Gryphon Ink

I agree, there's no way TLG are going to include all the minifigs that people are anticipating in "Battle for Hogwarts". I'm guessing it will be similar to the SW sets "Battle of Naboo" (10 figs, mostly battle droids) or "Battle of Geonosis" (4 figs?). It won't be the entire battle, just one scene from it. A couple of Death Eaters, a couple of heroes. And another Harry, because we really need more of those.

The Kingdoms stuff was already more than enough to get me going, but if you look farther in his photostream there are shots of of some of the POTC line and the much-rumored Alien Conquest theme - which looks pretty damn cool. How long will it be before TLG's dreaded brick-built bounty hunters find him and terminate him? This is a huge leak.

I don't need to know any more about these sets. I see sunflowers in the big mill set. I AM SO SOLD. (Which won't stop me from fanatically checking back for info three times a day, of course.)

What a great way to arrive on Eurobricks, clouette! This is GREAT news! I can't wait to get a good look at these sets, especially the big civilian one.

That would be pretty typical, wouldn't it? You get one female character in the line, she only comes in one of the bigger sets, and she is used in the official stories as a damsel in distress. Gods forbid we should have a female who can actually hold her own in a fight, or appears in more than one set. I know Lego is primarily marketed towards young boys, and supposedly they can't identify with fighting, heroic females (perfect self-fulfilling prophecy if I ever heard one), but why can't they EVER try something different? This kind of thing really irks me. I had to switch equipment on the Lion Princess from the Prison Tower Rescue set. I gave her a crossbow and a helmet, and put her hair on one of the knights so he is now a young D'Artagnan type, and she is a deadly warrior princess leading a force of knights out to rescue one of their silly young recruits from the Dragons. I was quite pleased with the switch. And wouldn't you know, my daughter switched all the accessories back to the "proper" figures when she played with my castles? I knew I should never have let her play with Barbies when she was little. I never wanted her to, but our friends kept saying "what harm can it do?" Come on, Lego. Give us a strong female protagonist that can hold her own in the "boys' sets", not just Belville. Do it for my daughter.

I just saw this in Target and had to buy it. I liked the design at first glance - interesting use of small pieces to create something that looks very much like a real-world piece of machinery used in deep-sea salvage and research, something different from most Atlantis vehicles, and a couple of really cool parts such as the globe "headlamp". Not bad, until I noticed the propellor. Basically you've got a massive, unshielded propellor spinning away about one foot under the diver. That's an OSHA investigation waiting to happen. Sadly, I think I have to add this to the roster of Atlantis vehicles that need to be scrapped and recombined with other vehicles' parts in order to make any sense. Well, at least it still has some cool parts, and another Atlantis diver with that squiggly horrified expression. I'd be squiggly and horrified too if I had to work so close to that propellor. Someone please tell me I'm not the only AFOL who doesn't mind crab and manta men, mystical keys to sunken kingdoms, and giant mechanoid shark and lobster monsters, but can't stand to see an unrealistically placed propellor. I keep thinking Atlantis could be the coolest theme ever if it wasn't for these bad little details. (But Atlantis 2011 looks a lot better!)

I like this set - the speeder itself is the best design yet for a small Atlantis vehicle, and you get a couple of other cool pieces into the bargain, like the speargun and the seaweed. I think the yellow contrast bricks actually tie in well with the red and yellow color scheme of Atlantis 2011. I don't really like the scheme, but it is cohesive. That head is definitely not new. Two out of my three Atlantis 2010 sets came with the same head. I wish they'd vary them a little bit. This is a point against the set, although at least the torso has changed for 2011. Nice review, krystalKING.

Holy cow! The legs of the workbench are amazing - for a minute there, I thought that was a molded piece.

Put in a vote for a brick-built Bantha, as they are much more iconic than the Rancor in my opinion. The Rancor is a pretty generic monster.

Congratulations. It's actually a pretty cool "family game" (we got it for my daughter's birthday) or an excellent parts pack if you don't need family games.

I really like the new City shuttle. It looks to strike a good balance between realism, playability and affordability. $40 is a good price point for me - not everyone can afford to spend $100 every time they buy a Lego set, especially if they're not already serious Space collectors. At $40 Lego will sell many more of these than the Shuttle Adventure set. The shuttle is not as unrealistic as some people are saying. I think its proportions are pretty accurate considering its size. The elevons are actually pretty close to the right size, and it seems like that ugly gap between wings and elevons is not nearly as intrusive when the elevons are lowered. They could have gone with a prettier and more realistic hinge mechanism, but at what cost? Picture of an actual shuttle, for comparison of the wings: Notice that the elevons go right up to where the front of the engines turns into a harder curve. The Lego version isn't that far off. Just replace that eyesore of a red/black hinge with a white one (and do some piece swapping to split the elevons, if you're hardcore like that) and you have a pretty good model.

A footnote to the "will Disney ever have topless women?" debate: there is no debate. Disney has had topless female humanoids in its cartoons before. The centaurs in the original Fantasia were all topless for several scenes, and only cover up with artfully arranged hairdos and flowers later on. I believe the fairies in the same movie are also nude for a while. And there is the "Night on Bald Mountain" segment that is actually quite horrific and explicit, with plenty of breasts on display. In Fantasia 2000 there is another fairy figure that seems to be naked, although it's hard to tell as her hair turns into robes in a very fluid manner. But the Fantasia movies weren't made for kids, and they are notoriously boring and scary in turns for small children. All the mermaids in the Disney kid-targeted movies (Peter Pan, The Little Mermaid) are consistently covered by hair or shell bras. LEGO has already done one mermaid figure on Brickbeard's Bounty. She had a shell bra. I seriously doubt that's ever going to change. Neither LEGO nor Disney can afford to take the chance that their toys will be pulled from Wal-Mart's shelves or get a PG-13 rating because of nudity. POTC is probably going to be PG-13 anyway, so the movie mermaids will probably be naked-but-artfully-obscured - but the toys will be G-rated.

I was going to ask, too, because it totally looks like Sly. Nice work!

I could spend all day looking at this amazing work. The design of the kitchen alone is a revelation! The appliances, the furniture... all beautiful.

Beautiful design! I don't think it needs to be more colorful at all, I think you've got it perfect. That window turret is awesome.

I love it, although I always pictured the Ankh as being a really sludgy brown color. Very difficult to recreate that dirty river feeling, I know - especially in a small scene. If you ever do a larger part of the river, maybe adding some assorted flotsam and jetsam would help. A couple of 1x1s with clips could be dead fish floating on the water.

Heh. My wife seems alternately curious about what I can build and appalled at the money I'm willing to consider spending on LEGO. She knows I want the Burrow and is just about okay with that, being a big Harry Potter fan, but I'm still a bit worried about telling her the next thing I really want to buy is the $100 MMV. But I have pointed out to her that I buy LEGO sets with money that I put aside especially for that purpose, and that when I buy LEGO, I'm not buying DVDs or video games or whatever. She's pretty supportive about it. In fact, the other day she said, "do you know there's a LEGO store in New York?" when we were discussing our holiday plans. I think she sees the creative aspect of LEGO and appreciates that. That might be something to point out to "other halves" who don't think adults should be playing with kids' toys. There is a really strong creative, even artistic, element to this hobby. I'm certainly not at that level, but many people on this site are. Show your spouses/girlfriends/partners some serious MOCs on Eurobricks, and they may come to see that building LEGO is not exactly like collecting action figures (no offense to the action figure collectors out there)!

Very nice review covering every aspect of the set. The set itself looks like an awesome one. This is truly the pinnacle of the Atlantis line. The "barracuda warrior" (I, too, thought he was an angler-fish-man) is great, but the crabman is simply one of the most awesome minifigs I've seen. The divers are okay, too, and bonus points to TLG for having an expedition led by a woman for once (if that's official). Even the little sub looks better than some of the big Atlantis vehicles, which have a tendency to be half awesome and half kludge. And the design of the temple is beautiful. I don't know if it all adds up to something I'd personally pay the full price for, since I don't really do Atlantis or ancient history, but this is a killer set for serious MOCers. So many elements of the Atlantis line are screaming "I want to be a Cthulhu Mythos MOC!" at me - unfortunately, they tend to be exclusive to the really expensive sets.

Doing some Christmas shopping at Target yesterday, I was hoping to find the Target Practice impulse, and didn't see any, but I found Hagrid's Hut on the shelves for the first time since it was first released. So happy now. I think the set is beautiful and well worth $40. Even the spider doesn't look as bad in person as it does in pics. Okay, it's still weak. But a great set altogether. No more LEGO for me for at least a few weeks. Must limit purchases, getting strange vibes from the wife. Kind of "if you spend another dollar on plastic bricks I will skin you alive and feed you to the cat" vibes. Very bad juju. Of course, all bets are off if we happen to go by the LEGO store when we go to New York.

This is beautiful. That "thatching" definitely works - it's a great technique. I also really like the beach and the rock wall. It looks totally natural.

This looks like a really useful set for what it costs. Tree pieces are always good! It's kind of annoying that there isn't a similar set with a Dragon soldier, though, since as we all know the Lions outnumber the Dragons already. Also, really this guy is not an archer, but a crossbowman. Not that it's that big a deal, but I keep getting excited to see that a certain set includes an "archer", only to find the same old crossbow piece.

I guess it depends on your definition of a model vs. a real ship. In the first movie, I can't argue: they used miniatures, a soundstage, and a dressed-up barge to play the Black Pearl. For the second and third movies it was decided that they needed a much more maneuverable ship to be the Pearl, so they built one. The Sunset is an actual ship, a 109-foot powered vessel built in Alabama. It's not an authentic tall ship, and as far as I can tell its rigging is purely stage dressing - as opposed to the Lady Washington which actually is a close replica of a historical tall ship - but it is indeed an ocean-going ship, which was outfitted as the Black Pearl and is now outfitted as the QAR. I suppose you could call it a "full-scale model", but in my opinion any vessel that can sail from California to Hawaii under its own power deserves to be called a ship. Is it a realistic, sail-powered pirate ship? Of course not. It's Disney's version of a pirate ship. It's ridiculous, like everything else in this franchise. But it's certainly not less realistic than your average LEGO ship. Article on the Sunset docking in Hawaii this February (Watch the video, it shows the Sunset/Pearl at sea). Article on creating the Black Pearl

Simple: the actual ship that portrays the Black Pearl in the second and third movies is a ship called the Sunset. The ship that portrays the QAR in "On Stranger Tides" is... also the Sunset. And it's pretty obvious when you look at pictures of both of the movie ships. They didn't change very much of the structure. Sunset

I tend to agree, although I think POTC will be fun too. I really think if TLG keeps this license for long it will effectively kill the yellow pirates. I hate this because I just "came out of my Dark Ages" and pretty much completely missed LEGO Pirates. (I have one Kraken Attackin' set on order, and would like to be able to get Brickbeard's Bounty soon, but I'd predict that will be as far as I ever get in collecting classic Pirates. It's a money issue. On the other hand, I dig the POTC franchise as a reliable soure of cheesy pirate cliches and fun adventure, and I bet we'll see some good LEGO sets come from this. People will just have to adjust to fleshies and slightly higher prices. The dedicated Pirates community will probably continue to use the official sets as mere parts packs for superior MOCs anyway, so it won't change much for them in the long term.

I think the Spirit of Luis is a much more graceful craft overall, but I love the engine assembly on the older plane. SoL also loses a lot of points for the fact that Jake can't see a thing, although it's easy to mod it so that he can. Voted for SoL overall, and thinking I should try to mod mine to include that engine detail.