Haltiamieli

In the last picture, the Dragon Knight in the spider-web-tree is holding in his left hand a... fish?!? I suppose that's not part of the official set – or is this a strange nod towards Monty Python? "You must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest with a... HERRING!"

These sets are pure win. Nothing more to say (the king has a different torso than in the 2010 wave, nice )

Apparently there's a sequel in the making, scheduled to appear in March 2012. The first film wasn't that successful though, so I'd say it's nigh unthinkable that Lego would bother a licence theme, especially considering that the film series is not aimed towards Lego's target demographics (neither was PoP, admittedly). If they really wanted to do a theme based on Greek mythology, they could easily do it on their own as a non-licenced, more playable and more kid-oriented theme. The producers of the films can't really claim copyright on thousand-year-old legends, after all.

I don't think it's print, or sticker either for that matter: it's cloth or paper or something similar. In this picture you can even two small holes and vertical slits in it. This makes it possible for you to move your minifigs through the waterfall to enter the Fountain place, just like they probably do in the upcoming movie.

Sadly, there's some bare skin showing in her torso, as can be seen in this pic. Well, I suppose supporters of flesh minifigs deserve some dresses too.

Whitecap Bay looks much more substantial than I expected from the prelims. Nice. London Escape looks good, they've made the house bigger since the prelims! Are those window shutters new pieces? It seems there's not many new torsos where switching to yellow would be possible. Expectable but unfortunate. Not completely sure about Elizabeth Swann fig though.

I wouldn't object to these, the more historical figures the better for me personally, but still the list doesn't sound very probable: as others have mentioned there's a lot of overlaps with existing themes (knight, astronaut, sensei, pirate, warlock?). Also, considering the characters and apparent "themes" of the first four series, it seems quite unlikely that Series 5 would include only one sports fig (the boxer). However in case the list ends up being correct, I'm crossing my fingers for a reimagined Black Falcon knight!

Oh my... But thanks for the links anyway. They were... informative. That is indeed quite a remarkable creation. I have much respect for the people who manage to do beautiful brick-built animals in minifig scale, but in my honest opinion brick-built animals don't really fit along the specialized mold animals, which I have/will have a plenty anyway. So I suppose either the Belville one works (well enough) or I just won't have a dancing bear (at least not until Lego does a system version of the brown bear). The scale doesn't seem to be horribly off anyway, so I think I'll try it.

Today I bought the Ostrich Race for €13.70. I was actually hoping to find the Prison Tower Rescue on sale - a friend of mine got it for €36 in another city, but sadly no such sale on my home town. I didn't want to have walked to the shop for nothing, so I bought the Ostrich Race instead. PoP sets have been on sale all around the town for some time already, but this was a little bit cheaper than elsewhere. Quite a weak set with bland and all-too-often-seen structures and awkward gate opening gadget, but on the other hand it is a nice parts pack and the ostriches are better than I had expected. So I'm actually quite happy with my purchase. Also, the first "flesh" minifigs I've ever owned. They look quite pale and dead to an untrained eye.

I might be an optimist, but I could wager a small bet (but only small ) that we'll see some kind of domestic animal park or petting zoo set in 2012, with pigs, goats and chicken. It just seems such an obvious opportunity now that we (soon) have the new goat mold: it's not a very useful animal for more serious farm sets, but would fit perfectly for a domestic animal park. Add in a kid-minifig with a parent and voilà – you have a winner!

Cute and simple yet not bland scene. Didn't really stop to consider the SNIR fence before reading prateek's comment on it, so apparently it blends in well. I've considered buying myself a pony/foal too, but I'm not sure whether it would stand out in the company of other horses as it has no printed eyes or such. What do you think?

Yeah, true. I tried to compare the size to the studs on the baseplates, which is not as easy as comparing to the red antenna. Good call. 3-4 studs is quite small really, but on the other hand maybe small is better than huge. The bear can always be interpreted as a young one, which it looks like anyway with its big head. I wonder would the mouth be of the right size to hold a bar for some sort of muzzle?

This is quite a trivial question for its own topic, but there doesn't seem to be any special topic for small questions... So, I thought it might be a nice addition for my medieval village to have a bear tamer and a dancing bear,* but the only brown bear Lego has produced (excluding Duplo) is this Belville one from the beginning of 2000s. It seems cartoonish for sure, but might just pass in absence of better alternatives. However it is quite hard to try to make out the real size of the bear compared to minifigs from the smallish Bricklink pictures, and I don't want to buy one from BL just to see myself as they're somewhat expensive. So I'm asking whether any eurobricker happens to have this piece and be willing to tell (or better still, photograph) how it compares to minifigs in size and look? * Bear taming is cruel I know, but it was a quite common custom in the middle ages.

Yeah, that was my reaction too... But looking at the bright side, I save money as I don't have any need to buy HP sets this year. And these sound good enough for HP enthusiasts so everyone can be happy, more or less.

Brown chicken might mean the rooster we speculated about a few pages ago? Or maybe some of the chickens in clear sight just have been changed to brown. Either way, it sounds good.

Where there's a will, there's a way. I presume you could use Bricklink, for example? A few months ago I bought Medieval Market Village from BL because I have no credit card so cannot use Shop @ Home and there's no Lego Stores in Finland either, and it didn't even cost more than it would have in S@H.

While I agree with the general sentiment, I disagree with quite many of your examples. I think many of them would be unnecessarily redundant and uninteresting for the most people. Lego is a building toy after all, and minifigs can be customised with swapping a few pieces. How different, for example, could another sumo be? It could have a different face and hair - and certainly a better torso, but if it would be considerably better than the first one, they wouldn't look good together and you'd just be better off buying two of the new ones, negating the point. And I would certainly love another gladiator figure (well, it's still quite some time before we get the first one), but more importantly I would love a few dozen other Roman minifigures (legionnaire, senator, Roman noble woman, emperor etc.) and prefer them to be published first. And after we would have gotten a few of them, it wouldn't be hard to build another gladiator out of their parts. Using Spartan's torso and Atlantis trident I suppose one could even have quite a good gladiator out of existing parts already. Not to say all your examples are bad, by no means! Two boxers with exactly the same equipment would look strange even if one would swap different face for the other one, and there exists no differently coloured accessories to swap. Same goes for team sports - Clutchers competing against Clutchers does not make a match. I suppose we might see such variations in the upcoming series (supposing we will see more than 5 series anyway), hopefully a little apart from each other (like the cave man in Series 1 and the female version in Series 5). [EDIT: Sorry for posting much the same arguments as Fred67 before me, didn't see his post before submitting mine.]

One of my Castle-related dreams would be a tournament-themed wave that would include a big tournament grounds set with spectator stands and such, and then a bunch of smaller sets each including one competing knight on horse with his squire. And at least some of these knights would be reimaginings/redesigns of earlier Castle factions. This would surely be a hit both with kids and AFOLs, right?

This brings to my mind one "over-detailing" (in a way) that I dislike a lot: double bearding. If there's an accessory beard piece, why use a head with beard print? They just don't fit together! The recent green wizard (otherwise a nice figure) from Kingdoms is one of the worst examples I've seen: black beard piece and grey printed beard? Oh wait, the fisherman from Series 3 is as bad: white beard piece, grey printing. What were they thinking??

What has the kraken to do with the Greeks?

You have quite an envy-inspiring collection, Dazmundo! And they seem to be in quite a good shape too, considering their age. According to Bricklink this fella has appeared only in Town Square - Castle Scene -set of 1980.

On the Wanted tab, there's a subtab called "By Shop" which should do exactly that. When there, it is imo best to change the sorting method to "Lots (Unique)".

At least all the Series 3 I've seen in Tampere have dots, though not all of them seem to match with the published cheat sheet (I've seen packages with serial numbers 239BO and 142BO). On Monday I found a full box of Series 3 and felt it through until I found the first elf, then I went through the rest of the box comparing the dots and thus scored three elves. It remains to be seen whether I can be content with that... Feeling the packages got easier the more you did it, though luckily I'm not interested in any of the harder-to-identify figures. And now the instructions on the dot-usage in Finnish, in case that helps Capt. Becker: Kyseessä ei siis ole mitkään painomusteella tehdyt pisteet vaan pikkuruiset nypykät tai kuplat muovikääreessä. Ne löytyvät pussin takapuolelta alasaumasta. Samassa saumassa on myös pussien valmistukseen liittyvä sarjanumero, kuten 142BO. Kääntele pussia eri kulmissa valon alla, niin nypyköiden pitäisi erottua pieninä varjoina.

Can't speak on the behalf of the organisers obviously, but I'd think the important thing is that the creation is an original Harry Potter character. Even the acceptability of female characters would be (theoretically) shaky if the contest name would be taken very literally, as female ones are usually called witches in Harry Potter. Anyway this competition is a great idea, I may consider entering if I come up with some not-too-bad way to represent my ideas in Lego form (with my restricted amount and variety of bricks).

Well, the pictures have been removed from the original source, a Dutch online toy shop. Not surprising, as they were still preliminary. Obviously the pictures themselves have already spread to fan sites and such, so one can still find them elsewhere. Here's to hoping that we'll soon have official pictures.