Joebot

I don't think TLC can continue to churn these series out at the current frenetic pace without running into some "fatigue" from the fan community. Personally, I'd love to see TLC continue indefinitely ... BUT at a slower pace than 2 or 3 series / year. Maybe one series a year, or possibly reduce the size of a series to only 8 figs.

That's an easy one. As Frank Miller once wrote: "I'm the god-dammed Batman."

Just as an FYI, the telltale bumps are located along the bottom seal of the packaging, on the back side.

AFOLs are very susceptible to "The Cult of the New," meaning that we're easily impressed and distracted by whatever shiny new bits TLC puts out. I would guess that a lot of those negative comments regarding Series 3 stem from all those nifty new Series 4 pictures that just popped up. Series 4 is New, and thus has more appeal than Series 3. Once Series 5 hits, Series 4 will seem dull and drab. For whatever it's worth, I got most of Series 3 at TRU last week, and I really like them. Even the ones that I wasn't all that excited about, like the Mummy and the Cyborg, really suprised me.

In my opinion, the reason the Fisherman is "short-packed" (to use a term from the action figure industry) is just TLC finally adopting the super-rare "chase figure" marketing strategy. It's disappointing, but not terribly surprising either. I bought most of Series 1 and 2 at the Lego Store in Schamburg, IL, and I can tell you that the employees there didn't care at all that I was using a cheat sheet. In fact, several of them stopped and chatted with me as I was scanning through the box. Whether this is common or not, I have no idea. The employees at the Schamburg store are exceptionally cool folks.

Because consumers keep buying them. If TRU can sell just as many figs at $4/each as they could at $2/each, why WOULDN'T they jack up the price?

My baseball stadium covers 9 plates (3x3), and I feel like it's too small. In retrospect, I wish I'd gone with 4x4, but that would have taken a huge bite out of the available real estate in my town. Good luck with your project! I'm curious to see how it ends up!!

Nice work, and good choice of minifig heads. However, there are actually FOUR musketeers in Dumas' "The Three Musketeers." Everybody always ignores poor D'artagnan.

I was in TRU earlier this week, and they had both the '09 and the '11 police stations for sale, sitting right next to each other on the shelf. The price / piece count disparity was quite jarring. '09 version: $100 for 953 pieces '11 version: $110 for 783 pieces Also, I find it strange that both versions are available at the same time. I've never seen TLC step on their own toes like this before.

Hey everyone, The next chapter in my Lego superhero comic is finally finished! This one continues the story arc from last time, with two small-time supervillains trying to make it in a city filled with overpowered superheroes. Sorry this one took me a little longer than usual. I've had half of it done for several weeks, but just couldn't seem to find the time to get the second half finished up. I'm pretty excited about the next chapter, so hopefully I get motivated to plow through that one quickly. As always, thanks for reading, and please let me know what you think!!

The bumps aren't "bumpy" enough to distinguish by touch. You have to visually identify them, which is not always as easy as it sounds.

Agreed on that! There is some very fine detail on these figs, like the pinstripes on the baseball player, or the flower-print on the samurai, or the baggy pants on the rapper. Even the Mummy, which I was kinda lukewarm on based on the pictures, is really cool, with some creepy green flesh poking out from behind the bandages in various places. As an aisde, last night I went to my nearby Lego Store, which is about four blocks away from the TRU where I found the figs. The Lego Store had none in stock, and when I asked about the figs, the guy told me they're scheduled to arrive in January. That seems really odd to me that TRU gets these figs weeks before TLC's own retail stores!

Definitely not easier than the barcodes. The barcodes were tedious, but once you found the match to your cheat sheet, it was clear what the fig was. With the dots, there's a lot more ambiguity. The dots are maddeningly hard to see, and sometimes it's not obvious what's a legitimate dot, and what's just a scuff on the packaging. I ended up using a combination of the dot system and feeling the bags. I used the dot system to narrow it down to what I THOUGHT the fig was, then would try to feel for the relavent parts for verification. It takes a while, and I sorta felt like a dork while I was doing it, but I did manage to get exactly the figs that I wanted. It works, but be prepared to spend a bit of time tilting the bags back and forth in the light, to try to make out the dot pattern. I know, it all sounds very silly, but I refuse to play the blind packaging game.

Yeah, as soon as I hit Add Reply, I saw I goofed that. Fixed it!!

Of the 13 different figs that I've purchased, I did not have any spare parts. I was especially bummed that the sumo wrestler didn't have a spare trophy like the karate dude from series 2 had.

I found two mostly full boxes in the TRU in Schaumburg, IL (Chicago suburb). I had the same reaction to the dot system. It's not nearly as simple and clean as the barcodes. I got what I wanted, so it does work, but it takes a while. Some of those dots are tough to pick out. And the differences in the pattern between, say, the hula girl and the rapper are verrrrry subtle. But still, thanks again to the fan community for finding this system in the first place.

I would argue that this color used for the NBA figs is a lot closer to a realistic Caucasian flesh tone that the current yellowish one. But anyway, I'm digressing from the topic at hand. I agree with most of the posters here that until TLC tells us otherwise, we can probably assume that they'll stick with their separation of licensed / non-licensed mini-fig colors. Any future non-licensed Pirate theme would presumably revert back to yellow figs.

The turning point was Lando. Back when the Star Wars license started, and all the characters were yellow, TLC didn't include Lando in a set for an awkwardly long time. I mean, geez, the dude blew up a Death Star, right? How about some mini-fig love?? At the time, there was MUCH debate on Lugnet (anybody remember Lugnet??) about how TLC would handle the fact that Billy Dee Williams is an African-American. This debate, as you can probably imagine, was heated and filled with much posturing and angry claims of "I'll boycott Lego forever!" The debate came down on two sides: 1) Keep all figs yellow forever, regardless of who they are intended to represent. This would have been the simplest solution, but probably not a very satisfying one. As Aanchir noted above, a yellow Lando next to a yellow Luke would have been odd. 2) Make Lando brown, and keep all characters portrayed by Caucasian actors yellow. This too would have been a simple solution, but it comes with an unpleasant connotation. For 40 years now, TLC has said that yellow minifigs don't represent a specific race. They're just "people." This is a very nice philosophy. Unfortunately, as soon as you introduce a brown Lando next to a yellow Luke, you've now made the connection that yellow = Caucasian. This implies that all those yellow minifigs ever made in the past 40 years were, in fact, meant to represent Caucasians. Both of those solutions had their (typically angry, vocal) proponents. TLC threw us a curve ball though, and did something that no one expected or predicted -- they made a new color to represent Caucasian characters. It solves one problem (how to represent the fact that actors and actress have different skin colors), but introduced a whole new set of problems -- namely, changing colors in the middle of a licensed theme. Thus my Star Wars collection is half-yellow and half-flesh. They sort of mitigated this issue by not making the new Caucasian minifig color very realistic. Instead of a peachy-pink color (which they DID do for the NBA theme) they made it a sickly jaundiced grey-yellow. I have never seen a person with this skin color before in real life, so I'm always amused when people refer to it as a "realistic flesh tone." It's not realistic at all. It's a compromise -- it's "sort of" yellow, so it's not quite so jarring when these new figs are placed next to classic yellow figs. Anyway, that's how I remember the whole thing going down. It caused a huge uproar at the time, second only to the now-infamous grey/bley change. Good times, good times ...

That's a good point. It's possible that these minifigs (especially series 1) will only increase in value as time goes by. In a couple of years from now, that Diver that everyone made fun of may be really valuable. Then again ... maybe the hype will die down, and the figs won't be worth the two bucks that the scalper paid for it. You never know. Collectibles are a fickle business. Just ask all those people who bought those rare hologram-foil-stamped comic books back in the 90's, or those people who bought Beanie Babies back in the early 00's. That stuff is worthless now.

Whew, I guess I just snuck in under the wire! I got accepted yesterday afternoon and got my NDA to sign.

I was wondering about this too. If this is a paid "consultant" position of some sort, that would really be cool. Regardless, I fired off my email this morning!

Agreed. I never understood all of the "Won't someone PLEEZE think of the children!" hand-wringing around here. This is capitalism, folks. Buy whatever you want in whatever quantity you can afford. It's not the consumer's responsibility to make sure that there are enough figs to go around. That's TLC's job, not ours. The only way to defeat the hoarders and scalpers is to increase supply so that there's enough to go around. To TLC's credit, it sound like they've finally done that with this series.

That's just marketing spin. TLC doesn't care if it's "fun and fair." They don't care about encouraging interaction and trading. The ONLY REASON for blind packaging is money. It's an age-old marketing scam, and it works really, really well. They want consumers to spend more money, because you're never sure what you're going to get. You have to hedge your bets. If there's one fig that you want, how many figs do you buy to give yourself a reasonable chance of getting it? 5? 10? Whatever that number is, you've just spend way more money that you would have if the figs had open packaging.

Those are really great! Ah, I miss that show. I loved it even though it drove me crazy.

The ISS seems like an odd choice for a Lego set. First off, it's enormous, so displaying it quickly become a problem. Does it sit on a stand, or are you supposed to suspend it from the ceiling? Second, are there really a lot of play features? Twist the solar panels, kids!! Yay! And third, it looks VERY fragile. Seriously, a hefty sneeze, and this thing is lying on the floor, and you've got trans-blue tiles from one end of the house to the other. I see some Technic beams in there that might give it some structural integrity, but even so, that thing looks to be held together mostly on faith. It's a fantastic looking model, though.