Alexandrina

Ah, so the first time they're in uniform and the second time they're in other clothes. I'd personally prefer to see a uniformed variant in the Forbidden Corridor, to recreate the first scene better. To me the clothes they're wearing at the end - particularly Harry's red jumper - are more linked with the latter challenges, in particular the confrontation with Quirrelldemort.

I'm a fan - it all looks very clean (yes, even the yellowed tile, since no train station is going to stay pristine for a century!) My only point - and please don't think I'm being rude or anything, because that's certainly not my intention - would be that it doesn't really feel Victorian to me. I might be unduly influenced by my own local station, which is of Victorian architecture, but in my experience they tend to have red brickwork with ornate designs around the windows etc, and chimney-stacks on the roof (because nothing says 'Victorian' like pumping soot into the air!)

Aren't they wearing their uniforms when they go to the Forbidden Corridor anyway? The jumpers might not be 100% film accurate if they have the Hogwarts crests on them, but they're going to be more accurate than any non-uniform torso.

You're right - there's plenty of room for civilians even in a modular castle theme. And to be honest, the end-product would likely be a better looking castle and some better-looking sets to go along with it. I'd be happy to see a Blacksmith-style set every year as the civilian "companion piece" to a castle theme, with the result of three or four years' sets being a big castle and a tidy village around it.

This comes with the added benefit that if one part of the castle looks terrible, we the consumers don't have to choose between buying an ugly castle or not getting the castle at all - we can just skip over the terrible parts. As a downside, though, there would be less space for civilian-focused sets. They already struggle for representation in Castle themes.

Have we ever had a Hufflepuff jumper with the badge, in any era? I wouldn't be bothered too much by the torsos just to complete the set.

That can't possibly continue more and more indefinitely. There comes a point where kids are saturated by digital exposure and need some physical play. I would also query whether a predominantly digital experience would truly be Lego, but that might just be me.

As far as I know they were removed some time back. Your best bet is someone PMing you, who happens to have them saved.

If they're going for the retro look, hopefully the big rock pieces make an appearance. The newer, smaller panels are too flimsy imo

She has a bigger role than Charlie Weasley. Make of that what you will.

I genuinely don't know where Penelope would fit, unless there's a hospital wing set (actually, that might work, with Madam Pomfrey, a petrified Hermione and a new printed tile with the "pipes" scrawl). On the off chance she does come this year, though, it wouldn't surprise me if Percy turned up in the same set. After all, given how little he had to do in the latter-day films, Percy essentially only has one key scene - confronting Crabbe & Goyle in the dungeon - and given Crabbe & Goyle are coming in June, that scene won't be for a while. There was no Percy in the Burrow either, so I'm wondering when we'll get him at all. Incidentally, both Penelope and Percy were prefects. If Lego were to introduce torsos with the prefect badge on the uniform, they could check off Gryffindor and Ravenclaw together. Add Pansy Parkinson and Ernie Macmillan to the list and you have yourself the set. Eh, I don't think you can distill it to nostalgia alone. I personally quite like the June sets, and while I was collecting Lego at the time of the original release, I wasn't into the Harry Potter sets at the time, so the only one I have is Dobby's Release - which is far far worse than any of the sets slated for this year!

That's unfortunately not going to happen, even in a world where Lego offer custom sets. There are thousands of discontinued parts without extant moulds - the cost to resurrect those moulds, in the gamut of colours including discontinued and never made, would be astronomical. In fact it would probably put Lego out of business long before they reaped any dividends from adapting their business model. I think the best we can hope for is the ability to build a custom set from a preselected range of parts, like with the old LDD. At best we might see certain old sets return to order, with the understanding that they won't have a production run until a certain threshold of orders is reached and so it might be some time before sets get made.

I helped myself to half a dozen legs and helmets - torsos, obviously, out of stock. When Lego finally get the stock figured out, they'll be left with loads of legs, as everyone piles on getting torsos to go with the legs they've already bought!

If Lego ever resurrect raised plates, I'll happily buy your unwanted ones from you! Is anyone else confused as to where the ladder at the back of that castle is going to? I get the first part, to clamber onto the battlements - but the second half just seems to stick into the air. Is it to give the defenders extra height, so they look like giants and the besieging forces get scared?

This reminded me of Hugh Grant's Prime Minister saying all the things great about Britain in Love Actually ! I can't help but feel like when people ask for new moulds, they aren't thinking about stuff like arms that are integral to getting the parts they want to see. It's the Headline Moulds that get talked about; people see that there's a brick-built basilisk and don't notice the dozen new parts that they got instead. Is it really that new? I've been using it plenty for foliage on trees; I stick one on top of each of the big studs of the 4x3 leaves. It makes the tree canopies look a bit less flimsy.

I think it's safe to say that anybody asked in 1981 what they thought the Lego of forty years' time would be like would probably get it all wrong. Forty years ago was actually just after a pretty big sea change - the Space and Castle themes (and indeed the Lego Minifigure) were about three years old by that point. I suspect people at the time might have guessed a few things correctly - pointing perhaps at different faces on the minifigures' heads, a wider variety of themes, a slightly expanded colour palette (green, dark grey and brown bricks would probably have been seen as an inevitability, and orange, pink and purple as 'standard' colours would have factored into some guesses no doubt). On the whole though they'd have been way off. All this to say that our guesses are likely to be wildly innacurate! I'd love it if these forums are still up in 2061 and someone can dig out a link to this old topic for us all to have a good laugh. Anyway, I can see Lego's evolution focusing on the minifigure. We've now got about five different types of leg. In forty years we'll probably have body types too. I can imagine Lego trialling a switch to a slimmer torso piece instead of the waist curvature printing on lots of female minifigures - probably for some license or other to begin with, and eventually fading into other themes as it stops being a controversial new part and becomes a member of the Lego stable. As for licenses, it wouldn't surprise me if some more mature licenses get picked up. Stuff like Game of Thrones (emphasis on like, because I don't know what'll be relevant in forty years' time but it won't be Game of Thrones). It won't be soon, but Lego are already getting more mature with their licenses over time. Twenty years ago, Lord of the Rings was too mature. Ten years ago it was a theme. With Stranger Things - admittedly a single set - they're now in the territory of licenses with swearing and violence, even if these aren't represented in the sets they make. Especially now that they've started an 18+ brand, I can see them slowly pushing the boat out year on year with the licenses they pick, until they think nothing of the sort of adult fantasy that is off limits right now. They'll probably still be pumping out an X-Wing and a TIE Fighter every two years, even when Star Wars Episode 24 comes out and they've got ample films to make sets from. Depending on how technology develops, I can imagine Lego offering bespoke production of desirable classic sets. It probably won't be their full range, but I can imagine Lego making a predetermined range of 'classic' sets - stuff like the Black Seas Barracuda, Galaxy Explorer, Fort Legoredo, Old Fishing Store, classics as yet unreleased - available made to order. These might raise a premium, or there might be an understanding that Lego will produce the sets when they hit a threshold of active orders, so the more niche a set the longer you'll be waiting for it. I'd expect baseplates to return in a big way one day, too. I don't know why they were phased out, but I presume it has something to do with costs. If those costs come down, a good baseplate would be a good way to add perceived value to sets. Look at, for instance, set 6411 Sand Dollar Café compared to set 41363 Mia's Forest Adventure. Pretty much the same number of parts, but the former looks much more impressive in a photo, because of the baseplate. As more and more shopping is done online, how good a set looks on its photos is going to play a big role, and it wouldn't surprise me if by the 2060s every Lego set over about 120 pieces includes a baseplate.

Buy two. Then you can display the rear and your wife can display the front.

That's good to hear!

I'm gonna be honest, I read all the original comments as meaning that the BBC are showing a documentary about the 20th anniversary of Lego Harry Potter and didn't think anything was odd about that. I wonder why they've decided to broadcast it today? I could have understood it more late last year, when the film industry shutting down totally had left them running out of new stuff to show... but they've had lots of new television on so far in 2021 so I can't imagine it's them desperately plumbing the depths of their archives.

I'm having trouble understanding exactly what you've done here. So you've done a main render, then supplemented that with close-up renders - and then after that, you've essentially put a white border around the close-up renders (different process, by the sounds of it, but the same end result)? So if my understanding is right, your close-up renders don't show the whole model and the edge of the image is all-white? Apologies if I've misunderstood you somewhere, but if I'm reading you right I have to say that I don't see how that looks more presentable. The Ideas platform is putting a white border around the images anyway just from the whitespace on the page, so all you seem to be accomplishing is making the image smaller to the eye. Just at a glance, the submission on the front page of Lego Ideas right now (the Village Post-Office) has done close-up renders of different parts of the build, and it looks a lot cleaner than if they'd added artificial whitespace on top of what the Ideas site is already adding.

There's an owl too? Wow, clearly it's been longer than I realised since I read any Winnie the Pooh!

Disney own the rights to Winnie the Pooh, right? Is it possible that the presence of new moulds in a licensed Ideas set is part of Lego greasing the wheels of their arrangement with Disney; I imagine there's a lot to be lost on certain more steady licenses if Lego are releasing Disney-licensed products that Disney see as sub-par. It might even be the case that Disney insisted on new moulds, since it wouldn't really be possible to do Winnie the Pooh without them. The in-house Ideas wouldn't have the same benefit of a more powerful third party wanting to be appeased. Alternatively, it might be the case that Lego anticipate selling more of the licensed Ideas than the in-house ones (whether or not that's correct). I know the Pirates of Barracuda Bay was a good seller, but would Lego not have already committed a budget to the Blacksmith by that point? Not sure of the lead time on designing new sets. The third possible explanation - and I don't know how Lego budgeting works, specifically, so I might be way off-piste here - is that the Ideas budget for the year is to be spread around every Ideas set, rather than having a budget per set. If there's only so much money for all of their Ideas combined to have new moulds, I can definitely see Lego figuring that it was more important to get moulds for characters integral to one of the properties (they couldn't exactly leave out Winnie in a Winnie the Pooh set, for instance) rather than as an addition to a set that doesn't strictly speaking need new moulds. It would have been nice to have goats and such, but the Blacksmith doesn't fail without them, so they'd be lower down the priorities for spending the budget.

I must admit, I'm surprised at the absence of Kanga/Roo. That said, I had no plans on getting the set until I saw the design - which is wonderful, even without considering the minifigures at all. Now I've seen the set, it's shot up to "strongly considering buying" for me, so it's a good job Kanga and Roo are missing - if they'd been included too, I'd probably have been wanting to buy the set Day One, and I can't really afford that at the moment! As it is, I can wait a few months until I've got more money free for spending and fewer sets I want more urgently, and save myself the horror of a gaping hole in my next bank statement from buying too many bricks. Fingers crossed for something in one of the CMFs or Vidiyo sets, or even the City sets, that can be used to make the missing characters.

A page or so back someone linked some information about the 3-in-1 including that the main build is similar to the Black Falcons fortress. I think we've just assumed that means the Black Falcons are coming again.

Fair enough, I didn't even realise Smyths had enough shops to be worth giving them exclusives!