jdubbs

Yes we've all got anecdotal evidence to support whatever narrative we're peddling. But rows and rows of peg-warmers are only a testament to Hasbro's horrid distribution and lopsided case assortments — and anyone who's been collecting action figures for more than five minutes can tell you they've hardly been unique to the sequel-era toys. (And again, Hasbro ≠ LEGO.) For every "The Star Wars merchandising sky is falling and it's all Disney's fault" story I see on JTA, etc., there is yet another quarterly report saying Hasbro's sales are through the roof, Star Wars is among LEGO's top-selling lines, etc. At the end of the day, I put more stock in what the companies making the toys say, than in the "well-documented" reporting of fan sites pushing a particular agenda. Right, LEGO is producing sets to support the media that is current/active right now, just as they were producing ST sets when those movies were current, and PT sets when those movies were current, and Clone Wars sets when that series was current. Saying "LEGO stopped selling ST sets because ST toys didn't sell" is no different (and no more true) than saying "LEGO stopped selling CW toys because CW toys didn't sell." Fact is, the sequel trilogy ended, and other things began, and so LEGO moved on. When The Mandalorian ends, or Bad Batch, or whatever, LEGO will move on again. That doesn't mean those products failed, or that they won't ever grace toy shelves again. We had 5+ years of near non-stop ST sets; it's only natural that LEGO would now hit pause for a while and give some love to other media.

Diamond Select makes statues, busts, and other pricey display pieces, all targeted squarely at adult collectors. While there is no doubt some small overlap with LEGO's target market (primarily, kids... secondarily, parents of kids... tertiarily, AFOLs), the two companies are by no means selling to the same customer as a whole. What sells for Diamond (or Hasbro, or Funko, or...) is not necessarily the same as what sells for LEGO.

I think if LEGO made a mistake here, it was in not being clearer up-front about what the they meant by the three choices being put to a vote. It would not have hurt to specify a general price range and set size for each option... e.g., "the Nebulon B, roughly in scale with this Star Destroyer, at around $500", "the TIE Bomber, roughly in scale with the UCS TIE Fighter, at $350", and "the Republic Gunship, roughly in scale with the UCS X-Wing, at $350". Or whatever. There was clearly a lot of speculation and confusion about what they meant by the Gunship in particular during the vote, which LEGO easily could have clarified at the time.

I think doing this kind of math is a losing battle. After all, mInifigs do not scale to human proportions at all (unless we're talking cavemen, perhaps) and LEGO frequently cheats the proportions of sets in one dimension but not others, as I think was the case with the gunship. When I look at the last LEGO gunship, it seems like the overall height and wingspan are closer to the source material than the length, for instance... so you might only need to elongate LEGO's version to get it closer to scale-accuracy... this wouldn't require 1.5x the total number of parts in the set, or anything close to it. (The same could be said of the First Order Troop Transport, which lots of people modded to be longer, keeping the rest of the build consistent with LEGO's.)

This still doesn't really support your argument. Yes, the 2014 AT-AT versus the TLJ walker jumped $40, but it also added 250 more pieces and a lot of bulk. The Star Destroyer jumped $30 and added about 100 pieces. If we extrapolate those to the last gunship — which was already pretty darn close to minifig scale, perhaps 15% under? — it might very well sell for $150 today, but it would also be a few hundred more pieces at that price... this is generally how LEGO has justified price inflation over the years. So if LEGO wanted to put out a deluxified, reasonably-close-to-minifig-scale gunship, they wouldn't need to do it under the UCS umbrella, or hold a poll to do it... they'd just do another mainline $150ish set with 6-7 figs, like they do every summer. At that price it would already be a noticeable upgrade from the last gunship, bringing it even closer to minifig scale, or upping the level of detail, or both. "Advanced building techniques" — I'm not even sure what that means, or how one would quantify it — would not then get you to $200... this ship, at minifig scale, and at that price point would require a substantial secondary build and waaaaaay more figs than LEGO has ever included in a ≤$200 Star Wars set (if we're putting so much emphasis on precedence here)... at which point you're just as likely to tick off the people who wanted a minifig-scale gunship, since they now have to pay 33% more for the privilege of having it. Are there people who expected a $200 minifig-scale gunship with dozens of clones? Certainly. Where they justified in expecting that, or feeling entitled to it? I would say, no. We all knew that an overscaled version with 2 dinky figs was just as likely (or moreso), given the scale of most of the other UCS sets, the advent of the MBS moniker, etc. Minifig-scale UCS is the exception, not the rule, and it seems to happen only when the stars (scale of source material, parts availability, price point, marketability, etc.) align just so. You can be disappointed this didn't work out the way you wanted, but no one should be surprised.

This would be a much more compelling argument if the price/identity of the 2020 AT-AT and 2021 (rumored) Arquitens had been known when LEGO's UCS poll was being voted on. They weren't. (It's also worth pointing out that most people here were pretty shocked to see the AT-AT priced at $160 when it finally was made public, so you can't even argue that that kind of price inflation was to be expected.)

You're not going to buy a set because it doesn't include a repacked minifig? That might be a first. Considering Pedro's sister is trans and Gina has publicly denigrated trans people, I kinda doubt that will happen here. 3...2...1... before mods say it's time to reign this all back in...

Technically, she has pupils. Really, really big pupils.

LEGO's production schedule was clearly impacted by COVID, but the 1H 2021 set numbers and price points were known before COVID-19 became a thing. Battle packs were never part of the 2021 lineup, as far as I can tell.

In 2019 there were three $200+ D2C sets. The ISD, Tantive, and the Droid Boost set. It is not common but it does happen.

Did you... erm... uhh... watch the first episode of Mando Season 2?

There are always catalogs sent out at some point, but in the 2-3 years prior to COVID, whatever was distributed at ToyFair included mostly generic white/gray/black boxes for the licensed summer sets... this is what happened last ToyFair, for instance, when a blurry box shot of the Greivous ship leaked... all the other Star Wars boxes in that catalog were generic except that one, for some reason. The 1H 2021 retailer catalog was the first time in a long time that prelim shots of most/all of the upcoming sets appeared in print.

The Instagrammers and sites like promobricks get their info on 2H waves second- or third-hand from retailers who see the sets at the EU and US ToyFairs. (There is also a price list that LEGO distributes more broadly around then, which is usually how the set numbers and prices —but not pictures — show up in small stores' websites, as happened last year with a South American bookstore... I forget which.) ToyFairs normally run January to February, but for 2021 they've been pushed until summer or outright cancelled. Since they could not show sets in person earlier this year, LEGO sent out preliminary print catalogs for the January-April waves... something they had stopped doing prior to COVID-19. One of these leaked in its entirety, which I'm sure everyone here saw. So, they may do the same for 2H 2021, or they may push it back later since the 1H 2021 prelim catalog leaked so badly, or... who knows. In any event, don't expect this year to work like last year. As with everything else, COVID disrupts the norm.

Last year there were some fake summer set lists in circulation around this time (Sith Star Destroyer, B-Wing, Exegol, etc.), but the actual summer wave didn't become public until February.

Not counting Sketches/Art/Mosaics and Brickheadz, 1H 2021 looks to be down 3-4 sets, versus 2020. You are correct that the identities of a few 2H 2020 sets were not known until shortly before their official announcement, mostly because they were retail store exclusives of some kind. But the existence of those sets (set number and price, generally) was known by this point last year, if not sooner. (By some people, anyway). At this point, there appear to be fewer of these sorts of sets coming next year.

Vader's Castle should have used the ANH print, if you consider it a Rogue One set... I don't know whether the VR depiction of him in the castle used the robes over the chest plate or not. And if you want to get really anal, that freebie Vader pod, since it was supposed to be the Tantive interior. In any event, I would not hold my breath for that torso to reappear, even if LEGO releases an ANH-specific set... any more than I would expect them to bother with new prints to get Imperial Officer rank insignias correct, or to print the backs of astromechs, or so on. Like it or not, LEGO's Star Wars line is contracting. When they see an opportunity to reuse, simplify, cut costs, etc., they're going to take it... look no further than the Mustfar Obi/Ani figs showing up in sets where they should not have. What is maddeningly contradictory is that they will randomly spend money making inconsequential changes to figs who, by any metric, don't need updating... like the Shuttle Pilot. Don't recall anyone asking for that, and yet it somehow got budgeted as a new print.

A-Wing vs. Vader's TIE. Inner robes print is screen-accurate to ANH, versus all the other Vader figs which are accurate to ESB/ROTJ/etc. https://brickset.com/minifigs/sw0744/darth-vader-(white-head-rebels)

Why did LEGO bother to create a Snowspeeder pilot torso/legs, only to revert to the Yavin pilot fig in every Hoth set of the last several years? Why did one (overpriced, underperforming) Rebels set get a proper ANH Vader torso, never to be seen again? LEGO pulls this cr@p all the time. Fans notice, sure. Kids, notsomuch.

I can count on one hand the number of Star Wars system set figs that have had printed arms. Would it have been nice if LEGO included the Vader with arm printing? Sure. But don't act like this is huge deviation from the norm... Beskar Mando and Vader are the exception, not the rule.

No. It comes out a month later.

The actress is 40. Assuming the character is 18 when we meet her mid-way through the Clone Wars, that would put her at around 47 when she shows up in The Mandalorian. When you consider that virtually every actor playing a high school sophomore on TV is well into their 20s or even 30s, it's hardly a stretch for Katee to be playing Bo on-screen. Let's also not forget that "Baby" Yoda is 50 years old... nothing to say that Mandalorians don't age a teensy bit slower than us Earth-bound humans.

This is not the only Mando set in 2021, so it's certainly possible Cobb will appear later in the year. That said, there are lots of major/desirable characters, vehicles and locations from season 1 that have yet to be released in LEGO form... Kuiil, the Client, Gideon, the Armorer, Flametrooper, ITT, Mando Forge, new TIE, etc... any of these could have easily been ready for the August 2020 or January 2021 waves. But LEGO opted to pass on them all (for now)... so I don't think it's a forgone conclusion that this one fig will ever see the light of day. It does not appear LEGO feels any great sense of urgency to support this show, not in the way they did with the theatrical releases.

Hahaha, touché. (I did say "generally", though.) ;)

I'm not saying Lucasfilm/Disney isn't secretive about certain plot points, characters, etc., to the point of saying "you can't release this until X date". Of course that happens; we saw it happen with The Child, and with stuff like Luke's appearance at the end of TFA, Kylo/Ben's appearance in the final battle of Exogol, Rey's yellow lightsaber, and so on. But that is entirely different from them saying "we're not going to let you do a Cobb figure, full stop." Or, "We're not going to let you put out prequel sets any more." Or, "You must release this many X-Wings and that many landspeeders each year." Which is what a lot of people here seem to think... it's just part of the same tired, false narrative that evil overlord Disney micromanages LEGO into all the bad decisions LEGO makes... The far more plausible explanation is that Cobb doesn't appear in the set because a) LEGO didn't know about him in time to do a new print for a Jan 2021 release, or b) LEGO is cheap and didn't want to budget a second new fig print in a $30 set, or c) LEGO felt the Tusken actually fit better in a set with two Tusken-specific builds, or d) LEGO just didn't see the appeal of a fig that seemingly appears in just one episode, and looks a whole lot like Boba/Mando/the 4 Mando figs released last year. Take your pick.

This is a very popular opinion on this forum that seems to pop up every month or two, like a bad penny. But there is virtually no evidence to support it... and plenty to refute it. LEGO designers have actually said the opposite -- that Lucasfilm suggested doing one thing, but then LEGO made the case for something else, which is what ended up being produced. And one need look no further than the wide diversity of products offered by different licensees to see that these partners have wide latitude to release the products that make sense for them and their customers.... the products Hasbro puts out are pretty different from those that Funko puts out, which are pretty different from those that LEGO puts out, and so on. Yes, Lucasfilm has strict rules for how the license can be handled (this is true of almost all IP licensors, whether Marvel or WB or HP or professional sports) to ensure brand integrity is preserved and certain aspects of the IP are consistent across all licensees (e.g., Luke generally cannot appear with young Anakin, because it breaks the timeline). But suggesting that LEGO didn't put out a Cobb minifig because Lucasfilm/Disney wouldn't let them is pure fantasy.