Lyichir

I understand that, but even given that I tend to prefer the new style. It's true that minifigs have a blockier appearance than many of the animals do nowadays, but the new style animals still retain a certain simplicity that makes them fit in. Moreover, the old-style animals often had quirks due to their shape that made them look odd from certain angles. From a direct front view, the old horse could be hard to make out as a horse (except, of course, for those accustomed to recognize what a Lego horse would look like. Oddly, your Star Wars example often has me thinking the exact opposite in regards to actual minifigures. I'm of the opinion that a great many licensed figures with custom heads look "off"; for instance, C3-PO could probably work just as well with a standard head, and some alien heads can look bizarre for having features normal figs lack, like noses.

It's weird how much opinions differ. I think the snake is only okay (the head is not much different from the snake vehicles, and I'm not hugely fond of the jaw). But I LOVE the dragon, which not only has great swooshability and an AMAZING function, but also has a beautiful color scheme (heavy on white and dark stone grey, with colored highlights on the heads and trans-green "energy" projecting from the wings). But I suppose it doesn't matter to LEGO which part of the set you like so long as you buy the set. Another thing I love in the set that not many people have mentioned is the prison/temple/tower. I had been hoping for a larger Serpentine building like the Fire Temple we got last year, but this is the next best thing. I love the antenna-like construction at the very top, and the dark red landscaping at the base. It gives a wonderfully evil vibe.

It varies for me, but in most case I tend to prefer the new versions. The reason for this is most often consistency. Back in the day we had dogs with textured eyes and horses with printed eyes. It was horribly inconsistent. Nowadays it's gotten better, as newer molds tend toward printing. It's not all this way yet; the parrot actually went from being printed to being, for some reason, blended , and the new-ish fish has always had textured eyes (although this helps it to better serve as a dead fish for cookin'. Another reason I tend to prefer the newer animals is that often they add playability where it wasn't before. For instance, the newer shark can swallow a minifig whole, and has more attachment points than the old one. This summer we're finally getting a new horse, which actually has poseable legs, something it's needed for decades. Altogether, it often has to do with how similar they are to minifigs. The horse is bigger and ostensibly faster than people, and so it should be at least as poseable, if not more. My preference toward printed eyes started with the newer, more detailed minifig faces.

I don't think the LEGO market is oversaturated. I doubt there's an oversaturation of licenses. There are a great number of licensed themes this year, but there's little evidence that they're going to crowd out traditional themes. Lord of the Rings may have supplanted Castle temporarily, but I imagine the theme won't long outlast the Hobbit movies. We already have a number of iconic scenes from the movies depicted, and there are still at least two waves (winter and summer 2013) before the second of those is released. By that point I believe a number of the significant scenes will have been used, and LEGO will be forced to either release sets based on less interesting scenes, or remake older sets. LotR doesn't have the staying power of the multimedia behemoth that is Star Wars, so I doubt it will fall into said theme's two-to-five-year cycle of remakes. And while Cars seems to have largely supplanted Tiny Turbos, I don't see any reason why the non-licensed theme deserved to stick around more than a theme with actual characters and story. Many lines don't seem to get a chance at another wave simply because there's not an intention to make those lines last. Where else could the Dino theme honestly go? There's already a ton of vehicles and a decent base. It's one example of a theme that I see as perfectly concise, with no more sets than it needs to fill out the cast of characters and setting. Alien Conquest was another example. I know AFOLs yearned for a human base other than the mobile one, and many wanted a mothership that could actually deploy smaller ships. But the alien ships had a defined, limited aesthetic, and kids would only purchase a number of sets with that aesthetic before getting bored. As for a human base, I'm sure mobile bases sell more than non-mobile ones in most, if not all, cases. So again, continuing the theme until sales dwindled to a non-sustainable point is pointless when LEGO can "refresh" the market with a new theme. I disagree that Atlantis wasn't given a chance. It lasted three waves, and I can wager that the third wave was less successful than the first two. So that's an example of a theme that WAS given a chance, but failed to return on expectations in the end. Pharaoh's Quest was a theme with limited scope: it only encompassed Egyptian locales. If it were to continue, it would need to do so in a different setting, probably with a different name. And who's to say it won't? It'd be easy for LEGO to bring back the cast of PQ when they next need to do such an "adventure" theme. I also disagree that collectable minifigures are oversaturated. Most places I know only have the most recent two series' in stock at one time. And the CM line has a different dynamic than most themes. Once a kid (or AFOL, for that matter) has gotten their favorite fig, they might not spring to buy the same series again. So LEGO has to run a limited edition of each series, and release new series frequently. And as others have said, LEGO's strategy seems to be working. You rarely see Lego on clearance aisles, except in the rare case of a theme that out-and-out failed, such as Prince of Persia or Speed Racer (which failed largely because the movie did not live up to the studio's expectations in terms of sales). LEGO has not stopped releasing exciting new lines in favor of licenses (even if new ones don't always have to be long-runners). And despite the frequent releases of new Collectable Minifigs, that line continues to sell well.

I'm not 100% certain Greg has the same influence on HF's story as he did with BIONICLE. I do know that he does have a similar role with Ninjago, but based on the simpler storylines of Hero Factory, it's possible that LEGO lets the set designers do a story outline for any given year, and the TV producers flesh it out into what we see of it. Such a system would explain why most of the comics we've seen are little more than adaptations of the TV episodes.

I personally like one-wave themes. While I love following a theme over many years, in some cases a theme that sticks around too long suffers a decrease in quality. For instance, there's really no comparison between 2011's City of Atlantis and the previous year's Portal of Atlantis. It's worth mentioning that Atlantis was probably not intended as a one-wave theme (promotional graphics in the first wave's sets teased the next wave's Portal set), but the logic is the same. A theme that can be planned out from start to finish will often look better in retrospect. I think there has been an increase in one-wave themes in recent years. In many cases, however, I think these themes have greater success by cutting off before interest in the theme wanes. I've seen very few Pharaoh's Quest sets stagnating on store shelves a year after the theme was released, compared to the last years of multi-wave themes such as Exo-Force, where sets are so overproduced in their last wave that they need to be given away, in bulk, at conventions.

I, too, am a creature of habit, but honestly the old horse mold has been underperforming for years. It had two poses: head up and head down. When the Toy Story horse "Bullseye" came out, it made me more aware of how much better the horse could be. Now we finally have a horse that can rear (although we have yet to see how it looks in other poses, like running and jumping).

The sets look amazing, as I expected they would, but MY GOD. That display is the best I've ever seen. The way they have all those functions automated is truly incredible.

The change of brown and grey wasn't because there were too many colors. That was because the old brown and grey weren't bright enough, and yellowed more readily. They did rationalize and streamline the color chart a few years back, but that was an unrelated endeavor, and the color chart has not grown much since then.

What? Lego has WAY fewer colors than they did a few years back. Since then they've seriously streamlined their color chart, and now there are probably under 50 colors used each year. But the real question is, how does this have anything to do with the new Monster Fighters theme? I haven't seen a single new color in those sets.

He wasn't talking about elements; Earth Blue is LEGO's official name for Bricklink's Dark Blue. And the Venomari seem to be lightning-aligned; we'll never know the Anacondrai elemental alignment since the only one has a tail and thus can never have a spinner.

I don't think the "splodges" are really a misprint; that piece actually has two different plastic colors blended together, and that almost always causes some variation. Before LEGO started doing this deliberately for some parts (like the one you posted), parts that got more than one color in the mix were known as "flame" colored, and were much sought after.

How exactly is it a fail? In terms of sales, it's definitely not: it was one of the top-selling themes this Christmas. I don't see how death is an untouchable topic for kids, and Ninjago is almost never about killing. In Ninjago the line between the Underworld and the real world is blurred, but nonetheless there is rarely a case of a character "dying" (any dead characters usually died before the story started, no different from Harry's parents in Harry Potter, or the Air Nomads in Avatar: the Last Airbender). I don't see how it goes too far from the idea of creative playing (in fact, it's closer to the idea of creative play than any previous theme with a game mechanic, IMO). The Ninjago theme is not placed anywhere in human history, because it doesn't take place on Earth. It exists in a fictional, anachronistic world where seemingly anything goes in terms of technology, which allows kids to use their creativity however they want. If they want the ninjas to use paper gliders, that's okay. If they want the ninjas to ride jets, that's okay too. I don't see how a theme needs an educational purpose to be legitimate. Personally, I cringed every time the Fantasy Castle or Knights Kingdom II lines appeared in a magazine with facts about real medieval tech. I appreciated it as fantasy, and hated when it tried to pretend to be something it wasn't. The vehicles and creatures may seem stupid to you, but I see them as something else: CRAZY AWESOME. It doesn't make much sense for a ninja to ride a motorcycle, it's true. But ninjas are awesome, and motorcycles are awesome. Surely the compound awesomeness when these things are combined more than makes up for the lack of realism. The story is a heck of a lot deeper than you give it credit for. The main story lead is Greg Farshtey, who previously wove an intricate story for BIONICLE, but I think he's even more in his element writing for the zany world of Ninjago. I don't know much about TMNT, so I can't vouch for how similar or different it is from that. But in Ninjago you are presented with deep, relatable characters, and a rich mythology, but these don't restrict the creativity of the theme because of the anything-goes attitude I mentioned before. You say the theme is good for AFOLs because of the parts and minifigs. But I like the theme because it reminds me of how kids play. They don't care if their X-Wing is movie-accurate or if their trains don't match any real-world models. Ninjago is the kind of zany fun they can appreciate for what it is, rather than something to criticize for not matching a narrow idea of what does/doesn't make sense. The previous Ninja theme was good, I agree. But that doesn't mean that realism is the only way to create a theme. There's always a place for fantasy in the minds of children. A stodgy insistence on what is logical, or plausible, has never been what LEGO is about.

As far as I can tell, Jay's hair is actually dark orange; and that's lucky, because it exists in that color in far more sets than the reddish-brown hair you pictured. Zane's hair is somewhat rare in tan, so I hope to get one from bricklink at some point in the future (I could potentially get the whole set it came in, seeing as it's a small and fairly cheap set).

I was going to vote in the poll, but I felt some of the questions were too weighted in one direction or another. For instance, I have no background in marketing, child development, etcetera. But I know that LEGO does have experts in this field, and did a lot of research before putting out this theme. As the recent BusinessWeek article described, LEGO's research showed that girls wanted a fig they could identify with, and the minifigure was not effective in this regard. If regular sets and minifigs would work for this market, LEGO would have used them; after all, it's a lot cheaper to work female minifigs into standard sets than it is to create molds for entirely new figures and build a line around them. I don't understand why many AFOLs fail to give LEGO the benefit of the doubt in cases like these: LEGO has more than enough resources to study the market before making decisions like these, and I think it's quite presumptuous of us to assume we have all the solutions despite having a much smaller reference pool to draw conclusions from.

I think the issue is that LEGO isn't going to be successful by creating girls sets that don't conform to the norm. The meme that girls prefer pink and pastels is constantly reinforced by western culture. LEGO is at its heart a business, and Friends is their attempt to break into the girls market. So should we really expect them to take a progressive stance when the greatest effect it could possibly have is to make the theme a failure? I feel the Friends theme is a lot more progressive in general than its predecessor Belville. While there's a stereotypically girly salon set, there's also a robot lab (which encourages girls into STEM fields, where females are underrepresented).

I think that'd be harder to do than the sides of legs and arms thanks to the "holes" in the backs of minifig legs.

Based on the fact that it looks like the "Breakout" theme might last two waves, I'm suspecting that Black Phantom is the Big Bad, the inside man who organized the Breakout... but that he may have been working with a Bigger Bad, who worked on the same plan from the outside to cause trouble for Hero Factory. Just a guess. It'd certainly explain how the villains could break out so easily, and why they haven't done it before now.

The closest we've seen is Peter, assumedly Olivia's dad, who looks remarkably like Indiana Jones. He's so much manlier than I'd expect in a doll-like figure.

The heads, while great looking, are still remarkably simple to build. And I've noticed that the smallest of the snake vehicles, the Rattlecopter, has a simpler head design. So I don't think kids'll have a harder problem building these than they would with other sets at a similar price point.

What do you mean, dying away? The Clone Wars heads are still being used for the Clone Wars sets, just as they always have been. We're still not seeing scenes from the Clone Wars show recreated with normal figs, so I'm curious what gives you the idea that they're going anywhere.

See, I see it the opposite way. I don't see a large theme as being very successful. What I do see as able to happen is a few sets depicting large-scale replicas of Minecraft blocks and figures. Some of the MOCs I've seen to this effect have been amazing. But a full theme? While there's a lot of latent interest in Minecraft, I don't think there's enough that many users will want to "collect them all". I think LEGO would do better to garner sales from them by releasing one or two display-quality sets in the $50 range.

That's just speculation. There's been a rumored list of summer sets from some people who have a history of being right about these things, but there's no hospital on it. Apparently summer sets will focus on mining, which I'll assume is meant as a variation on the age-old construction subtheme in the same way LEGO reimagined the police and fire subthemes for this wave.

It is because it's pearl silver (looks to be Silver Metallic specifically). In fact, I wish his torso matched. C-3PO proves that it's not impossible to do torsos in metallic colors, and I am annoyed by the contrast between Silver Metallic and Medium Stone Gray in both the Roman Soldier and the Clockwork Robot; I wish the soldier had a silver torso and the robot had a light gray wind-up key. Even then, however, I see no evidence of lower quality from these pics.

The 5th movie is plenty realistic, seeing as despite less critical acclaim than earlier PotC movies the latest one was a financial success. My best guess for why we haven't seen more sets is because that movie won't be out until at least 2013, and LEGO wants to pace themselves so that sets are released when the movies are fresh in the public conciousness. I'm extremely doubtful that the PotC theme is over, and I think a wave without new sets in no way means that there won't be any more in the future.