icm

And just like that, we've circled back to the start of this iteration of this perennial discussion. Thank you everybody, let's wrap it up.

Actually, in the early sketch/concept phase of product development, Lego set designers are encouraged to cut, glue, paint, 3d print, use long-obsolete retired parts, etc, as they please, in ways that would make a purist moccer wince. I've heard that willingness to do that, instead of restricting yourself only to available molds, is a positive qualification for becoming a set designer. Obviously, by the time a set makes it to production it must be production-ready, by definition. But that's not true in the early stages of product development represented by the available pictures of Seatron and Europa. Those are some pretty early prototypes, as you can tell by the fact that Seatron was developed into Aquazone; the production version of Seatron was Aquazone and it didn't have a monorail. Seatron was a concept and at the concept stage it didn't have to follow all the production rules. So, a sketch model or a concept theme is just a MOC that can potentially be developed into a set, like an Ideas project with access to prototype parts. Ok, now we're finally getting somewhere. What you really object to, and consider less versatile than old-school Lego, is not the bulk of today's parts library, it's the practice of having special, unique molds for minifigure parts and minifigure accessories, when those are new parts (excluding minifig prints) are intended to be used in one or two sets or waves and are not intended to have much future use. You object to Darth Vader's helmet, Statler's head, Pythor's tail, and Logan's huge blue sword. You contrast these short-lived minifig parts and minifig accessories to the relatively long-lived minifig accessories of the eighties and nineties. (The late-nineties UFO, Insectoids, and Batlord helmets were just as short-lived as modern minifig helmets.) So, restated, what you object to is the proliferation of unique minifigs. That's fair. I'm not much of a minifig collector myself. I'm more interested in how to build a shape or a mechanism out of Lego than how to make a minifig satisfy my vision for it, and I pretty much skip past the minifig sections of new set reviews. But when you start out by making a broad claim about the specialization of Lego parts in general now and then, you can see how people like me can be confused about what you're actually trying to say. You yourself said that different cultural contexts are the versatility and usability you are talking about, not the compatibility of the part with different building applications. But I did misspeak, misstate, or misunderstand what you meant. You didn't mean that parts made with cultural context A in mind are better than parts made with cultural context B in mind, you meant that parts made with cultural contexts A, B, and C in mind are more versatile and usable than parts made with only cultural context A or only cultural context B in mind. As a corollary, if a part is made with only cultural context A in mind (ie a sword for Castle), it's better that it be made with cultural contexts A1, A2, and A3 in mind (applicability to several Castle subthemes) than only cultural context A1 (the particular Castle subtheme currently in development). And that's fair, I agree with you about that.

Not to mention that a Golden Snitch can be used as architectural detailing (nearly any small part can be used as architectural detailing), and anything at all (like a forestman's hat) is liable to show up as NPU in Botanicals sets or a fish tank. @Wolfpack, I'm glad that we agree on most things. However, I think that whether a prototype or concept theme was released or not has a lot of bearing on the "true/proven/released/verifiable/etc" versatility of a part as long as we're batting database links back and forth, with how many times a piece was used in how many themes or how many years or how many distinctive applications or what have you. An unreleased prototype, concept, or sketch theme is just a MOC by someone with access to prototype elements; its uses of parts are only potential but unrealized uses as far as the released portfolio goes, no different than the potential to put a FIFA World Cup piece in someone's MOC of a pub window or the hypothetical potential of Lego to put that piece in a later licensed FIFA stadium for minifigs. If your notion of the versatility and usability of a part just boils down to which cultural contexts you can use it in (old-school Castle, Space, and Pirates being more versatile and usable than modern Ninjago or Star Wars), as opposed to the potential for creatively using the part in a build in a variety of different contexts and applications than in its retail set appearances, then the whole argument reduces to "my cultural interest A is better somehow than your cultural interest B and therefore deserves more Lego products". That's not a very interesting or useful argument, however much any of us want evergreen revivals of those classic themes or however much we want new original themes. I'll have to spend some time thinking about those statistics plots you linked to. I'll probably have something to say about them, just not yet.

See my previous post about what could potentially make new monorail parts fundamentally more usable than the old ones. Yeah, the frame story didn't have enough legs for a continuing cinematic franchise. But the sets themselves were that fun mash-up of genres. More so for the first movie, less so for the second movie. I'm not intrinsically opposed to huge new specialized parts - I've said before how I appreciate Pirates hull bases and, sometimes, City airplane wings. The main idea I'm trying to express in this thread is that we shouldn't be kidding ourselves that old-school Lego was less reliant on big specialized parts than modern Lego. This argument has been rehashed so many times over the years (with every new wave of online AFOLs) that it's been partially banned in the past. Can I say the word, or will the censor block it? J-u-n-i-o-r-i-z-e-d! <insert that tiresome argument>! J-u-n-i-o-r-i-z-a-t-i-o-n! Juniorization! Wheee! I'd have to take a good look at the new maybe-monorail parts and see how they're used to get a good understanding of them. Edit: See <insert that tiresome argument&gt

@danth New Elementary could probably do a pretty good analysis about that (how new monorail track parts could be visibly more versatile or usable than old monorail track parts). These are the things I would look for in hoping that new monorail track would be more usable in other applications, or more affordable in its main application, than old monorail track: Relatively small, simple molds make it easier to reuse specialized parts elsewhere. The old monorail pieces are very large, heavy pieces of plastic, some of them composed of multiple elements joined together. The roller coaster pieces are much smaller and lighter, and some of them are as short as four studs long! Similarly, modern railroad track pieces are single plastic molds that are cheaper to produce than the old 9V track pieces. While there are various pros and cons to the different methods used to power Lego trains, the point here is that now Lego can include stretches of track in smaller, simpler push-train sets like the most recent playscale Hogwarts Express. Similarly, I'd expect new monorail track to be as cheap and simple as possible, for the sake of affordability, versatility and, let's be honest, corporate cost-cutting. Abundant connection points. The old monorail pieces have four sideways studs for connection on each end, but that was intended for joining monorail track parts to each other rather than joining them into larger builds. Since sideways building wasn't very common back in the day, that made the monorail pieces harder to work with than they would be today. Compare that to train track parts with their abundance of studs intended to make it easy to build in layouts and trackside structures. Roller coaster parts have two studs and antistuds for connection on each end, but those studs face up so they're easy to work with, and the entire length of the roller coaster rail uses a standard 3.18-mm bar that any clip can hold. There are also diagonal 3.18-mm cross-members in the longer roller coaster parts. An emphasis on making sure curves and dimensions are "in-system". New Elementary could do a better job describing that than I can, but with my very limited knowledge of old monorail track parts I don't get the sense that their curves were in-system.

Aka The Lego Movie (2014)? and to a lesser extent the sequel (2019)

True that. We'll have to wait and see how the new monorail parts are used. I've been quite impressed by how much the roller coaster parts have been used since they were introduced in 2017. What at first seemed like a family of extremely specialized parts with very limited use has been applied to a wide variety of contexts besides carts on rails, and the basic carts on rails have been used in a lot of things besides the two big Icons roller coasters.

Space, Space, and Town. The new monorail tracks look cool, let's hope we get them in some cool retail set instead of having them be exclusive to non-retail Education sets.

Ok, so now we're narrowing down what your complaints are about. You're mainly objecting to bespoke licensed minifig accessories, rather than the broader variety of parts in the modern parts catalog, and you're choosing not to highlight the many highly bespoke unlicensed minifig accessories in themes like Chima, Ninjago, or Dreamzzz. Yes, the FIFA trophy for minifigs is an extremely bespoke specialized part that wouldn't have been made in the old-school era. CCBS has been abandoned for eight years now, and for the past several years Lego action figures have been made out of basic Lego that unquestionably feels like Lego: bricks, plates, slopes, brackets, etc. This has been done in large-scale buildable figures that are comparable to medium-sized mech builds, and in small-scale character mechs. That's not to say that there were no such parts like the CCBS Darth Vader helmet in the old days. Remember Scala? Belville? The less said about My Dad/Christian With Gifts, the better .... Yes, the Golden Snitch minifig accessory is an extremely bespoke specialized part that wouldn't have been made in the old-school era. Monotrail track parts were only used in two themes. The prototype Seatron monorail is just that: a prototype that doesn't count as an actual use for this discussion. Your argument that they could also be useful for mines in Western, Jungle, etc, goes both ways: that is precisely what we are trying to say can be done with modern parts. So, you either accept that the monorail track parts were huge and virtually useless for anything besides Space monorails and they don't help your argument for old-school parts versatility being better than modern parts versatility, or you accept that modern parts are equally versatile in a wide variety of themes. As a kid in the main age range that Bionicle was intended for, I never had enough imagination or enough Bionicle parts to do much creative building with them, but many other kids did. There's a huge Bionicle moccing community out there doing truly astonishing things with parts that always struck me, when I was a kid, as being ridiculously specialized. It just takes a little bit of imagination to see the potential in an accessory as being something that other characters can use besides the named character that originated the accessory, or to see a core torso part as a platform for creative building, etc. Besides in that era Lego sets were using Bionicle parts wherever they could. I never thought it looked very good or worked very well to have a random Bionicle part on a building or on a race car, but some people did. Yes, Lego produces more part types overall than ever before. Therefore, it produces more specialized part types than ever before. As a proportion of the total parts library produced in a year, I'm not convinced that today's specialized parts are more prevalent than they were in the old-school era. If there used to be 1000 different parts and you could build anything, now there are six or ten thousand different parts and you can build anything even more than ever before. Do you not see how your arguments go both ways? You can build far more subjects in a far wider variety of applications with modern parts than you could in the old-school era. There are still plenty of generic heads and generic people. Not so many knights and spacemen, except on Pick A Brick. Europa was never released, so it doesn't count as an actual use for this discussion - only a potential use. The old, narrow range of minifig hairstyles was generic enough for anything within a narrow Eurocentric cultural context. The modern range of minifig hairstyles certainly can't match the actual range of hairstyles worn by everybody all over the world, but it at least gestures toward broader cultural representation. The saddles were used in Castle, Western, Paradisa, etc ... wherever there was a need for a horse with a saddle. That's an extremely specialized part used in an extremely specialized application that appears in a variety of cultural contexts, since many cultures around the world use and have used horses! But you never saw the saddle part being used for anything but a saddle for a horse! It's emphatically not a good example of having less specialized pieces in the old-school era than in the modern era. The same raised baseplate mold was used for themes as distinct as Space, Pirates, and Castle [edit: not Aquazone], but it required dramatically different prints to work for those contexts. There was no such thing as a basic, unprinted raised baseplate that didn't have a specialized theme suggested for the build by a print. Would you have been happy to use the raised baseplate from 6983 Ice Station Odyssey (Space, Ice Planet 2002, 1993) as the moccing base for a castle, or the raised baseplate from 6276 Eldorado Fortress (Pirates, 1989) as the moccing base for a space station? I would not have been happy about that if I had those as a kid. Also, the basic bricks, slopes, and plates used in the facsimile of a raised baseplate in the modern Icons remake of the Eldorado Fortress can immediately be used in a wide variety of things, because they're such basic, common parts! Some helmets, swords, and other minifig accessories made in the modern era are used for a variety of factions, themes, and subthemes and are still in use after what is now decades, others aren't. Exactly the same thing can be said about helmets, swords, and other minifig accessories from the old-school era. Any broad claim of systematically wider use, versatility, or longevity of old-school minifig headgear and accessories compared to modern minifig headgear and accessories should be supported by statistics. I don't have time to run a statistical analysis of this topic, do you?

Well, not impossible. Just takes a reduction in profit margins for this fabulously profitable private company to spin up some more production and marketing of slightly less viable themes. I wonder how many classic-revival or new-idea in-house themes could be financed by the R&D budget for the Smart Bricks if every in-house theme besides City didn't need to be a Big Bang with a TV show and a bunch of highly bespoke minifig molds?

That's a good way to put it. Yes, there's rough parity in set count, but not in set diversity. There are more licenses with only a few sets each than there are distinct in-house themes with only a few sets each. The lack of proper, unlicensed, continuous, classic themes is a crying shame, and there aren't a lot of small single-wave unlicensed themes in different subject areas to balance out the small single-wave licensed themes in different subject areas. But then again, this is at least partially due to the strategy of placing things within the budgets and labels of umbrella themes, rather than due to the contents in the box. If we separated things out from umbrella themes and gave them their own labels, we would have now or would have had recently the following additional unlicensed themes to accompany City, Creator, Friends, Ninjago, and Dreamzzz. That is to say, apart from the label on the box there's no reason not to think of these as continuing or single-wave in-house themes akin to the single-wave in-house themes of the 2000s and early 2010s. Remember, Botanicals used to be labeled under Icons before it got its own label. the many realistic animal sculptures from Creator 3-in-1 the cute buildable household items from Creator 3-in-1 City Space 2024-2025 Friends Space 2024 Technic Space 2024 Winter Village Modular Buildings City Exploration themes Of course, then we'd have to break out other licensed themes from their umbrellas: Icons-scale licensed vehicles Car Transporter Gang Lord of the Rings Zelda Other individual licenses City Formula 1 2025-2026 But we could break out at least one unlicensed theme from a licensed theme: Dinosaur Fossils (this seems to me to be pretty close to unlicensed in concept; they just stick it in the Jurassic World label because there's no reason not to So, I guess it would be pretty much a wash in terms of licensed:unlicensed theme ratios if we broke things out from their umbrellas. I'm just making the point, once more, that theme counting is inherently fuzzier than set counting.

From model year 2025 alone, we have the following in the Brickset database (link). I will use the following abbreviations: ML for minifig-scale and licensed; DL for non-minifig-scale (Display/Duplo/etc) and licensed; MU for minifig-scale and unlicensed; DU for minifig-scale and unlicensed. I'm ignoring magazine gifts and other tiny promotional items, and I'm counting each CMF series as a single set. I know BDP is a very different production and distribution model from most sets, but it's an ongoing program that's highly visible in AFOL spaces, so I'm counting it as a theme. If a set contains minifigs but the main build is a non-minifig-scale display item like a large car or a Disney dress, it counts as non-minifig-scale. I'll list these in the order ML, DL, MU, DU. Animal Crossing: 6xML Architecture: 3xDL Art: 3xDL, 1xDU Bluey: 4xML Books: not counted for this discussion Botanicals: 9xDU Brickheadz: 16xDL Bricklink Designer Program: 20xMU City: 6xML, 32xMU Classic: 6xDU Collectible Blind-Boxes: 1xML, 1xDL, 1xMU Creator: 2xMU, 26xDU DC Comics Super Heroes: 4xML, 1xDL Disney: 18xML, 7xDL Dreamzzz: 11xMU Duplo: 10xDL, 17xDU Education: not counted for this discussion Fortnite: 2xML, 2xDL Friends: 34xMU Gabby's Dollhouse: 2xML Gear: not counted for this discussion Harry Potter: 13xML, 6xDL Horizon: 1xML Icons: 7xML, 6xDL, 4xMU, 4xDU Ideas: 4xML, 2xDL, 2xMU, 6xDU Jurassic World: 5xML, 4xDL Marvel Super Heroes: 24xML, 4xDL Minecraft: 18xML, 1xDL Miscellaneous: 4xDU; 5x employee and inside tour sets I'm not counting Monkie Kid: 2xMU Nike: 3xDL Ninjago: 24xMU, 2xDU One Piece: 5xML Promotional: 1xML, 1xDL, 5xMU, 14xDU, a bunch of other little stuff I'm not counting Seasonal: 1xDL, 3xMU, 17xDU Sonic the Hedgehog: 5xML, 3xDL Speed Champions: 15xML, 1xDL Star Wars: 18xML, 15xDL Super Mario: 18xDL Technic: 16xDL, 5xDU Wednesday: 2xML, 1xDL Wicked: 4xML, 2xDL So, using this very simplistic ML/DL/MU/DU sorting I count: 165 ML 127 DL 140 MU 111 DU So that's 292 licensed vs 251 unlicensed, and 305 minifig-scale vs 238 non-minifig-scale. That's 16% more licensed sets than unlicensed sets, which is very noticeable but isn't at the point where licensed sets drastically outnumber unlicensed sets.

Your list is skewed because you're going from a short printed catalog that necessarily omits more than half of the sets produced in a particular year, and it can't be verified by anyone who doesn't have that specific print catalog in front of them. It's more useful to count sets from an online database than from a print catalog. It's an equally valid question or complaint why there are almost twice as many licensed sets as unlicensed sets in the particular piece of marketing that is the print catalog you're looking at, but it is a separate question.

It's that the notion of what counts is a theme is a lot fuzzier than it looks at first glance. Anyway, your list is internally inconsistent. You need to move Icons and Ideas to the hybrid category and you need to merge DC and Marvel Super Heroes because it's well known that they have a single budget and a single set of designers, so internally they are a single theme.. You also need to move Architecture and Art into the hybrid category. Of course, extending the hybrid category that way doesn't make the licensed vs unlicensed roster look any more balanced.

Yeah, the complaint is valid. No ongoing Space theme since 2013 (though the 2024 Space subtheme was amazing), no ongoing Castle theme since 2013 (though there have been some amazing one-offs and related sets), no ongoing Pirates theme since 1997 (just intermittent waves and one-offs), and non-Space sci-fi action-adventure themes being hobbled by the Big Bang development model and not running concurrently, or being folded into the Ninjago umbrella. All that is true. It's just the theme counting I was quibbling about, since the prevalence of umbrella themes, the tendency to feature similar kinds of content in several themes at once, and having several different themes take on the same IP in different ways means that the traditional concept of a theme as a distinct play world or a distinct license is less relevant than it used to be. Also the rejection of Friends as not a proper playtheme due to its use of a different style of minifig gets tiresome. If I had a nickel for every time this gets brought up I could probably reach a hefty GWP threshold.