 3 really cool figures, 2 "okay" ones and 2 bad ones and some usefull grey parts just do not justify this price. Same for the Uruk/Rohan set. It is certainly not a straight F but big improvements would not have been difficult. I totally see your point. My opinion is just "if you do a job, do it right". If they did one good one instead of those 2 laketown sets (3 if you include the polybag) and given the master just hair (maybe the shakespears hat like Filch from Harry Potter just in dark orange) and did not waste a mould on the strange hat that isn't even in the most important sceene where Thorin has his speech, it would have been a better choice. This way there would have been a mould left to do at least Orcrist as a mould or release a Thror minifig including a beard compatible with the special crowned hairpiece.

Well... a Balrog or Fellbeast without knowlege of the movies is still a cool demon/dragonlike monster...while boring gray wall is a boring gray wall. Gandalf for example is a nice Wizard minifig no matter if you see him as the Gandalf the Grey or a generic Wizard. Size does not matter in that scenario. If there have to be big sets, there would have been opportunities to do sets that feel like "ok, everything about this set is at least nice to have and worth the money the set could have been cheaper without it". That's what I mean with that there were bad choice made. The Witchking in his rotk design is just cool. Saurons mouth is well made as a figure but he is supposed to be disgusting. Without fandom love there are less people that would like to have hin than the Witchking. A Thror minifig would still have been a golden dwarfen king. The master of laketown on the other Hand is a strange guy with an even stranger hat and an ugly face. All I say is when planing the sets they should have had that in mind what could still be desirable if these are vieved as generic sets.

Oh, I don´t say we must have a complete mine. I just say that this set wasn´t that great and I ask myself why something that can´t become an A+ set no matter how well it would be executed (which the mines of moria set was not) is chosen to be release, while there are better options that stay ignored. There are people that would buy a big amount of cave troll and Moria Orc battlepacks and build Moria with there own bricks. Those won´t buy 50 80€-Sets. Children as the main target group had so many cool sets to choose from... why should they buy a gray wall? Because they are such hardcore fans of a very mature 3h 48 (the mouth of Sauron makes it seem Lego expects them to know the extended version) movie that has a very slow pacing few kids could stand even if it was much much, much shorter? If we want to do a Moria set it could be done with a smaller Balrog-Set including two fellowship members... that would sell to hardcorefans as well as children who don´t know the movies at all. A 40/50€ set is also in a price range that is less limited to christmas or birthday presents. My critisism about Weathertop isn´t exactly that it is too small. While I don´t like the SW microfighters, I completely understand why many children like them as a fun little toy or at least as a quite cheap way to get certain figures. Personally I´d think that a microfighter Ringwraith on a little brickbuild dragon would have been a good little set because of those reasons. Weathertop has much in common with a microfighter in terms of scaling down and simplification. My critisism is that Weathertop is just not working that way. I would honestly not be able to recognise it as Weathertop at the first moment, children who don´t know the movies don´t really care much about a little pile of bricks with stairs and it is much to expensive for a "there are some nice figures and a bunch of random bricks"-set. Again: A Nazgul or even the Witchking with a new helmet mould on a brickbuild fellbeast would have sold like sliced bread to all kinds of target groups. That´s quite true depending on how good the result should look and how much money you want to invest (is it ok, if Rohan soldiers have dragons on their armor? Should they have printed legs that fit with the torso? The really good ones are in my opinion 3 ones from vikings, one from prince of persia, the hun warrior´s from cmf series 12 and the ghost kight´s torso from series 19. Getting printed legs for the vikings and the Ghost are a pain.). But if we argue that you can use bricklink to compensate the insufficiencies of sets, we also can´t critisize missing pieces or smeared prints anymore. Depends strongly on the licence in my opinion to be honest. Middle Earth has "a problem" in that regard because there are so many important named characters and the narrative of lotr and the hobbit is in both cases basically a long connected journey of a fellowship. Star Wars the clone wars on the other hand was mostly about combats between clones and droids with a small amount of named non-clone characters in pretty much each episode. With one set including one of the separatist leaders and a Jedi you were ready to go army building clones and droids, which all looked the same. There was pretty much no set multibles of would not have been usefull to 95%. This way the Rohan soldier and Eomer suffer from quite the same problem like the 2 Jedi knights in the clone trooper battlepack about two years ago. Like I said: I see Middle Earth as a challanging theme to make really good sets of compared to a original Lego theme created with sets in mind and some choices done by Lego in trying to do so were pretty bad on top of that. I am happy for you to get them for a reasonable price at your place. I really am. But that doesn´t change that the original prices were especially for that time very high. And having to look for big sales to even start with collecting the theme is a really bad thing if you want to get people into it. That is why the literally "great" hall from Harry Potter was the right way to start the theme while giving no way of at least getting Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas in one set was pure greed and/or stupidity. Well... Again I´d say that is a question of the theme. Super hero sets sell pretty much just because of the figures and not because of a strange vehicle nobody knows. For the Harry Potter sets the hogwards castle builds play a much bigger role. For Star Wars it depends strongly on the ship or building if it is disirable. For Middle Earth it is a bit like this, too. Baggins end is an adorable set with a beloved location. It would also have even sold with less awesome Minifigures. On the other hand pretty much nobody asked for the Battle of the five minifigures ruins.

Wow... If the roumors are true that we get now just 12 figures per series in paper boxes and we still get such bland and boring figures (assuming that there aren´t parts missing that would improve the look of this figure at a massive scale) with only 1 new mould that abuses the cmf moulding budged to save money at other themes, this will make me boycott the product cmfs completely even if there is a good figure down the line (coming from someone who owns Series 1-20 completely).

I know and love most of them (but espcially the dwarfs) :D I am sure they would still sell well as a 1:1 rerelease today and even outstanding if they make an updated version with the new roundshield (or even an octagonal one), more beard colours (a white or blond dwarven beard would nice to get at all as well as the brown beard in a orange or black version) and maybe one new helmet. Of course I can´t speak for the international market, but when I was a child I would have done everything to get a box with standard tan bricks or at least yellow ones to build a pyramide and other things to expand my adventurer-sets. Today´s children might be less interested in building things without instructions than I was, but from what I can see there is still quite a demand. I get asked often by relatives with kids, where to get big amounts of certain colours for a reasonable price... and have no answer except flea markets or chinese fake bricks. I also hear toy shop owners ranting about the new brick boxes and how they could sell the old ones with a few basic colours while the new ones completely fail. If there are for example wall texture bricks, some plates and arches there could be some instructions for Wall designs and stuff like this, too. I don´t say every set should be like that, but if we take one terrible filler set every year and replace it with such a brick-box it would surely not be the worst Idea. To be honest I think Lotr and the Hobbit are just something completely different than a generic original lego fantasy theme: They have lots of named characters with very specific and detailed outfits and settings that are not ideal for Lego playsets. The Dwarfs need their individual beard moulds. The Rohirim are no SW-clonetrooper army. It hurts, that for example Eowyn is missing - a problem original Lego themes just don´t have, if there are just the characters they release. Helm´s deep is supposed to be ugly and while I really love the Minifigures (except for the poorly excuted berserker) the lego set is ugly bacause of that, too. So is the orc forge. Moria´s atmosphere lives 99% from the light and how big the place is. You can´t really reproduce this in a Lego set... A generic castle theme that is planned from scratch to look good as a toy does not suffer from these problems. Perfection is pretty much impossible this way, but it could still have been handeled much better. For example the Erebor set could have had a paper background like the old Studio sets to show the big cave full of gold. The box art looks awesome. The final product like a bad joke (except for the perfect Smaug). There were so many bad choices done by Lego in terms of which sceenes were made into sets, where the effort for example in terms of moulds was put in (Master of Laketown got an exclusive mould. No Thror, no Orcrist, No Sauron, No Witchking, no Narsil...)... and the worst was the price politics. Today the Uruk Hai attack looks nice next to the 501 battle pack, but back then the price of many sets the line had (Weathertop without any new moulds for 80€) were just ridiculous. So was the distribtion of minifigures. You need the whole first hobbit wave to get all 13 dwarfs and nearly all lotr-sets wave 1 to get the fellowship. To get that gorgeous Smaug you had to spend 130€ for pretty much nothing besides him. Especially Dwalins green Torso and Trans green axe were insultingly ugly (and comletely inaccurate). Azog was in 2 expensive sets... I say expensive instead of big on purpose thinking about the battle of five minifigures with Dain even reusing Gloins face print. These are the basics most people want before thinking about getting more orcs. Who has money left to start the generic bad guys army building after that even if that set then had a reasonable price point? A pack of 4 Dwarfs with toros and legs designed from the scratch to be switched with each other and still look good, different beards and helmets would give people an insane amount of good looking combinations - something you can´t do with the 2 Rohirim of which one screams "This is Eomers helmet and torso" right at your eyes.

To be honest I think a few certain battle packs would sell like sliced bread and increase brick sales. Let's imagine two Battlepacks like the koruit Erebor dwarfs and Uruks. Let's add a mountain mining adventure brick box. It should contain tons of good dark bluish gray and/or dark gray bricks and a bunch of yewel pieces from the 90s till the quite new moon Exploration ones. You could build castles with it. You could build a mountain kingdom for dwarfes. Even Star Wars Fans could buy bunkers, or spaceships with it and i am sure most would love to get crystals and stuff for a lightsaber crystal have. Children love having a big treasure cave anyways. Brick Plates like from the Hogwards Castle with minifigures using yellow heads would even be a very successfull brick box in their own. That's just one example. I could come up with many more. I think the brick sales would only break down, if Lego keeps releasing brick boxes with mostly strange moulds in colours of limited use.

Isn't there a castle roumor every year? I hope for a recolour of the viking helmet and the tournament knights sword in the ideas blacksmith. I'd love everything dwarfen we get :)

The little anubis tomb, which opens when you pull on a spear connected on a chain (5983). It had an audio tape with it. It was one of my first sets and is a big part of why I am such a history nerd today.

Oh, I can assure you, you will have a happy customer as soon as I find it there :D I am working on Simpsons moulds myself at the moment. I habe to admit it is much more difficult compared to Design custom prints ^^'

Do we know anything new about the rumored UCS-Gunship? If it is minifigure scale it would be quite tempting with the 501-armybuilding Set on shelves.

Well, then I am out. For 4€ I demand to get exactly what I want. The thought of ending up with multible creepy carebears is a bad joke i don't want to be part of. I don't believe it a second that saving nature is a relevant point for that decision. At best it is greenwashing for marketing reasons. They could have stopped using plastic bags in boxes years ago but did not care. Instead Lego often used even 2 plastic bags per cmf-figure since TLM2 now. The plastic from plants is only used for Lego plants and part of a big marketing campain. This is only an attempt to squeeze the money even more from customers.

I am pretty sure they do. That is part of the problem. Children aren't really the customer group for a 4€-minifigure. Sure: if I put Kids in a room and let them play they will have fun with a Series 19-surfer. You can swoosh him in his own, which is an advantage over other characters. I am not sure how he competes with a knight (to play with the knight you need a second fighter or a horse or anything to interact with so the type of testing would be relevant, too). But will they spend their pocket money on the surfer - or better: on the option of getting him thanks to blindbags? I read some guides on how much pocket money children should get... the "I love firefighters!"-age kid would have serious problems getting a series 19-firefighter without feeling for it. At this pricepoint you have to convince the parents. Most parents don't see any difference between the series 19 Firefighter with printed stripe on her arms and the 0,50€ to 1€-Firefighter-minifigures on every flea market in a good condition. If the child is really into that theme, they will already have a city set containing similar figures. Special figures - the kind of "wow, stuff like this exists in Lego form?" - makes these parents more likely to buy them for a kid. Donald Duck, Shakespeare, Caesar... In regards of the cmf-theme i think it is nearly impossible to overestimate the relevance of TFOLs and AFOLs. In fact the only times I saw children and parents buying cmfs at a store was when I was offering to feel for a certain figure while searching for my own.

I share that concern and I don't believe Lego is able to do that, too. But I also don't think Lego is completely insane planing a cmf-series with the goal in mind how they can make it as nonappealing as possible towards customers. I trust Lego enough to be at least aware of if a figure is just a cheap filler reusing/ntroducing a mould that would have been made anyways for a City set, eben when the ones making these decisions are ignorant enough to assume someone is going to buy stuff like that for 4€ anyways. As long as the money was arriving at Lego it worked fine and there was no reason to improve something. Lego now feels that it does not work because stores stop ordering cmfs. Getting rid of some of those cheap fillers seems to be a decision even a buisnessman without much understanding of the product could come up with. I think this is one further step to the end of the numbered cmf-lines, too. When Lego wants to make even more profit they will start replacing the few good figures in thw reduced 12-figure-cmfs with carebears and modern Firefighters :/ I hope we get at least Zeus and Hades before the cmfs are over. At least I can make my own generic centaur now with the Harry Potter-Legpiece.

A massive assumtion indeed. I would have agreed with that a few years back, but the price increase changed that as well as the pathetic production quality of some serieses after moving the production to China, which made a lot of people buy them at all and pretty much killed the completionist-motivation for those who came back when the quality level went back to an acceptable level. Regional ones like Team GB and "die Mannschaft" as well as this stupid Mr. Gold buried the completionism of many more. New completionists are unlikely now at series 21. It's not like joining in at series 10 and getting the few serieses that came before. Maybe this could be fixed with a new label starting from 1 again? In my personal opinion the selection of figures gets less interesting, too. There was always a neutral figure out of 16 i got for completion from series 1 diver on... that was fine for that price. 19 and 20 had 4 and 6 I don't really want... and Carebear was the first figure I really dislike and would not have for free. It might be arrogant but it seems to me that my taste is pretty much the taste of the average customer at my place... i can still buy full boxes back to series 18 at local stores and they consisting completely of the leftover ones I don't like. With the new price and the experience of not getting anything they like children and parents seem to have stopped buying them at all pretty much. The days when collectors buy 2 complete series as well as additional ones and the rest is sold to people grabing a bag or two without feeling for it seem to be over. Putting 12 relly interesting and well done characters in every box could indeed push sales. It gets cheaper to complete serieses so people will maybe buy them all again instead of the few outstanding ones. If there are 9 Vikings per box army builders are happy as well as collectors and children who would like to get at least one

I guess they will just use less and less special cmf moulds (like for example the Dragon guy guits headgear and tail) until there are only firefighter and drone-guy cmfs left, which include moulds which would have been released anyways... to the point at wich they became so boring nobody buys them anymore. I doubt they got much more expensive At all. Simpsons 1 sold for 2,50€ with tons of dual moulded arms and exclusive head moulds for each character worthless for any non-Simpsons-theme. On top of that it had licence costs. These days we have just a bit more dual moulding and printed arms from time to time with most moulds being reused for other themes for 4€ even without licence. It is just maximising profit at a degree that reached pure greed.

Cute and - knowing who's blood that is - disturbing at the same time :'D my only idea for a little improvement would be using a 1x1bracet in purple and a white 1x1 tile modified with Clip on top for Jokers arms instead of this 1x1 plate modified. So his arms would be completely purple :)

At least we are getting the ideas-Blacksmith. I hope for a recolour of the vikings helmet (a brown one for a kitbash-Eowyn) and the tournament knights sword.

i am very happy with him. My custom minifigures are just like original Lego. the only sad thing: he doesn´t print metal colours.

I think it isn´t allowed to share links or tell sites to leaks, isn´t it? let´s say: the usual place for leaks. a very popular site where people share pictures under the hashtag "legoleaks".