Alexandrina

I think that's swinging too far the other way, and using a subset of classic theme MOCs (those based on specific Space factions) to represent the whole. Any ten minute browse of the Castle, Pirates or Space forums will show off plenty of incredibly creative MOCs. There's even creativity to using a specific limited colour scheme - you might not have the part you want available, if it's never been made in the right colour, so you have to be creative to work with your parts limitations to make something new. MOCs, of all themes, are creative - often moreso than official sets, of all themes, which give you a specific model to build. I can see an argument that non-licensed sets are more creative than licensed sets, from TLG's perspective only, because the designers are constrained only by their imagination, rather than the template of a licensed model. Once those bricks get into consumer hands, though? It's all equally creative!

It seems a bit unfair to say Paradisa failed miserably, seeing as it had a perfectly solid run stretching back to Lego's golden era, and many of its sets are still looked back on rightly as classics. It doesn't belong with the others on your list at all

Or people like me who were into Lego ten years ago but certainly couldn't afford the Simpsons house, or even any substantial quantity of the minifigures (I say this as someone who had one Simpsons CMF during its production life)

Yeah I suppose - though to be honest, I've never personally seen the issue with all-chrome sets. I just know that in around 2007-ish the consensus was that we'd never get the Starship for that reason, and since it's been nearly twenty years and it still hasn't emerged, maybe there's merit to that consensus. Call me old school but yellow-face Palpatine was the pinnacle

Adding onto what @Murdoch17 said, in the early days (pre-1990s) around half of the solid colour palette was only used for specific things. Green and light grey were only for baseplates/plants, while dark grey and later on brown were only for minifigure accessories/weapons and things like rocks and tree trunks. It wasn't until the mid-late 1990s that all of these colours were regularly used for normal building materials - there wasn't a 1x2 brick in dark grey until 1998, for example. This discrepancy is best illustrated by looking at colours that had already been removed from the Lego palette prior to 1995/96. Medium dark pink, for example, was only used for three different pieces outside Duplo - a door, a window pane, and a flower. Light green lasted into the 2000s but it was pretty much exclusively limited to baseplates (though it did get a very small number of plates through Scala sets, and was part of the Clikits palette too). Even into the 2000s, though, more niche colours were uncommon. The core palette was broader (incorporating green, both greys, brown, tan, dark turquoise, purple and the sand colours) but outside of that most colours had limited use, a symptom of Lego's overreach in the era that contributed to financial difficulties. It's a far cry from the post-2008/09 era, where usually if a colour is in the palette then it's used broadly throughout system, Technic, Friends and Duplo sets. (I don't know if it applies to your example, but there were quite often examples of bricks being made in colours not available for retail sale, for use in Legoland models. These did sometimes get into the wild, though I'd imagine your chances of getting hold of any significant quantity without knowing the right person are slim)

Adama Traore Brickheadz?

I remember someone years ago (before there was such a thing as a Clone Wars series) theorising that we didn't have a Naboo Royal Starship because of the sheer amount of chrome pieces it would need. You could do it in dark grey I suppose, but it might look like a dodgy attempt at the Sith Infiltrator!! I suspect the lucrehulk (assuming it's what I think it is) has never been done because it would need to be a huge set and the options for compelling minifigures are few. At that price point you'd want more than Nute Gunray and a couple of battle droids. I agree with you on the Rey film (I still think it'll end up being X, XI and XII) - the sequels were undeniably imperfect, and there's room to learn from their missteps. Maybe we'll get a Jedi with an orange or brown light saber, and force Lego to release a new saber colour!

According to Wookieepedia, the Perpetuus

The next film is Mando in May 2026. Fairly sure Andor is the only new release next year so it'll probably be a good opportunity to fill in some blanks. Watching The Phantom Menace yesterday, it occurred to me that we've never had the ship that takes the Jedi Council to Naboo at the end. I'm surprised at that really - it's a unique vehicle with plenty of flexibility in terms of figs, take your pick of which notable Jedi you want to whack in there, maybe even a combo of super popular Jedi and complete nobody. Yoda and Adi Gallia for instance.

I'm quite happy to not get into what directors have said as it's not really on topic about Lego, but I have genuinely got no idea what the supposed issue is, even after looking it up. The idea that the film will make barely 200m is laughable, to be honest. I know the sequel trilogy was divisive, but they still made bank off each movie there - and Daisy's performance as Rey is usually cited as one of the strongest aspects of it even among people who disliked it. It'll bring in a lot of viewers - those who always watch anything Star Wars, those who want a good family film at Christmas time - even if it's terrible. If it's not terrible, it'll be a few days before word gets out that it's actually good and people will go to see it. And the main thing going for it is that it's not going to have an insurmountable required buy-in. Presumably you'll only need to have seen at most the sequels to enjoy it, compared to Mando, which requires you to have seen multiple TV shows of questionable quality. Star Wars is far from a dead brand. If it was, Lego wouldn't continue to make so many sets for the theme, including numerous UCS sets

I think the difference is that the Rey movie is at the moment nothing more than "Daisy Ridley has been cast" and some journos trying to imply that not shooting until 2025 means it's destined to fail, whereas Mando is further along (has guest-stars announced) and meant to be the culmination of multiple shows which are almost all out, and yet its hype has actually dropped since it was first announced (Mando S3 being poorly received in many quarters, Ahsoka being pretty well inaccessible to people not already invested in the characters from the cartoons). The Rey movie also benefits from having low baseline expectations, while also likely being the sort of thing which will appeal to fans. Maybe not many people want it now, but it'll be a different story in two years' time if we've got the prospect of, say, a new Jedi Order with Karl Urban as Kyle Katarn and Henry Cavill as Jagged Fel, for instance. Either way, I hope I'm wrong. I hope both films are successful and lead to a litany of further films and great Lego sets. I'm just dubious.

I have a horrible feeling that not only is it going to be a flop, it's going to have lasting effects on the production of new Star Wars content in general. Certainly I wouldn't be surprised if we're lucky to get one set for new shows moving forward, and almost nothing revisiting old material beyond the nine main films. What I think will happen is that, regardless of whether the Mandalorian film pulls an audience, the hype will go to the New Jedi Order movie/Episode X - by the time Mando is ready for release, we'll be in a much more advanced stage in EpX production, with cast members announced, and EpX is imo likely to tackle some of the things OG fans wanted from the sequels, while pushing the timeline forward in a way Mando doesn't. Wouldn't surprise me if whatever Mando sets we get for the film are the last ones we get until well into the 2030s

Especially since the head, hands, arms and legs have all been done in transparent colours before, without issue. I think the only reason we haven't had any Force Ghosts yet is because most of the scenes they appear in aren't exactly conducive to Lego sets. Nobody wants a "Luke lying delirious in the Hoth snow" playset, and if we're having Dagobah then the Force-Ben scenes are the worst choice for sets. A UCS Ewok Village is the golden opportunity for Force Ghosts

I love it when Lego reuse random minifigure parts in a set that they don't seem to fit in. The other example that comes to mind is the Naboo Pilot torso being used in iirc Custom Car Garage. This is a cool set actually! Sadly I was a few years after this in getting airline exclusive sets, and they'd stopped being quite so cool by then

You could combine it with the new Skiff and Sail Barge sets and make that weird Sandbox level from Lego Star Wars II!

I don't understand this paragraph as a defence of the prequels over the sequels - both because all three examples are what I would describe as 'nitpicking' (I genuinely cannot see what the issue is with any of them) but also because two of them aren't even from the sequels. Honestly, I love the sequels (I'd rate TFA and TLJ in my top five Star Wars films, TROS a little lower but not at the bottom) but ballistic turbolasers are not an issue. If that was the worst thing the sequels had, they'd be universally adored. And I disagree with the idea that changes to lore have no have function. A lot of lore is worldbuilding - and with a world the size of Star Wars, you'd expect there to be more than one type of medicine. More than one region of even wealthy planets (Coruscant is the core of galactic civilisation, and it still has a seedy underbelly; why shouldn't Corellia have deprived industrial areas?) Limiting lore to what's already established just keeps the world small - and taken to an extreme, means everything after ANH is contradictory. We certainly don't have any indication there that Vader is Luke's father, or Leia his sister. There's no whispers of midi-chlorians. These two paragraphs are contradictory imo. The prequel trilogy is very Star Wars-like, sure - because the first part of it is a quarter of a century old now, and even the last part is nearly twenty years old, and because we've been inculcated in prequel-related media for most of those twenty years. If you look at the prequels in comparison to what Star Wars was before TPM, it's very different. The prequels have very overt politics (in the sense of literally seeing votes in the senate chamber, not in the sense of the writer having something to say), they have flashy, fast-paced lightsaber duels that mostly prioritise spectacle over pathos (exception here for Anakin vs Obi-Wan in ROTS), they take steps to apply science to the Force, large elements are targeted at kids in a way the OT never was (see: Jar-Jar Binks). Most of these things are the very reasons the prequel trilogy was reviled for years, until the demographic that grew up on it came of age. Even stuff like the Lego games has incorporated the prequels from the start. Where the sequels don't feel Star Wars-like yet is because we haven't yet had much (any?) media set in the same era. In fifteen years' time when we have another three Rey films, probably a TV series, and a handful of books/video games, taking cues from the sequel trilogy, it'll be a different story.

I like these a lot! Strikes a balance between the aesthetic of the old Futuron sets and the more modern building styles - the whole thing is sleek and futuristic and very well made!

I'm 100% certain we have an official Mara Jade, Jaina Solo or Thrawn (actual Thrawn, not Filoni's version) by 2016. Lego had been branching out into more and more Legends sets around the acquisition, and other companies had actually released products based on these characters. Beyond that, it depends whether George ever makes more films - certainly we don't get the TV series, for better or worse. I can't help but think that the real what if is what if George had made the sequel trilogy first. If he'd done some films taking a few cues from the Zahn trilogy (*ahem* Mara *ahem*) in the mid-90s, the original cast would all still have been young enough to do all the action required of them, and we could have had the next generation set up then - say, with films in 1995, 1998, 2001. George could then do his prequels a little while later, maybe in 2007, 2010, 2013, and then around about now would be an ideal time to be in the middle of a follow-up sequel-sequel trilogy, as the characters introduced in the 1995-01 trilogy would be about twenty years older. Imagine how much more harmonious Star Wars fans would be if there were no sequels, no TV shows, no dodgy cartoons and no divisive prequels to debate about! (And double-plus - we might have got Lego Star Wars sets earlier, possibly even poking into the tail end of the Golden Era. Sets with the charm of the early minifigures, combined with the design ethos of the early-mid 90s, would have been a wonder to behold)

I'd guess for Shrek the earlier films were when Lego licensing was still in its infancy (we'd only ever had six licenses by the time of the third film, including the flop that was Avatar) and by the fourth Shrek was in that weird place where the kids who had grown up on it were growing past it but not old enough yet to have lots of disposable income. Was Kung Fu Panda ever really big more than every other Dreamworks summer flick? I don't think those sorts of films were ever on Lego's radar tbh

Would it not be better to have a second regular Sesame Street set?

I'd go so far as to say that the licensed "series 2" shouldn't be a thing... at all. We already have a limited number of CMF slots per year, and licensed ones will turn off people who don't like that licence (maybe you might find one or two interesting figures, for other reasons, but if you don't like the licence you won't be intrigued by the CMFs as a whole). The reaction to the idea of a Formula One series shows this. And while it's easy to stomach the odd series here and there from a licence that you find uninteresting, because it comes with the understanding that another series will be coming along in the future that might be more to your taste, when those slots all start getting taken by rehashes of lines that have already come along, it becomes less fun. It's no longer "I'll skip this series, and the next licensed one will be something new" - it's "I'll skip this series, and possibly every other licensed series because they keep revisiting themes" Especially since they've demonstrated that a CMF series doesn't need to have corresponding regular retail sets available, and there are plenty of licences that would be more popular than going to the B-list of characters for a licence that's already been done. (This actually goes more for the licences that have full themes, as a lot of the most exciting figures are saved for the retail sets and we get boring variants instead; the Harry Potter CMFs were pretty disastrous on the whole because they were full of worse versions of the characters than were freely available on the shelves). I'd personally want licensed CMFs to end in general but if they must do them, at least pick a different licence every time.

Isn't that a pretty established fantasy archetype at this point? Steampunk is a logical extension of the Tolkien dwarves (miners who built these fantastic cities inside mountains), and has been fully entrenched by decades of Elder Scrolls. And imo we have proof, through Skyrim, that you can do steampunk dwarven architecture that still fits in a medieval aesthetic

As long as the plot requires. There have been inconsistencies here for as long as Star Wars has had overlapping plotlines (ie since The Empire Strikes Back) and I'm not sure there's any benefit to trying to pin down a hard figure. Star Wars has never been hard-science, and it would just arbitrarily limit the stories that can be told

Yeah, this is why I'm hesitant to commit. The opening sequence I have in mind is Mara - in her capacity as Emperor's Hand - tracking down and killing a Jedi survivor of Order 66 who has emerged from hiding in the aftermath of the Battle of Endor, believing that the Empire is defeated and the danger passed. While I could explain this in a crawl, I think that actually showing it would not only be visually cooler but serve as an effective introduction to who Mara is at the start of the story. I can see that. I really have latched onto her as the only real option for an immediately-recognisable Jedi who isn't Luke, who would be senior enough to be on the Council on merit. Without getting too into the weeds of the story, the idea is that Mara has been catapulted forward twenty years in time, thus never meeting and marrying Luke and therefore changing the future - but she retains her memory of who Luke is. I want another Council member who can comment on the scenario without being involved in it, and while I could use Kyle Katarn or Octa Ramis, or even an entirely made-up Jedi, Ahsoka seems like she would be a cool nod to the Disney-era canon. I wonder if she would be more receptive to an Order built with her principles in mind - to my mind, Luke would naturally seek out the only prominent former Jedi he knows of for advice, and Ahsoka would have an opportunity to fix all the things she saw as wrong with the old Jedi Order from the beginning. I think ultimately it comes down to the writing though!! I can have Ahsoka on the Council, just as I can start with a cold open before the crawl - it's a question of whether or not I can write it well enough to carry the idea off.

Bit of a tangent but I know there are plenty of Star Wars fans on these boards. I'm working on a Star Wars brickfilm at the moment (in scripting stages, nothing more) and wanted to solicit the opinions of Lego fans of Star Wars on a few elements: - Firstly, can it work to have the classic opening crawl after the first scene? I have a banger of a cold open that I want to lead into the opening crawl, but every actual Star Wars media I can find either opens with the crawl or doesn't have one - Also, Clone Wars fans especially, is it too out of character for Ahsoka Tano to be a member of a hypothetical Jedi Council circa 30 ABY? I'm going for 'based on but distinct to the actual canon', so I'm not concerned about whether it would fit the canon timeline or not - just whether Ahsoka's character would ever, in any timeline, return to the Order? This is in a timeline where Luke establishes a New Jedi Order fairly soon after RotJ btw - The big one: what colour lightsaber should Mara Jade use? I've been using a pink blade for tests as magenta doesn't exist in Lego form, but pink feels like it's Jaina Solo's colour to me As an aside, has anyone ever thought up a way of getting a convincing Saba Sebatyne minifigure? The trouble with book-only alien characters is that there tend to be few options for their heads!