Gryphon Ink

I got MEA today. TRU have all the sets except for DGA. Normal prices and no problem buying them. MEA is a mixed bag. The tree platform is not bad, but the walls are a mess and will need to be modded. I want to try combining it with Barrel Escape. The minifigs, however, are fabulous. For all the complaining about Thranduil's "neck ears", his ears are maybe one millimeter lower than a standard Elf's ears, and the difference is unnoticeable unless you're looking for it. His coat of mail is beautifully done. And the other Elves are great. The Gundabad orcs aren't my favorite badguys, but are at least a nice change from standard orcs.

Dude, that's just crazy talk.

Been to a lot of concerts and festivals, but some that stand out are NIN, Bauhaus, the Sisters of Mercy, David Byrne, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Faith No More, Shihad, Union Jack, Jethro Tull (three times), Third World, the Prodigy, Sonic Youth, Gavin Friday and Anne Clark. And a long, long list of names that wouldn't mean anything to anyone outside of Israel. Oh yeah, and Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker (AKA Cream minus Clapton). I knew I was forgetting someone important, and that was the one. Ginger Baker played the longest drum solo I've ever seen or heard. Like nearly a full-length album drum solo.

Wow. That is superb. So say we all!

Space: 1999 was one of my favorite shows as a kid, and I still think the Eagle is one of the greatest spaceship designs ever. Thunderbirds is a classic, too. I never caught any of his other shows.

Beautiful colors and interesting design - looks very Wonkalicious. I love how the sign is built, but wish those pieces were printed. The pineapples are delightful. Bring on the farm and the beach house!

I would look for Weathertop. It's a nice "scaled down" model with useful parts and includes the Nazgul and horses, which no LOTR collection is complete without. For Friends, I'd recommend the school. A great set with lots of things to do and great minidolls. Alternatively, if you can still find Olivia's House at a reasonable price, it's a must-have with beautiful interior detailing and the only adult male minidoll in the theme so far.

That is the official Princesses lineup. That's part of what I was trying to explain earlier. Disney are very selective about who and what appears in the Princesses brand. To put it in AFOL terms, some of your Technic and Creator sets might be minifig-scale vehicles or houses that fit right into your urban display, but they still aren't City sets. Tinker Bell is one of the company's mascots and the main character in the Disney Fairies brand, but she's not a Disney Princess. I wasn't trying to harsh on anybody's mellow when I disparaged the Princesses brand. I like some Disney movies and characters and would be very happy to see a lot more Lego sets based on them. But Disney is one thing, and Disney Princesses is another. That's not my opinion, it's the company's marketing strategy.

It's really not silly. Unique characters sell more. The army-building market just isn't TLG's main concern. For every AFOL who might buy six copies of UHA to build armies with, there are ten or twenty people who will buy one set, especially if it includes a hero like Eomer. The army builders will buy the set anyway, so TLG's primary focus is to motivate the one-time buyers. Obviously, I'm making these numbers up, but they wouldn't market things this way if the numbers weren't working out for them. Minifigs that aren't unique won't be sold as unique characters. There's no complicated reason for it. They just aren't unique. TLG won't sell the same eagle as "Eagle" in one set and "Gwaihir" in another. It's either Gwaihir both times, or it's a generic eagle both times. To do otherwise would be fraudulent, and we'd all be sitting here complaining about how "Gwaihir" was just an ordinary eagle fig.

Well, there's just so much to be optimistic about! Sure thing, dude. Enjoy the sunshine-flavored Kool-Aid!

You've answered your own question there. TLG don't balk at giving specific characters their proper names. Therefore, the Ent is not Treebeard, because he would have been named Treebeard if he was. He's a generic Ent who looks similar to Treebeard. As for why Gwaihir isn't named, I suspect it's because he's also meant to be a generic Eagle. The reason for this being that the exact same eagle comes in the Black Gate set, and TLG probably want to be able to say it's a different eagle and not a duplicate Gwaihir. Really, either one of these guys can be the specific character or a generic member of their species, depending on how you want to play - and that, I think, is the reason they don't have official Lego names. Just like one of the Nazgul in Attack on Weathertop can be the Witch-King if you want it to be.

I think a lot of people are failing to understand what "Disney Princesses" means. When the people at Disney say to you, "hey, you wanna sell some Disney Princesses merchandise?" they don't just mean merchandise featuring the heroines of various Disney movies. This is a brand of its own that exists purely for the purpose of making young girls buy into the fantasy of being a Princess and making their parents buy official Disney stuff. If you Google "Disney Princesses origin" you can read it in black and white. The Disney honcho in charge of merchandising noticed one day that girls at a Disney event were wearing their own costumes that they had altered to look like Snow White and other Disney characters, and he realised that the company was missing out on a ton of potential sales opportunities. The next day he had the lines all drawn out for an official Princesses brand, and there was nothing in his plan about capturing the spirit or personality of the original princesses. To make a long story slightly less long, the DP brand is all about altering the characters to make them fit together with the DP asthetic, which if you boil it down to basics means, "make these girls all look like eachother and make them sparkly". Every individual characteristic the girls show in the movies themselves is thrown out so they can fit better with the line as a whole and sell more costumes and accessories. Mulan, in her Princess incarnation (and remember, Mulan isn't even remotely a princess in the movie), is either wearing the hideous "Matchmaker dress" and heavy white makeup that she despised in the movie or wearing some completely new dress that is equally glittery. "Princess" Belle is not reading a book or wearing her signature costume, she is wearing the fancy dress from the ball scene and dreaming of a handsome guy. Tiana and Rapunzel both had plastic surgery to make them blend in with the rest of the Princesses. And Merida went on an extreme diet, brushed her hair, had plastic surgery and put on the stupid green dress that she couldn't do archery in. So, the fact that Lego Merida has the exact same face as Stephanie and much less wild curls than she ought to, and seems to have lost ten or fifteen pounds, is not a mistake or an compromise on TLG's part. It's completely intentional. And any dreams that the next wave of Princesses might include Merida fighting a bear, or Mulan wearing armor, just aren't going to happen. You'll notice there isn't a single bad guy in this wave. There won't be any in future waves either. Disney control their brands with an iron grip, and conflict is not what this brand is about. The sets are still decent for what they are. Nothing to get too excited about, but I do like that there are now more dress options for the Friends girls. So they can dress up as Disney Princesses, of course.

I got two Uruk-Hai Armies and will probably get two MEAs. I don't army build, but both of them are good sets for beefing up battle scenes and have good basic castleish parts. Extra horses and Wargs are never a bad thing.

I prefer your first version, Sergio. The new one has a bit too much of a wasp waist and is not as clean as the first. Adding detail isn't always a good idea.

I did not make that very clear. I'll try again. I think that the Elves in MEA are a good choice because, of all the different ways they could have done them, this is the option that makes the Elves most useful in a wide range of scenarios, both in Middle-Earth and in other fantasy settings. It doesn't contradict anything in Tolkien or in the movies. And since it is immediately recognizable as what most people think of as Elvish Style, it gives the set a certain "shelf appeal" that plate armored Elves wouldn't have. A kid or adult strolling through the aisles of the toy store will take one look at this set and say, "OMG, there's Elves in this one! Let's buy it!" where many people would have trouble even recognizing that the plate armored Elves were in fact Elves. There is a subset of AFOLs who are desperately waiting for armored Elves so they can MOC the great battle scenes of Middle-Earth. I'm not mocking that desire at all. It would be incredibly awesome to see MOCs of the Last Alliance or of the siege of Helm's Deep with a regiment of properly attired Elf warriors. But there is a much larger group of people even amongst AFOLs who just want some Elves. Plate armor wouldn't work for them. It is that much larger group that TLG need to take care of before they try to sell a minifig that only a few people want to have. I would also point out that this set may very well go with a specific scene in DOS that does NOT show any Elves in plate, so it would look silly in the appropriate context. Alcarin, I may be getting a bit long in the tooth, but I'm fairly sure I never said that Elves NEVER wear plate armor.

Mahtion, I bow to your knowledge of Tolkien's work and inspirations - I actually wanted to tell you that after a post you made here a few pages back. As an avid Tolkien fan, I sincerely appreciate learning things from you here. But I think the legitimacy of the folkloric vision of Elves vs. the version you're citing here is very open to interpretation. As far as I remember, whenever Tolkien did talk about armor in LOTR, he mostly spoke of mail, not plate, so you are already up to at least four different versions of Elvendom that TLG could have used here. In my opinion, the version that the broader audience would identify with has the advantage, not least because it gives you more options for MOCing.

Deathleech, I get what you're saying about Dol Guldur, and they might have improved the set with a few changes, but I really respect the design they came up with. I hear people saying it's flat, but I like it a lot, especially when I'm thinking about my kids since it has so many play features and cool things. They brick-built the stairs and the arches, which is the kind of thing I like as an AFOL. And I disagree with you about its recognizability. I think it captures the most recognizable part of Dol Guldur, at least the part most people know at this point. And while Sauron is a bit silly, I thought he was silly in the movie, too. He should have been much less corporeal in my opinion. I think it's good that it's a $70 set, too. Especially since you can add to it with the DGA set, either horizontally as it's given or vertically with your own mods - the bricks are good castle-building bricks. I dunno, I understand your desire for more, but I really love it. More than any of the last LOTR wave except for Rivendell.

I'm amazed at the amount of hate these sets are getting. I'm not going to say this is the greatest Lego wave of all time, but I really have to wonder sometimes what AFOLs are expecting TLG to do. No matter what they do, the complaints keep coming in. There is nothing TLG could do about the Necromancer, guys. This is what he looks like in AUJ: I don't see too many distinguishing features they could have thrown in there. Dude has no crown, guys. He has no robes. He barely has a shape. You want him to be something fearful like a Nazgul or something, but that's not what he is. And he's not going to have the awesome armor he had in the First Age. That form was destroyed. At the time of DOS, Sauron barely has a form. He doesn't fight the White Council himself. He pretty much runs away to Barad-Dur, leaving his minions to fight the wizards. (This is from the books, but it really can't be too different in the films or it will completely destroy the films' continuity.) You want to complain about Dol Guldur being a nondescript gray castle? Guess what, in the films the place is a nondescript gray castle. It has some ruined towers (which the set has), some crumbling stairs (which the set has), some spiky vines and withered vegetation (which the set has) and some ancient wrought iron gates (which the set has). Yes, the set would look better if it was a 3000-piece UCS set depicting the entire castle, bridges and all. And those magnificent sets would sit on the shelves at Wal-Mart for a solid year before they went into the discount aisles and finally sold at 50% off. That's not a viable business strategy for TLG. Let's complain about no armored Elves instead. Guys, again, Elves don't usually wear armor. Not in LOTR, not in any other part of Tolkien's work, not in popular fiction, not in actual legends. Ask a dozen people on the street what elves wear - the people who don't think you're insane will tell you a bunch of different things, but not one of them will say "oh, plate mail and tall, curvy helmets". What you'll mostly hear is green and brown, woodland colors, or shining robes. Many people will think of hooded green cloaks and longbows. And guess what the Elves are wearing in the MEA set? Yep, green, brown, shining robes, green hoods and longbows. OMG, what numbskull over at TLG thought of making an Elf set where the Elves actually looked like what the average person thinks Elves look like? How dare they??? Don't they know AFOLs need to build the ultimate Elf army? DON'T THEY KNOW THERE'S A WAR ON?!? Hey, I know, let's complain about how there's too many Bilbos in the sets. Oh, wait. There aren't. Darn it, TLG, why do you always have to ruin things for us?

That's a great model, Sergio! I love the front end solution. I tried making a Burton Batmobile a few months ago. Eventually I worked out a front end that I liked, but it was not as clean as yours. I agree that the whole front half would look better if it was a few studs longer, but it looks quite nice as it is.

Not much playability? These things are oozing play features! You've got catapults and Elf launchers and a swinging cage and a revolving secret door and a GITY Necromancer and a spiderweb that swings out of the way and swinging axes and hammers and rock sections that open up. And armies of orcs vs. Elves and wizards. The playability is higher than it's ever been in this theme. I think kids will eat this up.

Personally I think the elf set is awesome. I am happy they used classic Elven designs for the warriors instead of armor prints and helmets. It may be less splashy for people who were looking for the things in the trailer, but it will be more useful in the long run, since Elves are not typically shown in armor - especially the Sylvan. Likewise, I don't have a problem with the Elf swords being straight. In Tolkien's writing, Elves almost always use straight swords. And even in the films, not all Elvish blades need to be scimitars. Glamdring and Narsil were both storied Elvish blades.

I really like the looks of these sets from what we can see. Even the smallest one is okay. The good thing about making Beorn regular minifig size is you can part switch him. I did really want to see him in bear shape. The bigger sets are just great. The elf outpost is a beautiful set for its price point, especially including another Warg. It is darker than I would have liked, but still a great monster. And yay, elf armies. Love it. The big set, well hell Radagast and Sauron?!? And a nice building with expandability? Great stuff - I think a better buy than the Black Gate from last wave. And - le sigh - new Orc designs....

If you don't understand the R rating you may be in for a rude shock. I'll try not to spoil anything, but you need to know that the story is definitely R-rated. The Brian Depalma movie opens with a langorously shot scene showing two dozen teenagers in the shower with full frontal nudity. That's an R right there. And the shower scene is pretty much the catalyst for the entire plot, so it's not like you could just eliminate from the story. The book and the original movie then go on to include depictions of child abuse, some teenagers having casual sex in a car, a LOT of swearing, and the prom scene from Hell. Carrie is a psychologically abused and deeply troubled teenager with the psychic power to unleash Hell on Earth. Anything less than an R rating would not be Carrie. Personally I'm not excited at all about the remake. The book is great and the Depalma movie is absolutely perfect. Sissy Spacek is incredible as Carrie. There is no need whatsoever for a remake.

I could be happy with just one more variation of an orc that doesn't have a stupid macrocephalic headpiece. Of course, two or more new variants would be awesome. But really, one new torso and one new head would increase the diversity of the orc population considerably. People will complain about how Region X's orcs are not supposed to look the same as Region Z's or Sublevel Y's and the armor is totally uncanonical, but I'm old school about my orcs: they're anonymous grunts in a sea of swords and shields. Except for a few named characters, they just aren't individuals and they don't need to look all that different. Give me a couple of different facial expressions and a new armor print, and save the resources for new hero minifigs. This wave is sounding pretty awesome so far. I hope it lives up to its buzz. I still haven't bought either of the big sets from LOTR Wave 2 because they simply fail to excite me.

There are only two problems with the theory that Beorn's house would make a boring set: first, two of the nicest Middle-Earth sets so far have been locations that had no conflict whatsoever (Bag End and Rivendell) and both sets have been universally praised and sold pretty darn well (Bag End being just about THE hottest Lego set last Christmas). And second, a set with Beorn's house would not have to be boring at all, since Beorn spends the night in bear form killing goblins and Wargs together with dozens of his people whose tracks are seen outside the house in the morning. In the book, this happens off-screen and far from the house. But it would be totally reasonable to include a Warg rider or two with Beorn's house. This would have made a nice set in and of itself, would have sold at least a few sets just for the bear piece and the Warg alone, and would have appeased many of the dedicated fans of the book.