Alexandrina

I really don't see how this is a necessity. Cavalry hunting Native Americans down? Absolutely wouldn't fly, and I'd hope Lego would be smart enough not to do something so tasteless. But cavalry versus marauding bandits? There's nothing stopping a Western theme aping the aesthetics of the Old West and the stock tropes of cowboy films such as Shane. Back to the Future III did it, as did Westworld (at least the two episodes I saw), and neither were filled with horrendous depictions of Native Americans or high degrees of violence beyond the pale of what Lego do. Cavalry/sheriff/cowboys against bandits is quite literally just your run-of-the-mill City police range transported 150 years into the past - very much in keeping with the precedent established by City (and Pirates, in their law-keeping soldiers versus unruly pirates theme). Castle, admittedly, is different - because generally speaking there's no universally accepted "bad guys" in the Castle context that don't lean into story archetypes, and so the various factions are generally a hodge-podge of different groups on a relatively even footing. It feels like Western - being only a two-year theme - doesn't have the same embedded place as a classic Lego theme, and thus doesn't get excused for the same things that Town and Pirates do, because there's not the same acceptance of it as a vintage theme. It's not dissimilar to how minor inconsistencies in the original Star Wars trilogy are handwaved away as nitpicky while errors of the same degree of egregiousness in the sequel trilogy are held up as examples of how bad a job Abrams/Johnson did.

That goes back to the question of who was asking for Lego to incorporate all the subthemes of Western together. Sometimes a girl just wants her updated Fort Legoredo!

Do you have a source for the police raid? Not that I don't believe you, but I've never heard of this myself and I'd love to read more on the topic if there's news articles or whatnot out there.

Anecdotally I think things are speeding up again slowly. Like many, I ordered bright and early on January 1st (for the Herbology book and the re-released Ship in a Bottle). These were In Warehouse by the end of the weekend, but didn't then ship for about three weeks (once they'd shipped, it was no slower than normal - the delay just seemed to be that processing period). Around the same time (actually I think the day after that order arrived) I had a notification that the Skull Sorceror's Dungeons - which I'd had on backorder since last November - was back in stock, and that they would send it shortly. That was in the warehouse for about two or three days before shipping, and again the actual shipping time was no slower than normal. That said, I've noticed that DPD's live tracking doesn't seem to be working any more. I last used it for Lego in the late summer, as I had an appointment elsewhere during part of my hour window and wanted to know when to send someone to guard the box for me. It worked fine then. On both of my 2021 deliveries, there's been no live tracking at all. I'm not sure if that's Lego changing their practices for setting up the order, DPD changing their practices for delivering, or me changing a setting somewhere and not realising. It's also the ultimate First World Problem, but still...

That's a good selection you've got there. I suspect you could come away with a bit of cash if you sold the sealed sets and bought used copies - course, that depends on whether you keep the boxes or only want the pieces within! As an aside, I always used to scoff internally at people with big backlogs of sets or who found sealed sets hidden away - "How did you not get this built? You must have put that somewhere deliberately to save it for later". And then a week ago I realised I have a backlog of about half a dozen sets myself, out of nowhere!

I suspect you've probably already found these by now, but the first one is this and the second one looks like this

Thanks for that video - it was an interesting watch. Still, I don't think he touched on why Lego should never do Western again. There was a lot about being respectful of what people are saying - which I 100% agree with - but nothing so much on what Western's failings were, or why those failings could never be corrected. In fact, he went straight from complimenting the sets (particularly the Native Americans sets) to saying that Lego should never touch Western again. There's also the fact that (as he says himself in the video) he was never especially sold on the sets to begin with, as well as letting his perceptions on the potential of the theme be coloured by the Lone Ranger releases - and at times he even seemed dismissive of the fact that Western might have a fanbase ("who was still asking for these sets?", he says, of the 2002 re-release).

That's no different from Town being under a single umbrella in the vote (which it was). Had Town been the winner, they probably wouldn't have made a hybrid set with police and fire and hospital and a pizza parlour and a marina and everything else that falls under the Town umbrella. They'd have picked one - maybe two - of those things, and the rest would have missed out. Not to mention, they had no trouble splitting Castle and Space into numerous subthemes for the vote. If Western was excluded entirely because of potential issues around Native Americans' portrayal, why wouldn't Lego simply have listed the Cowboys subtheme and not included the Native American subtheme? At the end of the day sensitivity towards Native Americans doesn't fully explain the complete omission of Western from the vote - and given Western would almost certainly rank comfortably in the Top 30 if every theme and subtheme from before 2005 was included, it's therefore fair to speculate as to why it was left out.

Why do they need to interact? They're in the same theme because they're both subsets of the Western genre. They use design cues from Old West history and Western films, and aesthetically are linked. They're also temporally linked and spatially linked - it doesn't make sense to release them under different umbrellas. I don't see that as any different to, say, police and fire existing in the Town/City theme, or the various stables and seaside sets from Paradisa belonging to the same umbrella. These groups don't have to interact - but let's not pretend people wouldn't wonder what was going on if Lego decided their fire sets needed to belong under a Fire banner rather than the City banner. That doesn't mean your fire fighters need to deal with a fire at the police station, or the riding club needs to take a daytrip to the beach.

The soldiers in Fort Legoredo are definitely being pitched up against Flatfoot Thomson and his bandit crew. In any case, potential issues aren't inherent to a Western theme even if they were present before, so that should not be a factor in precluding Western sets from ever making a return

That's also true of the 1990s Western theme though

If we're talking minifigures only, probably the 1700s variant (though I love the torso of the 1500s figure - where did that come from?) Lego have yet to release a proper 1800s-era British army torso - while the last figure in your image does bear some resemblance to the 1800s uniform, especially having the buttoned jacket, the classic redcoat torso is the closest to representing that era in Lego. I would absolutely adore a proper Waterloo-era redcoat torso, pretty much the classic redcoat with the jacket done up more tightly to show less of the undershirt, but for now the existing redcoat probably wins out

I'm late to the party, but I really enjoyed that. A minor point: the commanders of the two factions were voiced by either the same person or two people with similar voices (I couldn't tell). In some shots they're talking to one another, and both are in frame together, and it's hard to tell which one is the one speaking. The film may have benefitted from a bit of lip animation there.

I can't speak for anybody else, but I'm hankering for the aesthetics. I love the look of the old Western sets with their abundance of log palisades (and had a hankering for Fort Legoredo for nearly eighteen years before I was finally able to pick up a copy at a reasonable price last summer) and I desperately want an updated version which can fill in the gaps - a good steam train, saloon, female minifigures that fit the time period. It's the cowboys and bandits I'm after.

This is absolutely true. That said, there's plenty of ways to do a full Western theme without ever placing cowboys and natives together - Lego achieved this themselves in the 1990s. Western is never going to be an evergreen theme, or even likely part of the second tier of themes that run for a long time (the Pirates/Ninjago/Bionicle class). It's not even like Castle where it can be given a new life just by changing the insignia on the minifigures and designing new versions of all the sets. While the two-year run of the original Western is not enough to bleed the theme dry, imo, it's probably not something that could last longer than four years tops. The most likely length of a Western theme before they ran out of sets to do is three years - and then it would be time to retire it again for a spell. Lego could easily incorporate Native Americans into sets entirely separate from Cowboys (and have those sets be well-researched and respectful). If they didn't feel like they could do that justice, there's easily two years worth of Western sets without even touching on Native Americans. The alternative is essentially a moratorium on historical sets full stop. Any blanket reason that Western is off the cards regardless of the content of the sets could be applied to any period in history where atrocities were committed. In any case, I don't believe Lego are any more averse to bringing Western back than any other 1990s theme. I suspect it's more likely that they have something planned - whether that be the Ideas set or a revival of the theme - that they don't want to coincide with the 90th Anniversary set. We've seen through the Collectible Minifigures, as well as sets from licensed properties such as the Lone Ranger and certain Toy Story sets, that Lego have been willing within the last decade or so to make sets with the Western aesthetic. There was even a Wild West area in the Lego Movie, which I suspect wouldn't have happened if Lego had made an internal decision to disavow Western as a theme.

Very smart. I know if I was in your position I'd have just built without consideration for stability until it all fell over and broke into little bits, then lose all interest in rebuilding from the remnants!

That is an absolute titan. How sturdy is the tower? It looks like it would be swaying and leaning with the slightest touch - is there a sturdier structure underneath the veneer we can see?

I've come across this view a lot, but I don't see how that would be a deal-breaker as regards including Western in the poll. Aside from the fact that any stereotypes in the 1990s range aren't bound by law to be incorporated in a future reboot - regardless of past mistakes, there's nothing stopping Lego from one day producing sets with a thoughtful and accurate depiction of Native Americans - it's worth bearing in mind that at no point in Western's run did Native Americans interact with any of the other factions. There's overlap between the Cavalry and the Bandits, and the Bandits and the Cowboys, but the Native Americans are their own thing. I actually think Western could come back as a fully-fledged theme without hitting any real political pushback and without compromising the quality of the sets - if they kept focus on the cowboys-and-bandits tropes of classic Western movies like "Shane". Lego can easily come up with some named characters - throw a cowboy, a bandit, a sheriff and a cavalry soldier in polybags, then have sets such as a covered wagon, a saloon, a bank, a train, a frontier sodhouse, etc. In actual fact, I'm hoping it wasn't excluded because of the Ideas concept, but because Lego already have plans to bring it back as a fully-fledged theme for next year anyway. I need me some frontier women minifigures!

If an Elder Scrolls license guarantees me a Mjoll the Lioness hairpiece I'm 100% down for it

Not that I suspect a Harry Potter TV series will ever happen (or at the very least, nothing being discussed by executives in 2021 will reach the screen) but if it did I'd like to see it in the period shortly after the original series, and following certain supporting characters. We don't need to focus on Harry, Ron and Hermione - but I'm not averse to them being characters of a similar profile to Robin Arryn, never in more than an episode or two a year. In fact, I think a Hogwarts-set story would be perfect. That way the locations can be our anchor to the world (and Neville/Hannah can serve as the link to the characters people already know and love) but the principal players can be all new. And maybe they'll put Peeves in, so he can come in minifigure form again.

I don't see why Lando couldn't have been released with a yellow head - in fact, I suspect if Lego had gone down that route they'd have saved a bit of money, since based on the printing style they were going for at the time the old standard grin with pointy moustache face (3626bp03) would have done just nicely - I believe that particular print was still in the regular circulation in 2003. Lego had never felt the need to use colours other than yellow for the heads of human characters in non-licensed properties, even those who would presumably have been an ethnicity other than white (the Indians from the latter-day Western range, for example), and in more recent times they've managed to incorporate a variety of ethnicities into in-house sets without resorting to coloured heads. This is in keeping with their philosophy of yellow not being equal to white. Going back to Lando, the key things a minifigure of his Cloud City appearance are the moustache and the cape. I don't have a Lando minifigure in front of me to confirm, but I suspect that if you traded out the brown hands on the 2003 fig for yellow, and swapped the head for either 3626bp03 or another moustached print, you'd get a figure that is still recognisably Lando. It's only through our present day lens, from a world where Lego use reddish brown heads for black characters, that the idea of them using a yellow head seems strange.

That looks fantastic, and you can definitely see the progress you've made in the last five years. I'm especially sold on the palisade fence - I've been struggling with similar designs myself, trying to get it to look right, and I would never have thought to top it with cones. That's a technique I'll be filing under "stolen from smarter people than myself".

Knowing me, I've already commented several pages back and am about to repeat myself - but I'd like to see a proper run of Doctor Who sets (and not just a single Ideas release). Much of Doctor Who's iconic elements are characters and villains, rather than locations. This gives Lego a lot more freedom to build their sets - rather than trying to replicate the look of a location, they can tailor the backdrop to the play functions they want and put in some recognisable villains. Imagine a first wave with different Doctors/companions doing battle against different villains. You could have Tom Baker/Sarah-Jane in a set with Davros and some daleks, Jon Pertwee/Jo Grant with an auton and the Master, Patrick Troughton/Jamie/Victoria against Cybermen... Knowing Lego, they'd even be able to make a play-feature out of regeneration.

Looking at the results of the first stage, I find myself echoing other people's sentiments that Classic Space seems the most likely to ultimately win out. The idea of voting blocs in the final coalescing into Bionicle and non-Bionicle has been discussed before, so I won't retread that. Of the other two candidates, Classic Space was around about as long as the original Pirates, and Space themes in general are far more evergreen than Pirates. That's more years to build generations of fanbases (the archetypal Classic Space set was practically vintage when the first Pirates came about), and combined with the Barracuda Bay/Creator 3-in-1 sets last year being something of a bone to Pirates fans I reckon Space is bound to become the System Champion. I'd say I'm disappointed in Paradisa's elimination - but it was never a frontrunner so I've had time to come to terms with it. I'll be voting for Space in the final round.

Admittedly much of my knowledge of classic Castle subthemes comes from trawling through the Bricklink and Peeron databases to compile an unfeasibly long wishlist in my youth - but I've always been under the impression that the Lion Knights and the Crusaders were different subthemes, albeit with similar colour schemes.