Gryphon Ink

I got the Constitution Train Chase - my first Lego train! It's a really nice model, IMO. Should look good around a Winter Village setup, after modding the cars.

I love that the lions, who were positioned as THE heroes of Chima in all the advertising, are in second to last place. The only clan less popular than them is the clan that hasn't had any sets released yet! (Not counting "other" as an actual faction, since other can mean a lot of things). Personally, I've always been a fan of ravens, both the actual bird and the ravens of folklore. I even named my daughter Raven. And I really dig the ramshackle lok of the Raven flyers - the big one actually looks like something a raven would build. So, duh, I'm a Raven! But I haven't bought any Chima sets yet, or seen the show. I just likes me some ravens.

Wonderfully thorough review, KDM. I like the set a lot, and the only thing keeping it from perfection IMO is the absurd proportions of the coach. Even on the box art it looks ridiculously oversized. It's a great design overall, though, and I appreciate the turning mechanism, which elevates it far above the usual Lego carriage sets. The Lone Ranger is a theme I hadnt really been interested in, but the sets are really starting to sell themselves to me. One thing I have to point out - that piece Tonto is holding isn't a compass, but a pocket watch.

I am in love. I'll have to pass on this summer's other LOTR sets to get it, but to me this is by far the best set in the theme so far, and the first set in any theme this year that I HAVE to have. I'm glad it's not enclosed. I think if they'd made all four sides, it would either come at the expense of the wonderful interior or cost $50 more. That would just be too much for me. Minifig-wise, not the greatest selection ever, but reasonable. I love Wormtongue and the robe for Saruman. Christopher Lee is built like a stork and towers over everyone, so this is a perfect representation of him! I'm as disappointed as everyone about the orcs, but at least we get new White Hand pieces to go with the Uruks. Loving the Ent. It adds a lot to the set, and I believe it all but confirms my prediction that Treebeard himself will be coming in his own set, probably a store exclusive that has yet to be revealed. Treebeard, Merry and Pippin smoking up in an Isengard storeroom - it's the perfect accompaniment to this magnificent tower. Thank you TLG! Now where's the White City? :-P

This is so far beyond what I was expecting. Full interiors including rooms that werent in the movies. A decent selection of minifigs (of course I'm disappointed that we still didn't get a new orc, but you can't have everything). The eagle and Treebeard give it some playability, and the detailing is basically modular level. LOTR has been a great theme so far, but TLG really hit it out of the park with this one. I have to have it. I may not be able to buy any other Lego for the rest of the year, but this is too good to miss.

Very nice review. I still don't like the mantis. The overall shape isn't too bad, but the fact that the model is completely unposeable just wrecks it for me. The mantis is a natural shape to build a ferocious alien "walker" assault vehicle, looming over the puny hu-mon defense forces to sice them open from above. Instead we got this sad thing that slides along on its abdomen, with outriggers. The Squaddie vehicle really is the star of the set. I actually like both parts of it. If you think about it, the concept of a "weaponized flying armchair" makes a ton of sense, given that its pilot is a robot. The dude is armored and doesn't need life support, so there's little need to build anything around him except for engines and weapons. Air support on a budget. It's actually one of the most sensible vehicles in the theme, IMO.

Meh. It's nice enough but what we really want is Minas Tirith. And Sting shouldn't be there yet, that's a complete break of continuity. Meh, I say.

Very nice work, the faces are spot on. Perfect for introducing my 4-year-old to modern artistic hyperviolent cinema!

Wow, very nice work! I love the exploding wall especially.

Wait, so there is a secret entrance through the Black Gate? If only Frodo and Sam had known that, they could have saved themselves about six hundred pages of slogging around, not to mention being envenomed by Shelob and captured by Orcses. The movies would have been three hours shorter. Nice forward thinking on TLG's part. This way, if the whole theme gets cancelled early and hordes of outraged AFOLs are screaming for blood because they never got a Minas Tirith set, TLG can say, "well, you don't really need Minas Tirith because in our version of the story the heroes snuck in through the secret entrance and most of Return of the King never happened." But at any rate, the sets look totally sweet. Hope I can find the money to buy them both.

I wouldn't say you can rule it out altogether, but the rules are very different for unlockable characters and bonus levels in a videogame, as opposed to actual minifigs in a production set. It's not only legal issues, which are significant, but the cost of making physical minifigs is a lot higher. To make Tom Bombadil as an unlockable game character takes a designer a couple of hours and adds very little to the total game development time, unless that character has weird powers that are totally different from any other character in the game. Manufacturing unique figures for a real set diverts a lot of resources. This sucks because I'd love to have Bombadil and Goldberry minifigs even more than the other exclusives people here were wishing for, but such is life.

Just to point out, this is actually the Blu-Ray/DVD *combo* pack. A lot of movies are being packaged this way, hoping that people will buy them because at the moment they just have DVD players but they know that in the future they will upgrade to Blu-Ray. So, no, it doesn't suck for people who don't have Blu-Ray. It's actually better, because you know you won't have to buy the movie again when you upgrade your hardware just so you can get the best picture and sound. I am in that category myself, and this just might be the version of the movie that I buy. Although I own and love the Extended Editions of LOTR, I really have little interest in an Extended of AUJ. I thought the movie already seemed stretched.

It sucks, but there were collectible editions of the individual movies that had bonuses you couldn't get with the trilogy set. They were well worth having - I'm still POed at myself for not buying the Fellowship set with the Argonath bookends when it was affordable. Anyway, didn't PJ swear up and down that there would NOT be extended editions of the Hobbit movies? I thought the whole idea of extending the story into three movies was so that he could cram every single Hobbit-related idea he had ever had into the story onscreen. Then it would be the An Unexpected Journey's Unexpected Minifig.

I thought of Lemmy from Motorhead! Great series IMO. Only a couple of figs that I'm really not interested in (skydiver, painter and paintballer), several that are totally awesome (Xena, Tomahawk Dude, Librarian and the EXCELLENT Medusa, and a bunch that are not thrilling but offer solid pieces and/or variety to street scenes. I totally need Bee Girl so I can switch out her legs for shorties and make her the Blind Lemon bee girl in the middle of a street scene. Very excited about the seagull and chihuahua pieces! Ultra Rarity Gold Chaser Dude is such an unspecial minifig it isn't even funny.

Those aren't tortoises, lad. Those be SEA TURTLES! Um, no. Okay. But seriously, I think it's a temporary thing. TLG have found that the Friends critters sell very well, so they've amped up the crittery cuteness in Heartlake City, but they're still producing the same number of animals everywhere else. Last year we had a new horse, which is everywhere this year. The new dog is out in new colors this year, too, and LOTR has an eagle mold showing up soon. The new bear has been in a couple of sets. We have Wargs, and recently a bunch of dinosaurs, and there was a cat in the Winter Village Cottage. It's not all animals, all the time, but I don't see that they've stopped making new ones. Personally, I think some of the Friends animals work well in regular System sets, too, such as the poodle, the foal and the squirrel.

I could be wrong, but isn't this that thread? It was all speculation until a few weeks ago, when the first set images started leaking. You could be right, but I'm not sure it's exactly a safe bet. Remember that TLG have had years to work on preliminary ideas for all of the Hobbit sets. Even though the details of PJ and Co.'s adaptation have been kept under wraps, the basic story of the Hobbit has been public knowledge for decades, and TLG will have known that there are certain scenes that absolutely have to happen in the movies. For example, they knew there would be a scene where wolves and goblins chase our heroes up a tall tree, and a scene where Bilbo and Gollum meet each other in the caverns. They could have designed these scenes long before they got any solid details of the script - and circumstantial evidence implies that they did. This is why the Warg Attack set has Yazneg in it instead of the Pale Orc. In terms of location design, splitting the two movies into three hasn't changed anything. The producers aren't adding new locations, they are just spending more time in each location. And they're still working with the same cast of characters, which TLG probably got design information about long before the rest of us knew about them. They will have had more than enough time to develop their minifigs and creature molds, even if some of them have changed (again, like Yazneg). I also think TLG probably had more set designs than we eventually got for AUJ. Like any other creative process, they would probably have fielded at least twice as many ideas for sets before they eventually decided on the ones they ended up producing. It's like when a band records an album with twelve songs on it. Most bands don't just write twelve songs, record them and release. They write and record sixteen, or eighteen, or twenty-something songs, and put only the ones that they think work best together on the album. TLG probably did the same thing here. So they have at least a few more "potential sets" that they decided not to produce, but they can go back to them now, polish them a little bit and put them in boxes. It still takes time, but not nearly as much time as it would to design from the ground up. If you look at the sets they did release, you can tell that they originally thought the first movie would end long after meeting Beorn, but they decided not to produce a Beorn set. Very sad, yes - but now we can hope that they actually did think about a Beorn set, and can put that in the DOS wave. Similarly, maybe Rhosgobel can now become a set, since it's likely to appear again in the movies. More Halls of the Elvenking? Yes, please! The small section of the place that we see in the Barrel Escape set can't be all that TLG ever thought about making. I'm not saying any of this will definitely happen, but I don't think a small wave is guaranteed. I think TLG will do everything they can to maximize their return on the Hobbit license, especially since this wave will be arriving right before holiday shopping again.

I've never met another AFOL completely at random, but when Facebook reconnected me with one of my old friends it turned out he had become an AFOL, pretty serious about Star Wars building. It's frankly the only good thing that Facebook has ever done for me!

I think the question is, is this a sign that CMFs are losing popularity? Because this sounds like one of those things companies do when their immensely popular collectible doodads start becoming less popular. "Don't stop collecting now! We have LIMITED EDITION variant covers, foil stamping, holograph cards and GOLDEN MINIFIGS coming out in the next wave! Your collection is not complete without one of these babies!!" I'm glad most people here are saying they won't increasing their collecting because of this gimmick, but I'm pretty sure there will be plenty of people who will. It's a tactic that works - for the short term. Long term, not so much.

You're right; she could have whatever ethnic origin you want her to have. Reminds me of Joanna from the Pet Salon - she is obviously a POC, but her specific ethnicity is wide open for your interpretation. The 2013 minidolls are really outstanding in this regard.

I haven't seen good enough pics of the Cruiser to notice details of the minidolls, but if there is an Asian character it's great news. TLG have done a nice job promoting diversity in the Friends characters, and I've been hoping they would introduce some Asian minidolls soon. Also, Maya was one of my favorite childhood nicknames. Strangely enough, just this morning I had a conversation with a client about a friend of hers who has the same name as me, and is also nicknamed Maya! There are Mayas everywhere today! Hello Maya!

There is ALWAYS a "no compete" clause. That's how licensing works, for every movie tie-in ever.

This looks like it's an amazing playset, just not so good as a display set. It's packed to the brim with explodey pieces and trapdoors and dumpster catapults that make it pretty exciting to play with, and then you've got a swooshy VTOL craft and several great comic book characters. If I was a kid of, say, 6-12, I think this would be one of my favorite sets of the year.

I think the new pics make the theme more AND less appealing. The castle is looking better and better in my opinion. I probably still won't buy it, but I think its less symmetrical layout gives it a few points over 7946, and it looks very solid and castle-y. I would be buying this if I didn't think my wife would go berserk over me buying another Lego castle that is very similar to the one I have. The Gatehouse Raid looks nice, and I'll probably buy it. Dragon Mountain is the one that looks less appealing to me now. It just doesn't look as solid as it did in the first blurry pics. I still want it, though. I'll have to rebuild my Kingdoms Dragon Fortress and try to combine the two of them for a super two-faction Dragon Knights lair.

For me the Council of Elrond is the standout - a wonderful display piece with great minifigs, and the colors make it very different from the rest of the line. Wizards' Battle is a great set for that price point. And it's hard to tell from the pictures, but the corsair ship looks pretty damn cool. I like the Black Gate, but it's not screaming "BUY ME! BUY ME!" I apologize to all the fans of the eagle, but I'm really not feeling it. It's not big enough, it doesn't belong in that set, and it can't hold minifigs, so I will continue to champion the Fierce Flyer, which only needs a beak mod to become a really great eagle on a more suitable scale. Overall, it's not as exciting as the first wave of LOTR, but it's not bad. I still believe there is another exclusive set hiding in the wings, and given the extreme lack of hobbits in the sets we've seen I still think it's going to be Treebeard.

I'd love to see a nice big inn. The MMV's tavern is great, but it's not the same as an inn. A good solid inn given the detailed treatment like we've seen in the modulars and the Winter Village would be a dream come true. Room for lots of different medieval characters on their travels, a little well out front, a couple of new horses and maybe a pair of thieving Dragon Knights. It would be reminiscent of the MMV, but different enough to be worth it. Other options would include a peasant's hut with an apothecary or healer's dwelling, a harbor set or a travelling fair (use that new bear mold). Most of these probably wouldn't sell well as regular retail sets, but I imagine they'd do well for D2C.