Karalora

I thought at first that I would end up getting this even though I already have the original version...but upon further reflection I think I'll skip it. I might see if the new carolers turn up on Bricklink for a reasonable price, but that's all. The photos of the new toy mini-builds should be sufficient for me to build them out of my existing collection. When it comes to new holiday scenery this year, I'll focus on MOCing a gingerbread house and/or Snow Queen's Grotto.

I do my best. I may be a bit grumpy with Disney right now due to the "Star Wars Land" plans for Disneyland. It's not TLG I don't trust...it's Disney. They hold the Lion King's share of the power in any deal they broker with another company and they're so unbelievably finicky about the way they market their characters. The minifig/minidoll divide with Princess just places further restrictions on which animated characters we could realistically expect to see in something like this.

That is literally just a jazzed-up version of the original Winter Toy Shop. And dang me, I'm going to end up buying it, aren't I? AREN'T I???

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this project. As much as I would love to have some classic Disney characters in proper minifig form, their animated canon alone is huge and they never seem to know how to properly merchandise it. I'm worried that either the character selection will be stupid, or the figures will look horrible, or both. You want Hercules and Hades? Good freakin' luck; Disney doesn't even seem to remember that they made that movie. Ditto for almost anything animated that isn't Pixar and doesn't feature a Princess in a leading role. You figure at least we'll get Maleficent and Jafar to go with the Princess sets? Good freakin' luck again; they don't like making playable toys of the Villains from their fairy tales...because girls don't like conflict and adventure and good vs. evil, y'see. Y'see?

With all due respect to those who followed the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, I doubt it's very high on the radar of the mainstream moviegoing public. Making sure new movies harmonize with that content would likely be more trouble than it's worth. As for this... By my reckoning, if you even bother to do that, you're already assigning the internal chronology more importance than the movies warrant. Indy's cinematic adventures, like those of the pulp heroes whose tradition he inherits, are episodic. It literally doesn't matter whether Temple happens before or after Raiders. Raiders introduced audiences to the character, but it was by no means an "origin story"...but neither was Temple. Apart from the Young Indy series--which, again, not everyone who enjoys the movies is familiar with--Indy doesn't have an origin story. Nor, in my opinion, does he need one. He doesn't need a fixed chronology. It's perfectly acceptable to me if they slap dates on his adventures without regard for whether such a timeline could be internally consistent. It elevates the whole enterprise to a mythic status.

If I may digress here for a moment, I have to say that Indy is one of the few big geek franchises that I think would handle being rebooted quite well. A large part of what irks long-term fans about reboots is the implication that the original continuity which they loved is being overwritten. Did you like idealistic, brightly-colored Superman and want to see more of his exploits? Too bad for you, the Man of Steel version is the "real" one now. But Indiana Jones didn't have much continuity to begin with. The original trilogy went story-prequel-sequel, demonstrating that it really doesn't matter which order you watch them in. Each one is self-contained; there is no overarching plot connecting them beyond "Archaeologist goes on globe-trotting adventures in the 1930s, fights Nazis, encounters divinely powered artifacts." Any new scripts could be framed as episodes of Indy's life we didn't see during the first go-around, taking place in and around the ones we did, neither contradicting them nor relying on our knowledge of them to make sense. Harrison Ford is too damn old for the role now (unless you want more 1950s Communists-aliens-and-nuclear-terror hijinkery), but there's probably a youngish actor who could do justice to Indy. So yeah...Indiana Jones "reboot"? Bring it on!

Four words: Avatar: the Last Airbender. What a hot mess that line was. It was instrumental in getting me back into LEGO because I loved the show, but in retrospect I can see just how badly they skimped on production--only two sets and one new mold (Momo the lemur), dismal minifig numbers... Even just drawing from Season 1 of the series, we should have had a buildable Appa. We should have had a set taking place in a polar environment--the season both begins and ends at one of the poles. We should have had Uncle Iroh and Admiral Zhao minifigs. We should have had molded pieces to represent Katara's waterbending and Sokka's boomerang. We should not have had an Air Temple with a hidden armory full of swords--the Airbenders were pacifists! If they had put just a little more effort into faithfully recreating the best moments of the series, the line might have done much better and could have moved on to Season 2, which is where, for my money, things really picked up.

Apart from the eternal battle between Penny's hair and the couch back, I'm pretty pleased with this set. What really sells it are the number of small details--all the mini-builds representing specific, recognizable things in the apartment. I'm also impressed by the extent to which the characters' personalities come through in the printing of the minifig heads. Both Amy and Bernadette wear glasses and have big grins (on one side), but there's a noticeable difference between Amy's earnest, oh-boy-I-have-friends-now enthusiasm and Bernadette's semi-forced, repressive-upbringing cheerfulness.

On the other hand, I can see how it would benefit people who missed the first Toy Shop. It's been long enough that you basically can't get that set anymore--I just checked on Bricklink and the cheapest one was missing the box and instructions and going for €150. That's a good 4x what it cost originally. But a toy shop is one of the fundamentals of any decent Christmas...sorry, Winter Village. I'll still probably get it if it's another toy shop. I'm in too deep to stop now!

I'll be pretty disappointed if it is a toy shop. Isn't it a little soon to be repeating basic concepts like that? Give us something new!

I'm a big fan of the Winter Village line. None of the sets has really disappointed me so far, although I would rather have had molded reindeer than brick-built with Santa's Workshop. The only real downside is that the collection has expanded past the size of my display area, so I have to pick and choose which sets to build each year! I feel like a candy shop would be slightly redundant to both the bakery and the candy stall from the Market. I would love a gingerbread house, though! I was going to MOC one last year to go with Santa's Workshop, but a November job loss put the brakes to that plan. I think there's plenty of room in the Winter Village concept for both realistic features and fantastic ones--I see the latter as elements of a temporary Santa's Village attraction the town puts up every year. Things are getting back on track for me financially, so if we don't get a Gingerbread House as the official set this year, I might take another shot at creating my own. I might also do a Snow Queen's* Grotto where she holds court with her Yeti servitors. * No, not Elsa.

Where do dweebs fit into this classification system?

I agree that articulated short legs would be nice. While it doesn't really make a difference as to the sitting vs. standing height of the figure, short minifigs are very often associated with action themes like LOTR (hobbits and dwarfs), Castle fantasy (dwarfs again) and Star Wars (Ewoks) and it seems weird to have them so static while their taller buddies are running and flailing all over the place. On the other hand, it's never bothered me that minifigs with dress slopes stand a little taller than minifigs with legs. It's just another facet of minifig stylization, like the trapezoid bodies and cylindrical heads.

Castle MOCers focus too much on historical recreation and army-building.

I have one fig I MOCed back when I was really into Castle and liked so much I kept her even after my interest in Castle waned. She's third from the left here: I call her my Mad Alchemist. She's not evil, but she takes a cavalier attitude toward property damage as well as damage to her person. (It's hard to say how she would treat damage to someone else, because everyone's wise enough to stay away from her lab.) She lost her leg in an alchemical accident years ago, but it didn't change her mind about her craft one bit.

I think the minifig Princesses look awesome! The existence of the minidolls has bugged me from the get-go, just because they're so dissimilar to our classic minifig. They're really stylistically incompatible, and that leads to this weird de facto segregation where there's Regular Lego World, with minifigs which are mostly male, and then Girly Lego World, with minidolls which are almost all female (and whose pets are far more cutesy-poo, and who have miraculously figured out how to mix pink, purple, and aqua paint). No, Elsa in the movie doesn't look like a minifig. But nobody in any movie looks like a minifig (unless of course the movie is a Lego production where the characters are specifically designed that way). Normally it isn't a problem, because we chalk it up to a sort of visual translation. We don't mind that minifig!Superman has hips far wider than his shoulders and can't make a fist. We see past the trapezoidal shape of the minifig to the intended appearance of the character. Likewise, we shouldn't mind minifig!Princesses with blocky figures and thick necks.

Now that you mention it, Iria, the Lego Yeti looks like a cross between the one from "Rudolph" and this animatronic version from Disneyland: The Lego Yeti is obviously friendly and has light blue skin like the "Rudolph" version, but the hair growth on the head and the huge fangs seem inspired by the Disneyland version.

Couple more: The Jungle Boy... ...is very definitely based on the classic character Tarzan, with his chimpanzee sidekick Cheetah: The Spooky Girl with her dead teddy bear... ...reminds me of no one so much as that macabre little decapitated-doll-toting sprite of mid-Sixties television (and early Nineties cinema), Wednesday Addams!

I've noticed others, but I wanted to give other people a chance to answer. If we wanted, we could go through the CMFs series-by-series and find them all.

First an obvious one, or should I say...elementary. Secondly, the Dino Hunter... ...seems to have a look inspired by Katniss Everdeen as portrayed by Jennifer Lawrence: Likewise, the Forest Maiden... ...may have been intended as a companion for the Forest Man (himself a clear Robin Hood expy), but who could fail to notice that she came out right after the public had established their fondness for another red-haired, green-clad archer girl? On a different note, this guy: ...is clearly not just any Roman emperor. The printed quote on his tile is a dead giveaway that he is none other than Julius Caesar himself: That's all I have for now.

My storage is kind of a mess, honestly. I have a mishmash of shelves with pull-out bins, tool caddies, compartmented boxes intended for sorting beads, food storage containers, and miscellaneous other containers. Some parts are separated by shape, others by color. Sets that I still rebuild from time to time (Winter Village) get their own bins. I'd really like to revamp my system, but I have so little extra space at this point that I'm not sure it's currently feasible. What I'd like to do is sort by color and then part type, in order to make it easier to design buildings and landscaping where I would want some color coordination. My collection isn't big enough to justify getting too detailed and granular, but I could certainly do better than I am currently.

I don't know, I think the Zookeeper torso could work for a guy. The waistline is a lot less extreme than on some female minifigs, and there's no visible evidence of breasts. You could just say the uniform belt is a little tight. Failing that, the Adventurers line turned out some similar-looking shirt designs--tan with pockets, etc. The Explorer has kind of a similar look too. Although ideally, TLG would just give us a Zoo subtheme of City, amirite?

I am fairly indifferent toward Lady Cyclops, but I make a point of collecting all the fantasy CMFs, so I got one of her. I think it would raise my opinion of her slightly if she didn't have the pink lipstick. She's a brutish blue-skinned monster, but she still wears humanlike makeup?

Ah, okay! The amphibian must be named after the monster, then. Maybe they were running out of words for squirmy things?

Sorry, this is bugging me...did you mean cephalopod? A caecilian is something entirely different. (Specifically, it's a blind, legless, burrowing amphibian--looks like a big earthworm until it opens its mouth.)