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Yeah, it's really a case-by-case judgment call whether a part designed for a licensed theme should be bespoke to the source material or a little abstracted for wider use. The Golden Snitch and sonic screwdriver are minifig accessories that benefit from the bespoke treatment, as are most character heads and sandwich boards, but sometimes I feel like bespoke animated character heads are too widely used. As a rule of thumb, I think it's better to start with a more abstracted design with wider application that can be produced without an IP lock, and then dial it in closer to the source material if necessary. The Golden Snitch accessory is a lot more fun and a lot better looking than the 1x1 round plate used before, so in that case the bespoke accessory is a good move. But I'm glad that lightsaber hilts, astromech heads and bodies, battle droid bodies and arms, Mjolnir hammers, Captain America shields, etc, were kept abstracted and in-system so that they could be used elsewhere, because all of those parts I just listed have been very useful in a lot of other themes. I'm gratified that @Wolfpack took the time to link not one but two statistical analyses of part specialization and lifespan over the decades, but I'm going to have to take some time to pore over the methodology before I take the conclusions at face value.

Besides, the typical thing has been that BDP sets increase their minifig counts between the time the selection is announced and the time the design is finalized for production. I'd be surprised if the Joust didn't end up with more minifigs than it has right now.

Series 10 finalists: Wild West Train Station Space Cafe Kiosk Castle Joust Firehouse Nothing that interests me, nothing I voted for. That's ok. My wanted list is already too long.

You know, Dreamzzz is the modern zany wacky mash-up theme like Time Cruisers. Early buzz about Dreamzzz was that maybe it would be like the second coming of Time Cruisers, before it was clear that it had its own identity. The main difference, for the purpose of this discussion, is that Time Cruisers didn't have a budget for new molds and Dreamzzz does, and Time Cruisers had a two-year run while Dreamzzz has had a four-year run. Speaking of Time Cruisers, what I'm going to say is anathema to you because of the license, but the BTTF Delorean in minifig scale is right there ... get yourself those wheels and go wild!

I think if we limit the topic to the broad statement that it's generally preferred when: New parts designed for licenses are not license-locked and get wide uses in other themes, and New parts designed for unlicensed themes also get wide uses in other themes Compared to the alternative where: New parts for licenses are license-locked and do not get wide use, and New parts for unlicensed themes get very narrow use. I think we can all agree on the broad statement that: We like new parts to be used as widely as reasonably possible, and Sometimes new parts are not widely used because of: License restrictions, or Overly detailed looks or out-of-system decorative items.

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?