Alexandrina

Oh, I don't think they're terrible either. I can't wait. But there's no denying that the general mood around them is pretty foul.

I suspect Lego would prefer people thinking the sets aren't special enough to people thinking the sets are terrible. I don't think anything could truly satisfy the community - and Harry Potter is at least less polarised a community than Star Wars - but these sets certainly seem to have missed the mark.

I obviously don't pay enough attention to Marvel, because I thought Thanos was bald all along anyway.

If this thread is anything to go by, neither are the Harry Potter sets. I wasn't active in AFOL communities at the time - what was seen as the issue?

Would Lego not have just straight up made a big fig for Endgame Thanos if they wanted to? It was one of the biggest films of all time - surely if anything justifies having new moulds it's characters from that. They shouldn't need to be backdooring it from more obscure characters in the same theme.

I've not been following the City rumours too closely, but I've just gone along and caught myself up to speed. I take it the presence of a new monkey in the summer wave pretty much confirms that the old monkey mould is gone for good? I figured it was based on its absence from PoBB, but if Lego have invested in a new mould it must mean that the old one's no longer usable. I hope it retains the yellow hands though - that seems part of the charm of the Lego monkey to me.

I'm very impressed by the protruding bit of the facade - I've been tinkering with a similar shape myself, so I know just how hard it is to pull off as well as you have.

Almost certainly. Maybe not next year, but it's a standard genre and I would be surprised if they never return to it. The fact we're getting perhaps three castle-related sets this year shows that Lego knows the market is there.

I disagree. The Star Wars anniversary sets looked more like the modern Star Wars sets than an attempt to recreate the style of the 1990s sets, and Harry Potter could easily have emulated that.

It appears to be this piece.

I wonder how much this is a generational thing. The Fire Breathing Fortress was before my time so to me it's an indelible part of Castle canon - and looking it up now, to me it looks brilliant. At the same time, I can definitely see how it's a step down a road apart from the Castle sets that came before it.

Depends on what figures. If it's knights, probably not - unless you're going for a specific look. If it's nobility, Kings and Queens and People of Court, then there might be a useful piece or two.

Huh. I guess I don't have as good an eye as I thought!

I think that's the crux of it. In a perfect world, maybe they'd have introduced a new mould for OT Han - but a screen-accurate one would be too similar to the existing Solo one, so they compromised on using the same piece.

According to Bricklink, you're correct.

I've not been happy with a Luke hairpiece since they changed from the standard male hair to the long hair a decade ago. The newer one looks even uglier imo. I wasn't aware Leia's had changed. As for Han, I can see that shapewise the newer one is closer to ESB than the original male - but, perhaps because I associate it with Ehrenreich's Han, it looks too young to belong to him. There could also be some bias because I don't like the piece itself - and perhaps a chunk of nostalgia for the Lego Star Wars videogames!

There was a price list posted in the Vidiyo thread. To my knowledge no pictures yet. It'll be interesting to see how much they lean into the cartoony visuals of the theme. Just as with the castle, there's the potential for some interesting new recolours of genre-specific pieces here.

I'll go one further: why did they need to do away with the old Han hairpiece in the first place? It looks more than good enough, and it's not like the new one is 100% screen accurate so why change it over?

I'm sure that particular colour combination will come eventually. The gold armour suited the Kingdoms King, imo, but there were red-and-silver and red-with-gold-pattern armour pieces during the earlier Knights Kingdom era, and it's a common fantasy colour scheme - embodied famously by the Lannisters - so I don't foresee Lego never touching it. The thing is, if they did every possible good idea in Kingdoms, there'd be nothing new to offer in the future. This way, there's stuff we haven't had yet - and so stuff to hope for in the future!

That's literally the Kingdoms Lion King minifigure. (Don't bother responding to me with any Lion King puns, by the way, since I've never seen it so they'll fly over my head! ) It doesn't make sense for them to have the same face, nor for their armour to be a recolour of the same pattern. They're about as similar as two kings from different factions can realistically get - I don't see how you could improve on that while still keeping the Kingdoms aesthetic. Potentially exciting! It'll either be a really good castle set, with useful parts perhaps given in as-yet-unseen colours - or something so far removed from Castle that it won't offer Medieval fans a thing. I suspect a "Candy Knight", if such a figure is included, would prove as controversial as Renly's Kinsguard the Knights Kingdom figures. I withhold judgement until pictures leak.

I don't want to be presumptuous, but that seemed like the most blatant sarcasm imaginable to me. Even better if the animals are actually controlling the butcher through some unmentionable Dark Magic, like a sick meat puppet.

4708 Hogwarts Express and 4709 Hogwarts Castle. Different colour tile in each.

True - but the June sets are far more in keeping with the Harry Potter aesthetic than the monorail sets of yesteryear - which, frankly, don't look all that much beyond the actual track itself

Although I've recently been able to acquire a couple of the original sets piecemeal through joblots - being a hawk who swoops and takes every listing on my local Facebook marketplace for bulk Lego - the only original wave set I owned at the time was Dobby's Release. I think I had it as a birthday present, from one of my parties during the golden era where the whole class got invited to everyone's parties - but I don't actually remember for sure. Both box and instructions got thrown away shortly after I built the set for the first time. There was a lot to love in the set, at least for little me. Dobby was a novelty - I especially enjoyed holding his rubber head, which felt different to the rest of the Lego I owned. I'll echo @BacktoBricks in praising the printed books, and there were some good tiles then. But the set has aged badly - and strangely, the only thing I really like about it now, with the benefit of hindsight, was one of my biggest peeves with it at the time: the lack of Harry. When I was a kid with only one Harry Potter set in my collection, not having Harry really annoyed me. I think I made my own from the standard grin head with black sunglasses, which was the only bespectacled head I had. Nowadays, as an adult with the means to afford all the Harry Potter sets that take my fancy, I find it boring to have a Harry in every set. It's something I'm glad to see they've moved away from with the Moments books, though for obvious reasons I don't expect to see that becomng the standard. I can't see how Lego could accomplish that without either having such a high parts count that the price is beyond most of the market, or going back to the aesthetic of the old monorail sets and having much of the track be on its own, with only token builds at either end. I don't think this would fit with the aesthetic of the modern Harry Potter sets.

Very probably it's just an illusion of camera perspective. They were on Instagram, but I think they were long since removed. Some users have saved the images, I think, so you'll have to get one of them to PM you.