Lyichir

Unfortunately the fire truck was the one set we didn't get clearer pics of (apart from the turnaround video). Hoping we get to see some of the alt pics of that one soon. I've noticed a couple neat new parts in these sets, by the way. Besides the neat figure parts and such, there's a new 4x8 "half octagon" plate used for several floors of the towers in the castle. And the fire truck looks to have a new 1x2x1 half cylinder piece, used for the yellow/black rotating barrels on the sides of the cab.

I disagree. For me it's one of the only things livening up a rather dull color scheme. To be honest, the castle doesn't "wow" me as much as some of the other sets have. I think it's partly the color scheme (which is more monochromatic than I like, with just barely enough blues and greens to add some level of visual interest) and partly the fact that some of the architecture feels like a retread of either the high school or the older Monster Fighters castle. Still, I do like the overall layout (which can be enclosed or fold open) as well as some of the features like the observation tower. EDIT: Looking at some of the other pictures, in particular the picture of it opened up, has me warming up to it a little more.

I like the way you've captured the spirit of the classic theme. The brickwork on the sides in particular looks excellent. However, if I had one critique... the roofs feel almost too smooth? It can be tempting to go for a studless look, or to opt for sloped tiles instead of the textured, stepped slope provided by slope pieces, but without any sort of texture to the roof at all besides the vertical slits between the long tiles, it comes out looking kind of plain. Perhaps if you went for more of a shingled look by layering shorter tiles, or even parts like 1x1 quarter circle tiles, it might improve the look. Of course, that's just my personal preference—obviously it's your MOC and your choice.

You are assuming that all buyers share your likes and dislikes, that sets you dislike are "disastrous" and sets you like would "save" the theme. I do sincerely hope, as a fan of the theme, that the castle and all the other sets get released, but if the theme were in fact on the decline there's zero reason to assume that a single set would turn that around, especially not just because it's vaguely similar to a theme that never even earned a second wave in the first place.

I don't necessarily disagree entirely, but I am curious why you are coming to this conclusion now (when we're going into a wave that's much more Castle-inspired and much less Space-inspired than many past subthemes).

It's a matter of different priorities. The Friends plane opts for brick-built wings attached lower on the body of the plane, which makes the rest of the plane interior roomier but also makes the shape a little more "cartoony". It also does without a traditional "door"—the only way in and out of the Friends plane is the power of imagination. That reflects the different sorts of design principles behind the two themes—City emphasizes more realistic form factors and "action play", while Friends is more about liveable details and role play. Personally I do prefer the Friends plane, but chances are if the City plane had opted for those features instead of a realistic shape and features typically considered standard like a door in and out of the plane, it'd be getting a whole different set of criticisms.

When my family ordered our copy, the sales rep originally said our family's order was going to go through with no issue. Then we got a follow-up email saying it was out of stock likely wouldn't arrive until May. But it actually ended up arriving a little over two weeks ago! Notably, the address it was shipped from seemed to be a mall in Ohio—indicating that perhaps Lego has been addressing at least some of the supply issues by shipping copies that had been delivered to their now-closed retail stores.

I dunno, the SNOT brackets in lime green are nice too. And those animals... I expect the chameleon in particular will look amazing in all those color combinations! The plane set also looks extremely good... an extra brick's worth of height on the body allows for a comfortable-looking ride and even overhead storage! I like the beach house too, with its dining counter, hammock, and hidden DJ stand. And of course the water park and waffle restaurant are both quite good.

I'M IN LOVE. Kinda makes me want J.B.'s next vehicle to be a ghost-trapping garbage truck and for her to make her very own Junkbot to go with it! If that never ends up happening as a set I might have to MOC it. So far the fire truck is still my favorite of the bunch—a great build with a cool conversion feature. The castle looks interesting but I'll need to see more angles of it before I can really form a full opinion of it.

There's really no reason to assume Hidden Side is ending at this point. I wouldn't rule out the possibility, but there's really no concrete evidence one way or the other (and likely won't be until either the story reaches a conclusion or we go more than a half year without new sets, since Lego rarely makes a big to-do about themes reaching the end of their lifespan). And there's certainly no way of knowing how Monkie Kid will sell before the sets are even out. AFOLs are often notoriously bad at prognosticating the sales for a theme, especially one that's new or different, and to be honest even Lego has no way of being 100% certain a theme will be popular until they have the actual sales data in hand. Add to that the massive, unprecedented uncertainty added by launching during a global pandemic, and to be honest anything could happen.

See, for me I think there's often a good reason for why they stick to stuff from the sets. Stuff designed solely for the show, like the Arcturus rocket... often just looks worse. It didn't go through the same design process as the sets and as such doesn't really share much commonality with the defining ideas or motifs of the rest of that year's sets, nor is it designed with things like play scenarios and functionality in mind. Much as I would've liked to get, say, a big Borg Tower set (considering that year's sets skimped heavily on settings), it would have been a lot harder to turn a design like that that was only ever really designed as a background scene or prop with little in the way of a logical and playable interior layout than it is to take set designs that already had things like physical playability baked into them from the concept stages, and improve them with modern parts and techniques.

Eh... I think the Fire Truck set is gorgeous. I was worried that the bus would be a hard act to follow but it managed to wow me anyway. I love the huge turret and the shielding around the wheels.

Since that "super rare" one is actually in the mega pack and not a blind bag (The Brick Fan mixed up the images), I can only assume it just means that there's only one of them in the set compared to other more plentiful printed tiles (and the fact that each comes as extra should mean that there'll actually be two). The BFF tiles are also in the mega pack, so there's one color for each bracelet in the pack.

Wait... in the fire truck set... is that TeeVee? Like the Alpha Team character? They certainly look similar!

The Brick Fan has pictures of the next wave of Dots sets! Especially exciting are the Bracelet Mega Pack with its own set of printed round tiles* including ones that are exclusive to the set, as well as five bracelets (four of which are new), the Extra Dots Series 2 pack (with square printed tiles* instead of round ones), the Magic Forest bracelet (which repeats the bracelet color of the Sparkly Unicorn set but makes up for it with new colors of gem tiles, glow-in-the-dark tiles, and some wonderfully Elves-esque prints), and the Power bracelet (with another fun new color of bracelet and some bold-colored parts). I notice also that the mega pack is the first set in the theme to feature male models on the boxart! *The Brick Fan has mixed up the pictures of the printed tiles from the Mega Pack and Extra Dots Series 2, but you can tell from the other images which tiles go with which

No, those tiles wouldn't collide with the jumper plate. Those hinges are at their widest in their fully extended position, so having them slightly hinged actually creates MORE space between them and the jumper. It would be a different story if the angled sections connected via their own studs, rather than those hinge plates, since that type of hinge plate angles along the "corner" where the two hinge sections meet, rather than centered on a rectangular part. You also seem to be misunderstanding how the wedge plate attaches. It's not actually connected to the angled section at all, but rather to a long extended section between the two angled sections. This is why the tolerance of gaps between parts doesn't even come into play—the angled section are only connected via each other as well as via a central axle that merely keeps them centered without enforcing a rigid distance from the main body the way it would if the angled sections were connected via studs.

It looks to me, looking at the full instruction sheet, like the frontmost section (the 2x3 section to which the hinges are attached, which is not secured to plates on either the top or bottom) still slides along the axle independently of the parts attached to the jumper plates. In other words, while that section remains centered thanks to the axle that attaches to the main body it can go "off-grid" along its length, by approximately a mere 0.06 modules. Thus, no stress on the parts nor any uncertainty in the geometry. Just to help out, I went ahead and calculated the angle of the hinge. You will want it to be hinged to 177.141 degrees (with 0 degrees being the hinge in its "closed" state).

Is the Monkey Kid line produced exclusively in China? I wasn't aware that that was the case. I would expect its parts to be produced in a wide variety of Lego's facilities like most other sets sold on a worldwide basis. That goes especially for these current times, when global instability thanks to the coronavirus means that Lego relying solely on any one production facility could be risky. The flexibility that comes with global diversification of production is essential for ensuring that issues at an individual facility don't have such a dramatic impact.

I don't think it would—Parker's hair is too thick and hangs down in front. But they could still be put off to the side when she isn't wearing her headphones—them being the same color is a nice bit of luck.

I'd been holding off on forming an opinion until we got clear pics of the sets themselves, but now that I've seen them I'm loving this new theme! The sets are really well designed, and remind me of both Ninjago and themes like Agents or Space Police—they've got a wonderful "heft" to them, if that makes any sense. There's so many things I love in these designs: the ingenious build of the engines on the cloud jet, the sheer bulk of both mechs, the little Asian buildings and convenience stores that make the action around them feel that much bigger and more intense, the brick-built cargo ship that serves as a secret headquarters, and the fact that the bigfig "Sandy" has a matching kitty and a big hammock to relax in!

For most sets, you're probably correct (one of the reasons why such big prefab parts get used in the first place). But for a "3-in-1" model like in the Creator theme using parts as big and pre-formed as those would probably be extremely limiting. When you're designing with alternative builds in mind, especially ones that have significant differences from one another, having more basic parts that can be repurposed more easily for different types of builds is a significant boon. I am curious what sorts of alt-builds this set will have.

The new plane canopy is interesting! It's similar to the previous jumbo jet canopy but a brick taller, with a profile that reminds me of the Airbus A380. That also seems like it gives the passengers an extra brick's worth of headroom down the length of the plane, and the tail end also seems to no longer be a single bulky, preassembled element—a much appreciated change.

I would hesitate to use those as counterexamples. In the Winnie the Pooh project, all of the minifigures in the proposal used non-retired headgear pieces from the collectible minifigures (albeit in new colors), and half of the characters were brick-built to begin with. The final set has not been revealed but it could easily take things in a different direction, for example by making the rest of the characters brick-built. In the Pirate Bay project, the older molds were ones for which more modern parts could be substituted. The retired molds in question were building elements, not figure parts, that could be substituted without compromising the spirit of the original project. By contrast, this set uses minifigures for all of its characters, and all of those minifigures use specific retired molds from almost a decade ago. There are no current head molds that could necessarily substitute for them, either—the best case scenario for characters like Spongebob would be to instead use a brick-built figure like the ones in themes like Unikitty, but it's hard to conceive of an adequate substitute for characters like Patrick and Mr. Krabs using existing parts. And unlike the Winnie the Pooh project (which would be adapting a franchise new to Lego System at least, if not Lego as a whole), these figures would have to be superior to the previous iterations of them if they were to be released to a positive reception. That means having to look better than the ones released as part of a theme with a larger budget and the ability to create dedicated molds for each of its characters. It also shouldn't be discounted that the project has several other things running against it. Lego having produced several sets of this exact subject before also means they have concrete data about how well or poorly it sold—data that might not paint a pretty picture of what the sales potential of a larger, more expensive version might look like. I liked Spongebob back in the day so would not mind being wrong about this project's prospects in review. But particularly with so many other, more novel projects in the same review period, I don't know if this one will get Lego's attention regardless of how quickly it achieved the 10,000 supporter milestone.

One of the main barriers to it becoming a set is probably the fact that it utilizes those retired head molds from that earlier theme. There's no guarantee Lego still has those around and even if they did, reintroducing all of them would constitute a much greater logistical cost than the use of active molds. I'm also not 100% sure what the current working relationship between Lego and Nickelodeon is. Nickelodeon does currently air Lego City Adventures, but all of the themes based on Nickelodeon shows (Avatar, Spongebob, TMNT) are long since retired, not even making a return in more recent "umbrella themes" like BrickHeadz or Lego Dimensions.

An issue with extrapolating the possibility of Lego sets from other premium toymakers revisiting the franchise is that the two aim at very different markets. Yes, there will be Lord of the Rings toys again. But will they be prominently advertised to kids on the shelves at Wal-Mart or Target? Or will they remain a niche product for die-hard collectors, especially adult collectors? A streaming TV series doesn't have as much merchandising impact as a movie in most cases, after all. I wouldn't necessarily rule out Lego revisiting the Lord of the Rings license completely. But if it were to return to tie in with this new series, I might sooner expect a small-scale revival, like Lego has done for franchises like Pirates of the Caribbean, or for other streaming tie-in sets like Vader's Castle and the Razor's Crest in the Star Wars theme. One large, premium, adult targeted set (and eh, probably a BrickHeadz set or two if they did go through the trouble of reobtaining the license) feels more comparable to the general merchandising strategy of other Lord of the RIngs products than a full wave of sets that would usually rely on the larger but more fickle kid demographic for Lego sets. Harry Potter (which when you get right down to it is based on a series of children's books and movies) is perhaps a less apt comparison, especially given what we know of how their respective Lego themes performed the first time around.