Lyichir

1 also says "ARSO" in the language of Okoto from Bionicle G2 (no idea what that means, though). And in addition to reading "CITY", 53 and 55 also feature icons from the 2001 Mata Nui Online Game used to represent Ussal Crabs and Makuta, respectively.

So guess which Lego character turned out to be a Castle fan?

Even better idea—a mini-doll theme that blends the high-tech concepts and builds of Nexo Knights with the themes, tone, and vibrant color palette of Elves. Though personally I'd prefer to just see Elves continue for as long as possible.

Worth keeping in mind that, as a theme aimed at younger audiences, City tends to use larger parts on average than the highly detailed sets we've seen for the Lego Ninjago Movie (especially sets with those massive floating boat hulls, which I imagine cost a pretty penny to produce). I don't mean this to bring up "that tiresome argument"—to be honest, it's a nice thing that there are larger sets for builders of all skill levels—but it does mean that themes with a higher target age range also tend to provide a better value for money.

Yesterday at BronyCon my brother and I got a copy of Farran and the Crystal Hollow signed by Kyle Rideout, the voice of Farran! He said this was the first time he'd been asked to sign a Lego set and asked if we were excited for the Netflix series (obviously, the answer was yes). Now I have two different Lego Elves sets signed by the voice actors (after getting Ashleigh Ball to sign Emily Jones and the Baby Wind Dragon last year)!

Dark brown. I believe—it seems to match the other limb sections.

The great thing is that it's a sequel to one of the posters in the Palace Cinema!

On top of that, seeing the enthusiasm an esteemed actor like Jackie Chan has for his role and for the movie as a whole gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

Very nice! I bought a big bag of hairless minidolls at BrickFair largely for that very reason. I don't think I'm ready to say goodbye to Elves just yet...

In the melting rig itself there's a key difference—in that case, the laser was magnified through a lens. Remind me, when Wyldstyle used it was it still hooked up to the lens, or did she use it independently?

Oh dear... hope they have it at the store I'm going to this Saturday.

Even if the Fire Mech is pretty big itself, I think the Ice Tank may be bigger, and more of those parts seem to be larger parts (large wedge plates for the armor plating, long Technic beams for the undercarriage, large rear wheels, plus those huge new half-cone pieces for the rotating drum on the back), so it having a worse price-per-piece than the Fire Mech (which seems to have fewer huge parts and more small detail elements) isn't entirely surprising.

I will say that a Monster-Hunter-like crafting system as described here would be extremely conducive to a constraction-based video game. Most constraction themes have gotten fairly little in the way of video game tie-ins. And most of those have not done much to really emphasize the Lego aspect of the characters. But a theme involving hunting mechanical enemies to use their parts to augment the player's own armor and weaponry? Now you're onto something. A mechanic like that might also make for a decent selling feature for a line of sets. Of course, the violence is still potentially an issue. Even if you make the enemies robots, scavenging remains from fallen foes still feels like it goes a bit further than the typical fantasy violence of most Lego themes.

As character cameos, sure. I certainly don't expect a full movie or anything like that, though. I also wouldn't jump to the conclusion that the current "pattern" of releases will hold—don't forget that TLBM and TLNM were only in the same year due to production being pushed back on both. I imagine that an annual release schedule would be preferred if possible, since having two movies per year sets a greater risk of both the movie sets and the movies themselves cannibalizing one another's sales. Of course, the performance of TLNM will probably influence future plans greatly.

So much to unpack in this video! Bionicle G2 lettering along the edge of the small second-story apartment, a Lego-ized remake of the Galidor poster (with actual Galidor writing to boot), Return of the Brick Separator poster (featuring the set designers!), the BELIEVE poster from The Lego Movie, trading cards ranging from Chima to Adventurers to Fabuland, an M-Tron logo on the shopping bag in the costume store... definitely a lot of deep cuts in terms of references.

If they had the capability of producing enough to do that, they could probably manage to produce enough to better satisfy demand at the convention itself. As it stands, these convention-exclusive figs generally seem to be last-minute additions to Lego's already packed production schedules. And unlike many of their competitors, the vast majority of their products are produced in factories they own and operate that run around the clock to satisfy global demand. So unless Lego can improve their production capacity and better schedule these sorts of one-off promotional releases to better satisfy demand, I don't see them expanding sales of these already limited items to a much larger marketplace.

As usual, given all we know, I don't see monorail returning. On the other hand, at this point I expect to continue to see this topic return to the top of the Embassy forum every now and again until the end of time.

No, Jay, from the Ninjago character encyclopedia released last year (in the "stone armor" he wore at the end of the Rebooted season). He came with a printed "Starfarer" comic similar to these, though I can't guarantee that these ones are exactly the same without seeing them "off the rack".

Guys, remember, discussion of the Meowthra set goes in the action themes forum. This one is for discussing Meowthra's story role.

I'm fairly sure one reason for the time skip is that Wu HASN'T gotten back to the normal time yet—his reappearance will probably be a plot point in the coming season.

I'm pretty sure those tiles are the same as the one that came with Stone Armor Jay in the latest Ninjago character encyclopedia...

Considering we're getting a time-skip, we probably could have expected the character designs to be updated anyway. Might as well use the movie designs as inspiration.

It's extremely reductive to pretend as if there weren't useful new basic parts being introduced before this year. Every single year introduces all sorts of useful new building elements. Just because you don't see the value in all of them doesn't mean that a new SNOT element, hinge, or Technic part is only useful for minifigures or builds that supplement them. Seems to me that the problem is that your definition of a "basic part" is artificially limited to the specific parts you personally find useful, never mind a part's actual simplicity or utility.

Personally I find the brick-built giant minifigures kind of charming, but in any case part of why I brought them up is that if there were a full series of them (as opposed to one per year or less), they could potentially introduce some more new parts to help smooth out the rougher bits. That might be the best solution if you wanted a "constraction" subtheme of an original theme like Ninjago or Nexo Knights in which the figs represent themselves across all media, rather than being stand-ins for more "realistic" characters like in Friends, Exo-Force, or the majority of licensed themes.

Oh, those trans-purple plates are gorgeous...