Karalora

The humble 3L or 4L bar has so many uses. It's a weapon shaft! It's a magic wand! It's a plant stalk! It's a flute! It's a flagpole! It's a plant stalk! It's a length of pipe running along the outside of a machine! It's a walking stick! It's a blowpipe! It's a fence post!

I can't wait!

That is some magnificent detail!

This looks terrific! You've really captured the unique appearance of the various nations' architecture.

I want to challenge the notion that having all-yellow minifigs means your characters are all of the same race, or no race at all. When I say yellow is race-neutral, I mean that any face can potentially belong to a member of any race or ethnicity. There is more to racial identity than just skin color, of course--earlier in the thread we were discussing the recent proliferation of highly textured black wigs that represent natural Black hair more effectively than the smooth and/or straight wigs that were introduced earlier in LEGO history. With or without naturalistic skin tones, LEGO is of course a highly simplified cartoon medium and it can be difficult to depict nuances of ethnicity without resorting to stereotypical costumes or activities, but I think it's important that we have as many options as possible so we can depict diversity in our brick cities if we want to. (And we should want to.)

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bumping this now that it's late August and the actual Halloween stores are popping up around town.

I separate them by individual builds (not entire sets) and keep the pieces in ziploc bags inside a big Sterilite bin. I don't have enough space to build the entire village each year so I decide what to include. Some years I go more Town, some years more of a fantasy setting.

Last year I used the stag Patronus itself in my Winter Village, as ice sculptures. An elf clubhouse is pretty far outside the standard iconography, but then again a fire station isn't usually part of small-town Christmas "lore" the way the other WV sets had been, and no one seemed to mind.

It's not quite parallel because Bender is a main character in the series while Snake is a side character.

A friend of mine who's not even into LEGO said this would be a good choice for them to produce because they could keep releasing new vignettes to add on top.

It bugs me a little too, but it was probably done because it's easier to make conifers look good at that scale, than broadleaf trees. (And also so it could pull duty as the Christmas tree.) In any case, there would be nothing stopping anyone from simply re-using the summer tree build in the fall scene.

YouTube randomly suggested this to me and I have never wanted anything more. It has already garnered 10,000 votes on LEGO Ideas. Think of all the holiday and seasonal vignettes you could design to go on the top!

I guess I should be honest: I have never seen any of the Despicable Me/Minions movies, so I don't know all the details of Gru's behavior. I'm just pointing out why wholesome toy manufacturers might be fine with depicting one "evil" character and balk at another. It's the same reason TV review boards tend to be more okay with a cartoon where characters fight with energy blasts from a distance of ten feet than one where they fight with punching, even if the former depicts more death and injury. If kids stand ten feet apart and pretend to throw energy blasts, no one will actually get hurt. It's the same reason, in fact, that LEGO pirates and cowboys can have guns but modern City police can't--the historical setting puts some distance between the guns and the kids playing, it makes the weapons less immediate...and thus the kids less likely to try to "play for real" with their parent's gun or something.

It's a bit complicated. The concern is almost never "Does this audience-identification character do bad things?" but rather "Does this audience-identification character do bad things that kids can imitate?" Spoofy supervillain stuff is almost always fine in that regard, because it's too outlandish to bear on anyone's real-life behavior. We don't have to worry about kids learning that it's okay/funny/admirable to blow up the moon with an ultra-laser or steal the Tower of London. We do potentially have to worry about kids learning that it's okay/funny/admirable to smash windows with a crowbar and hot-wire cars, which is the sort of thing you get from Bender.

Matt Groening may have invented an in-universe reason for Bender to be constantly drinking alcohol, but I think we all know the real reason was because he thought it was funny to have a hard-drinking delinquent robot as a character. I mean...his name is Bender. In the show, it's because he was built to be a construction robot bending iron girders, but insofar as "bender" is also slang for a drinking binge...yeah. Fortunately, there is more to his character than that. Pretty much the only thing Moe and Barney have going for them is tending bar and crippling alcoholism, respectively, but as @MatthewRC points out, Bender is also a wanton criminal. The question then becomes whether TLG would be okay with a licensed theme where one of the main characters is a criminal and this is played for laughs.

I neeeeeeed that lavender dress!

YESSSS! I'm always thrilled to see anything related to Disney theme parks built out of LEGO! One of my dream sets is an entire suite of Fantasyland ride vehicles with appropriate character minifigs.

And another batch of set ideas: Harvest Festival in the Park--a regular town set, depicting a public harvest celebration with themed carnival booths, market stalls, trees in autumn splendor, and a pumpkin-carving contest Trick-or-Treat House--another mundane set...every neighborhood has at least one, that person who sets up the most elaborate decorations in their yard and gives out the best candy! Spooky Greenhouse--we're back in the monster village now. Those horrific man-eating plants have to grow somewhere, don't they? Horse-Drawn Hearse--an old-fashioned hearse from before the advent of the internal combustion engine, driven by none other than the Headless Horseman! It occurs to me that I tend to think of individual builds rather than sets per se--some of these could easily be combined into larger sets. The Spooky Greenhouse would work well as an adjunct to the Pumpkin House since I've established that the pumpkin-people are gardeners. The Horse-Drawn Hearse could be bringing undead party guests to the Graveyard Jamboree. The Haycart Ride and Scary-go-Round could both be attractions at the festival in the park. Or different combinations!

A few more that just came to me: Mummy House--a mini-pyramid with a mummy couple in residence, plus a "birdhouse" (also pyramid-shaped) in the garden and a new vulture mold! Costume Shop--one more for the mundane side of things, designed along similar lines to the WV shop sets, with a big display window featuring dressed up mannequins, and several cloth capes in different colors to represent different costumes hanging on racks (one of the Disney Princess sets does something like this). Haunted Tree--a big old gnarly tree with a face in the bark and mushrooms at the base. Spider House--a house with a spider motif, using web accessories from the Spider-Man sets as structural elements, with spider-people (either humanoid spider-monsters, or characters like the CMF Spider Lady, or both!) as residents.

I started a thread to talk about it! Go check it out!

This thread is inspired by an offhand comment made by @Arstotle in the WV thread. Halloween is the "other" holiday for which people like to go all-out with decorations, themed parties, etc....in the US, anyway. Its popularity is gradually spreading to other countries but I think it is still considered primarily an American holiday that has been exported, rather than a global holiday the way Christmas is. Therefore it might be prudent to call the line something like Harvest Village rather than Halloween Village. As for sets, whereas the WV is mainly an ordinary town with a seasonal flair, with occasional fantasy sets...I think the HV should go in the opposite direction and have mostly fantasy sets featuring monster characters, and occasional sets that suggest the existence of a regular human town somewhere nearby. Christmas has a fairly limited stock of fantastic characters associated with it (Santa and his wife, the workshop elves, snowmen, gingerbread people, toy soldiers, that sort of thing), but Halloween can claim any and all spooky monsters that you can imagine. I think there's a lot of potential in sets that depict houses with a quirky structural theme and their inhabitants. (Some examples are in the list below.) And just as the WV is full of snowy roofs and icicles, every set in the HV should include foliage in the fall colors. So without further ado, here is a list of Halloween/Harvest Village ideas just to get the ball rolling! Pumpkin House--a house shaped like a jack-o-lantern, including a "family" of pumpkin-headed minifigs and a pumpkin patch garden plot. Skeleton House--a rickety house frame made of bones, including a "family" of skeleton minifigs and a skeletal dog, bone trees in the garden. "Scary-Go-Round"--a carousel with skeletal horses, much like this one from the LA Haunted Hayride. Farmer's Market--one of the few "mundane" sets, a series of market stalls where produce and other items are being sold. New food molds! Graveyard Jamboree--a graveyard set with many interesting headstone and mausoleum builds, plus a zombie/ghost band playing instruments. Witch's Cottage--a storybook cottage where a witch lives with her traditional black cat. (It occurred to me the other day that witch minifigs always come with brooms, but never have their cats! Why is that?) Vampire Manor--one of the larger sets, a grand house with a bat motif and a "family" of vampire minifigs. This would not be a retread of the Haunted House from the old Monster Fighters line (a beloved set that I build for Halloween every year), but would be stylistically completely different. Haycart Ride--another mundane set, a large wagon pulled by a tractor, for trick-or-treating kids to ride in. If you prefer ordinary towns to fantasy ideas, you could frame the entire village as a haunted attraction, with the monsters just performers in costume, and the haycart as the touring vehicle! That's all for now but I will add to this later. Feel free to share your own ideas as well!

Don't get me started! (Actually, maybe we should get started...new thread?)

Outstanding build! I love him!

Robert8 did takes on Artemis, Eris, and Hades.