Alexandrina

Gringotts, but it's only the minecart ride with the waterfall that washes away enchantments, including over five hundred trans-light-blue studs to represent the water - which have to be manually picked up and put back in place every time the play function is used. I think that would satisfy the "lower your expectations" criteria while still giving us Gringotts!

Stud.io lets you do this too, apparently, as I found out after spending two hours seeking out and counting exactly the right bricks for a film set I'd designed, only to find that the count was wrong since two of the parts were embedded in one another. I'm not sure that's intended function, though!

I'm surprised there's no free-to-air channels. There's probably still a big chunk of UK kids who can't watch it anywhere. That's one thing - and not something I'm opposed to, in kids' TV or otherwise. If that's what the other poster meant by major story events, then I'll retract what I said, because it's not an issue. I was under the impression that it was a long-form narrative á la Game of Thrones (though obviously for a different audience) where each episode is the continuation of a larger story.

Nice as that would be, I can't see Parvati turning up in a Hog's Head set. She's not integral to the scene, nor is she one of the main characters who will recur over and over again, and there are lots of characters in that scene who we've never had - and who might not have a better chance. Parvati, imo, would be better served in a Divination Classroom set with Lavender.

I never realised the DA meeting was in the Hog's Head. In that case, I'm all for it to get a standalone set - that's another chance at an Ernie Macmillan or Michael Corner minifigure

Agreed. What's left undone of Hogsmeade would really just end up being Winter Village with Fleshie Figs

An uncommon opinion, it seems, but one I actually share. Aside from the Three Broomsticks, everything in Hogsmeade seems like an afterthought in the films. In the books, especially after Prisoner of Azkaban, it's often a vessel for boring but necessary story movements that JK can dress up with a new location (the café where Harry and Cho go is springing to mind here). Given that the Shrieking Shack is separate enough both in geography and scenes taking place there that it will almost certainly be a separate set no matter how many times Lego run through Harry Potter, and the most we really see of elsewhere in Hogsmeade is a tiny glance at some shopfronts and about ten seconds inside Honeydukes, a Hogsmeade set is basically the Three Broomsticks and Friends.

I suspect we were on the same page but moving past each other with our wording! I completely agree: it's an underestimation somewhere in the supply chain that's leading to there not being the stock that demand dictates. I'm sure Lego will get around to fixing it eventually.

But the issue of whether Castle should be backed by a media tie-in or not is separate, and Ninjago is being referenced here simply as a comparison. There's a good chance a Castle theme - whether with a TV series or not - does worse than Ninjago in the first year or so it's out, but that doesn't mean a Castle theme would do worse than a new theme. Ninjago has a decade's worth of brand recognition to go by, so of course it's going to be more popular than a new theme. Out of interest, where is Ninjago aired? I've not gone looking for it, but I've also never seen it on any channel listings. To be honest, that's even worse. It's bad enough that you have to make the time investment of watching a cartoon to fully appreciate the Ninjago sets (note I say fully appreciate, I'm aware that you can enjoy them well enough without watching the cartoon). To then turn around and say that the time investment you've made is basically worthless because what you've seen will have no consequences later on in the series is essentially to admit that it's an exercise in marketing. If your programme is having major story events - which isn't necessary, especially for kids' TV - those events need to have some repercussions, otherwise what's the point? Why should the audience care? Let's briefly transfer the hypothetical to a new, non-Lego TV series with the same audience as Ninjago - aimed primarily at older kids but with something for the adults too. Imagine there's a main-adjacent character - an agéd mentor, perhaps, or the woman who runs the local dive bar that the protagonists frequent - who you really like. Every time they're in a scene you're interested, even if they're not the hero, because they're well-written. And then, let's say in the Season Three finale, there's a major story event. This character you like dies. It's heartbreaking. Except it's not, because you know the series has no long-term consequences. You know that within two years not only will your favourite character's death no longer have repercussions; it won't even be referenced. There will be no acknowledgement that the character even existed. But I'm straying way off topic here, and to be honest probably projecting my own expectations of narrative television onto a series that's not aimed my way, so I'm going to try and hit the brakes on Ninjago talk now.

But do kids, when they're actually in a shop, want the cool looking set with specific characters they don't know because they don't watch the cartoon or the cool looking set with useful army builders? To take it one further, what do kids do when all the themes are based on TV series, but the series have been running long enough that most of the associated sets have been discontinued? The Ninjago TV series has been running for a decade now, and while I don't doubt that it's an outlier in terms of length, Lego aren't going to set out to make a new theme explicitly hoping it gets cut short. There are kids now who are ten years old - almost ready to leave primary school, not far off entering their Dark Ages or going off Lego altogether, who weren't alive for the beginning of the series. There are kids just getting into Lego who have about nine seasons worth of Lego Ninjago content that no longer has associated sets on the shelves. The percentage is only going to increase as long as the series is running, unless Lego extend the shelf life of sets in general or resurrect old sets. Compare that to a theme like Castle, not backed by a TV series. I'm going to use the 1990s subthemes as an example, purely because that was a pretty much unbroken streak of Castle sets. A kid who's born in 1995, either an only child or an eldest child, will start getting into Lego in a big way in around 2000. They've got the Knights Kingdom sets on the shelves, possibly the lingering remnants of latter-day Ninja/Fright Knights. They might also have one or two older sets bought as gifts when they were younger, likely tiny sets if they've only been casually into Lego before. And that's enough. They're not tuning into a cartoon that starts with the adventurers of the Crusaders, Black Knights and Forestmen of 1990, so they're not disappointed to be missing out on those sets. They'll still get into Castle. How many kids are unable to get into Ninjago because what they're watching on TV no longer fully correlates with what's on the shelves? I bet it's at least a few.

This is surely done automatically, or at least flagged. Nobody at Lego or elsewhere can be reasonably expected to keep an eye on the stock levels and rate of sale of every part in production, but can you imagine if a little kid spent all her pocket money on the blacksmith set, found out her box didn't have the horse in it, and then Lego couldn't even send her a replacement for ages because they'd sold them all to the AFOLs online. And Lego can't have been expecting it to be such a huge seller (for some reason) or they'd have produced far more from the get-go - so it's not like somebody would have been watching the stock levels go down, anticipating the need to pull the trigger and shut down sales.

Dark red for the bloodstains or a new colour?

Gotta say, the blockiness is a cute factor that the modern sets don't have, it's like a hybrid of classic Space and the very early (1999-2001) Star Wars sets. Those janky minifigures remind me of the really early brickfilms and webcomics from the days when Star Wars sets didn't exist, and the days when 90% of the characters hadn't been made in minifigure form - so in a strange way these designs aping an aesthetic from more than a decade before I was born take me back to my childhood. I'd love to see more if you ever do any!

Chamber of Secrets set for me, for two reasons. 1) I want to see what that Justin fig looks like 2) I want to know how many BURPs, LURPs and MURPs go into the rocky base (I'm hoping a great many!)

I really don't think the matter is as cut and dry as all that. I may be forgetting something, but I'm not aware of a post-Lego Movie original theme not backed up by a cartoon/tie-in. If there is one, please correct me. (Obviously I'm excluding themes such as Basic, Creator, Architecture, since they're not really relevant to the issue at hand). It could well be the case that Lego have stuck to cartoon-backed themes because their market research suggests other themes won't sell. The truth is, though, that unless and until there have been a few themes in succession to come out without any media tie-in and fail it's simply not possible to say definitively that themes without cartoons will not sell well. (I say a couple because themes fail for a multitude of reasons, so one theme not doing well won't be evidence that themes need a cartoon - it could have been that the sets were lacklustre, that they got the wrong target audience, anything. Several themes would indicate a common issue, though). Now, if you don't believe it would succeed, that's fair enough; if you think a series would be weaker without having a cartoon, also fair enough. I'm just not sure it's fair to tout something as fact when (as far as I know) there is literally no solid evidence to take it beyond supposition.

I think Lola Bunny is likely to be included purely because as others have pointed out there are very few notable female Looney Tunes. While the first half dozen or so are locked in, by the time you're getting to the tenth slot, eleventh slot, etc. you're on characters that aren't hugely more iconic than Lola (and apropos of nothing, Lola was one of the cast of the Baby Looney Tunes, almost certainly for the sake of having a female character but precedent that she is the female Looney Tune when they need to pick one). Unfortunately that would mean that somebody gets left out. I suspect Lego will include characters like Tweety as 'accessories' with another figure, both to maintain scale and to cheat their way into another slot. And at the end of the day, of Lego needed sixteen slots to do all the characters they felt were necessary, they would have done sixteen slots. If they're doing twelve, it's because that's all they think they need.

How could that siren possibly be evil? She looks so friendly! By the looks of her, she's got a bit of the Wolves of Fenric about her. I do like the way her hair seems to be billowing in the water - it's a nice touch.

The speed at which it seems to be disappearing from stock must be showing Lego that there's demand for this particular torso. I'd hope it's not going to be a one-shot confined to an expensive set, but will be used in Castle-esque sets for the next few years.

That seems to have come a bit out of left-field. Thematically it doesn't fit any existing themes - it reminds me of what the old Time Cruisers might have evolved into, but even that's tenuous - so Creator is probably the right place for it. Espeically if that's the heading Brickset has it under. Possible backdoor pilot for a new steampunk theme?

That's a good point. If there was a castle on the shelves alongside the Hogwarts sets, some people would buy them both (I suspect a large chunk of that demographic also likes to chime in on EB from time to time!) but some people would only buy one - thus splitting each set's market. If Lego wait until the end of Harry Potter and bring out a castle, they'll get all the sales from people who bought Hogwarts when it was the most castle-ey set around and now want the real thing - and also from people who bought all the Harry Potter sets and now want bricks to expand their own Hogwarts. So perhaps there'll be a medieval theme in 2022 or 2023. On another note, unless I've missed something there's been no news on the summer 3-in-1 castle set for a while. I was still coming out of my Dark Ages a twelvemonth ago: does anyone remember when concrete details on the 3-in-1 pirate set began to surface last year?

I don't know if it's just me, but your images aren't displaying.

This is exactly what I have always argued should be the case for a Castle theme. Named characters work for some themes, but imo not for Castle.

There was a highly popular film series ongoing at the same time as Interstellar was coming out, the third film released in 2016. Now maybe the box office wasn't as high as Star Wars, Marvel etc. pull in but it's nothing to be sniffed at, and put Star Trek very much back in the mainstream. (For reference, Star Trek Into Darkness grossed similar to the first Thor film, so while Star Trek's film franchise didn't go on to greater things it wasn't some niche indie release). As for the relevance of Star Wars, I think you underestimate how much kids love the sequels, cartoons, etc. I don't want to make assumptions about you personally, but a lot of adults dislike the sequels - and assume everybody does - for reasons which don't matter to a kid. A youngster doesn't care if Rey got her powers too suddenly, or if Holdo's Star Destroyer manoeuvre stretches plausibility. To them its just cool. And if kids are getting into Star Wars to begin with through Lego, does it make a difference? I personally first watched Star Wars because a friend recommended I play Lego Star Wars II and I loved the game. When I watched the films, I loved them too. Lego came first, but the Star Wars films influenced my own preconceptions of sci-fi aesthetics (to the point that in early drafts of my abortive sci-fi novel I essentially copied a Star Wars universe that just didn't have the Force).

This is true, but usually doesn't happen in a generic Castle theme (stuff like Pirates seems to be different, as the pirate crew in each mini wave is set in stone). Take the last two Castle themes. The 2013-14 range had named/identifiable characters in only two sets, and it was different ones each time. Most sets were only the two bands of Knight. Kingdoms before that was slightly worse, in that the King appeared three times - but only once a year, and every other identifiable character appeared once. Most of the minifigures were knights of one faction or the other. Can you imagine a Harry Potter wave where Harry only appeared once per year and no other character was in more than one set in the whole theme? Yes, you can sell the figs. But for something like Castle, I would rather get more knights and unique individuals, instead of characters that I either sell or keep as a duplicate.

For those clockwatchers out there, it's ten past one in the morning, Czechia time. Not a peep from KA1. It looks as though no leaks will be forthcoming today (or yesterday, I suppose, for a good chunk of the globe...) Someone get Judy Collins on the phone. Tell her the clowns are in this thread!