icm

Well, yeah, maybe, with some changes. Mandalorian armor is on the low-tech, medieval-expy end of the sci-fi armor scale, compared to, say, Iron Man's nanotech suit. But that's just as much my choice as it is your choice to accept the Nightmare King from Dreamzzz into your Castle setting as a bounty hunter. Not that anyone had actually said anything about accepting Boba Fett into their Castle setting and not accepting the Nightmare King. But you do you, Imposter RiddlerDC Turtle. You do you.

That's a good take on it. Personally, ever since I was a kid I've also had a hard time finding other uses for minifigs with sci-fi armor patterns, etc., as in most action themes, but it's not like I'm very interested in collecting all the different variants of Star Wars or Marvel armor either. So that has more to do with the sci-fi armor aesthetic than with licensed or in-house IP status.

Since I've mentioned Journey to the West and Don Quixote in the same post before, I think it would be pretty funny if Monkie Kid was replaced by a present-day-fantasy mechs-and-creatures theme inspired by Cervantes. Call it, I dunno, "Quixxie Quest"? HEY! Dulcinea is trapped on top of a wind turbine! Build the suit of power armor and the mechanical war horse! Put Quixxie Don inside and charge the power plant! The new Quixxie Quest collection from Lego! Edit - I know that's nothing like the windmill scene in the actual Quixote, but Don Quixote charging at windmills is a cultural meme beyond the actual scene in the book.

Arkham Aslume is notorious for its frequent escapes.

That's a list of Lego YouTube channels. What is the purpose of listing them?

[citation needed] [highly unlikely] [wait and see]

That's not what the saying means. It means let people like the themes they like, whether licensed or unlicensed.

I'm not quite that harsh on it myself, but having built it a couple months ago I agree that it's not nearly the masterpiece the Galaxy Explorer is. It's much flatter than the original Renegade, and much more symmetrical, so I don't feel like it captures the key elements of the original nearly as well. The brick-built Blacktron logos as the little flyers on the wings is a cute idea, but it doesn't work very well either as the logo or as a little flyer for a minifig to use. The idea of a dropship with a big rover is fun, but it's not the same thing as a big container that contains a smaller rover. And the worst part, in my opinion, is the use of an overengineered clip system to join the modules. I understand the reasoning - it does seem to be more rigid and able to bear greater loads than Technic pins would be - but I just don't trust it to stand up to more than the lightest play over the short term. Clips are much more prone to fatigue failure than Technic pins, and a big unlicensed Lego spaceship at an attractive price point should be built to stand up to heavy play over a long term. Clips won't do that. They break all too quickly. I bought and built the new Renegade, the new City modular spaceship, and the old Space Police 2 Galactic Mediator all at about the same time a couple of months ago, and to my surprise the oldest ship (the Galactic Mediator) was still the best toy: surprisingly light, rigid, and swooshable for the size, but with solidly engineered play features and a roomy interior. The interior of the Galactic Mediator is barer than it needs to be, but I think for play that's better than the overly cramped interior of the City modular spaceship. That one is so stuffed with detail that there's hardly room to stand a minifig inside, which makes it hard to actually play with the interior detail.

I'd say they tarnish it, not ruin it. Neither affects the build of the main model. The hairpiece is easily replaced and you can leave the plaque off the model or buy a custom sticker. As unforced errors with the minifigs go, it's not as egregious as giving bikini Leia dual molded shorts. But yeah, those are annoying flaws that decrease the quality of what is otherwise an excellent set. To my eyes, the model looks so much better than the 2015 version. The curved base is especially a night and day difference.

No worries, no hard feelings! I'm sorry I got a little warm there too. I hope you know I really do respect you, like you, and value you as a member of the forum, even though there are some topics that we're consistently at loggerheads about :) In a way, the persistent licensed/unlicensed debate is the broadest version of the kinds of debates we see in all the other forums. In the Star Wars forum it's all about how there are too many clone sets and not enough OT-adjacent this year and the past couple of years, after several years where there were too many OT-adjacent (and OT-derived, as in ST) sets and not enough clone sets. In the DC Super Heroes forum there's too much Batman, not enough Superman and Justice League. In other forums it's been about how there's too many castles and Western sets in BDP, and of those castle sets too many Lion Knights and not enough other factions, and so on. In every case, too much of this, not enough of that / not enough of this, too much of that. And so the pendulum swings to try to address every niche interest in turn, as there's not enough capacity to address them all at once. I must admit, it has been pretty rough seeing alt-brick brands pick up the old stalwart classic themes and run with them, when the resulting products still don't interest me and the reaction pushes Lego in directions I don't like. I hope we can get genuine Lego playthemes of the old classics soon, as big BDP and Icons sets every few years don't really fill the same role. In the meantime, I'm hoping the Horse Knight Castle is good!

Got it. Sorry for misunderstanding you, that's my fault. Shake hands?

Two things. One: This is a counterfactual scenario. I generally don't believe it's worthwhile to engage deeply with counterfactual scenarios, because there are too many variables. I prefer to engage with things as they are. But, briefly, I imagine I would behave pretty much as I do now with respect to several intellectual properties and entire genres of build that I wish Lego would do, but they don't (Thunderbirds, Tintin, many kinds of real-world aircraft, and others). I'd be a little disappointed, but I wouldn't waste a lot of time thinking about it. I certainly wouldn't light up the forums saying that theme X has run its course and deserves to be canceled to make room for what I would rather have. But I'll take your word for it about what you would be doing. Two: I'm not going to take it personally, since this is an anonymous internet forum, but I believe you just called me an a-hole, someone who profanely cusses people out, a TLG cheerleader, and a monster. Let's not do personal insults. If you're going to do that, I'm checking out of this conversation.

Meanwhile, status-quo haters can't let a single reply stand without invoking everything they can think of to argue that nobody has the right to think there's some pretty fun stuff right now. Seriously, when have I ever attacked Western, Space, Castle, or Pirates as much as you attack Star Wars? Your arguments against Star Wars can almost always be summarized as "it's so boring, repetitive, and old that I can't understand why anybody can possibly like it - and by the way, I hate the movies. Therefore we should cancel the theme, effective yesterday." Seems to me like you're the one who most consistently says the theme that you don't like should be canceled, so nobody can have it. I'm all for everybody enjoying the things they like. I wish we had more Western, Space, Castle, and Pirates. I don't go around gloating that we don't have much of them anymore, the way you would gloat if Star Wars was canceled. Obviously, this is tangentially related to Lego, or we wouldn't be talking about it. But sure, let's stop.

Hey, we've had five years of a theme inspired by Journey to the West. That came out about twenty years before the Quixote. Don't tell me Quixote is too old to talk about in a conversation about Lego.

Is it a very modern thing? Don Quixote, Part I is basically a thousand pages of "stupid comic-book fan does stupid things and makes a fool of himself." Don Quixote is so full of references to the popular culture of the time (the chivalric romances that Alonso Quijana reads so much of) that only the broad slapstick humor is comprehensible today without a long list of footnotes to explain this reference and that reference. And the applause breaks you're talking about ... those are called "beats." A "beat" is a brief pause for effect, and it's an important tool in all writing. I'm 100% sure that actors in the Globe Theate in the seventeenth century took applause breaks after delivering a line that skewers something relevant to the time, or something relevant to previous plays by Shakespeare or Jonson or what have you.

How are cultural references completely irrelevant to the topic of Lego themes? That line makes no sense. You clearly haven't paid much attention to how many times Dracula, Ben-Hur, The Maltese Falcon, and other works were remade in the early film era - nor to how many unauthorized sequels used to be made to famous literary works. Ever heard of Edison's Conquest of Mars? That's a famous unauthorized "legacy" sequel to The War of the Worlds. Heck, this goes back even farther. The only reason Miguel Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, Part II is because some copycat had already written an unauthorized sequel that was selling like hotcakes in seventeenth-century Spain. Remakes and grotesquely disrespectful sequels have been a thing for centuries. Yes, these threads always are. They get very tiresome because they're always exactly the same.

Bingo.

That's the case across the board, including with Icons and BDP castles.

Most people admitted the prequel trilogy sucked too ...

In the USA, Cobi is quite a bit more expensive than Lego, per part and per gram. The recent Pokemon and GI Joe sets by Mega have also been just about as expensive as Lego. There isn't really much of a price difference between Lego and Mega anymore. Funwhole has been cheaper, but that's about to change, and it might have been subsidized anyway (to put on a tiny tinfoil hat that I don't really believe in). Cobi $$$ > Lego and Mega $$ > Funwhole and Pantasy $

Ah, but those X-wings aren't yellow or blue prequel spaceships, are they? ;)

With regard to yellow or blue prequel spaceships from Star Wars, isn't that a bit of a No True Scotsman argument? I don't like those designs, therefore I think they're repetitive. The point is that when you look at Star Wars designs outside the Original Trilogy that are variations on a theme, and you take them on their own terms, you can recognize quite a bit of difference between them. Going in the opposite direction and considering unlicensed sets, when I was a kid browsing Brickset I actually used to find a lot of the old pre-1999 Space, Castle, and Pirates sets (and a lot of the newer sets in those themes, actually) quite repetitive and boring. It's only as an adult that I've learned to appreciate a lot of the old Space, Castle, and Pirates sets on their own terms. With modern sets, I'm a spaceship and airplane guy and I'm not very interested in mechs, characters, or creatures (big articulated figures in general). I can quite happily go on and on about the creative and interesting differences between various spaceship and airplane sets, while I find mechs, characters, and creatures very dull and repetitive. However, someone with different tastes would say quite the opposite, and when I consider the mech-like builds in various themes on their own terms, I can recognize a lot of variation and innovation between different builds. With regard to unlicensed themes being too weird, I mostly agree with that. When everything in a theme is a zany mashup, nothing stands out and it all feels very similar, despite being very different. I prefer orderly "low-entropy" original themes to disorderly "high-entropy" original themes. When free-playing with Lego sets, it's easier to mash up different items from orderly themes into a disorderly, zany play pattern in the natural, organic process of play (chase your City car with your T-rex, then chase your T-rex with your X-wing) than it is to make things in an already zany set a little less wild. For example, Mr Oz's Space Car has an alt build on Rebrickable that separates out the Car from the Space parts and uses the Space parts to build a pretty decent Mars Perseverance Rover, but it takes some effort to do that. The builds from short-lived disorderly themes like Dreamzzz and Nexo Knights often feel coarse and unrefined, because there are few constraints that lead designers to elegant solutions. I do hope Lego can get its mojo back with evergreen in-house Castle, Pirates, and Wild West, but as I've said before in this thread, there's some pretty stiff competition there. That reminds me - I need to stock up on alt-brand Castle and Pirates before tariffs wreck everything, if it's not already too late!

I don't really have the expertise or knowledge to say much about the creative freedom of the theme lead or whoever it is that picks the design briefs and sets the budgets, but here's my thoughts on that: Long-running licensed themes with plenty of fresh new content and a deep back catalog of source material have a lot of freedom to pick and choose what to include in the makeup of each release wave or of each year's set lineup. We see this in the arguments over what to include in each year of the Star Wars theme. Material featured in new media is either entirely new (the Skeleton Crew ship) or a remake after an increasingly long remake interval (the Ahsoka shuttle, the Ghost), and material from the back catalog can feature very deep cuts (the Coruscant Guard gunship, the rumored UT-AT). Moreover, as much as we like to complain about buildable droids, creatures, helmets, dioramas, etc., on the forums, those are new set ideas and new set categories that haven't been done before, even if we don't like the results and we wish there were more traditional playsets instead. To play devil's advocate here, I'd argue that the LSW design team is actually showing tremendous creativity in pushing out all these buildables and other non-standard set formats that we on the forums don't like very much. Long-running licensed themes with little to no new content and a shallow back catalog of source material have less freedom to shape new and unexpected set lineups each year. We see this in the Harry Potter remake cycle, where the high degree of commonality and continuity from film to film means there's not much that can be done with new set concepts. However, the designers there still generally do what they can. I'm particularly impressed with this year's iteration of the Flying Lesson. That is a nice castle tower that can be used in a lot of Castle settings outside Harry Potter. It may be more expensive than previous versions of the scene (the first Flying Lesson set was basically a polybag), but it's a creative concept with a clever design and a versatile application. Long-running licensed themes with a huge catalog of source material can basically do whatever they want to shape a release wave. Speed Champions can basically do any fast or sporty car ever made. Technic is an unusual case. Its history is unlicensed, but the licensed fraction has grown to be the majority of the theme, and lots of people complain about too many identical licensed cars and not enough construction machinery or mechanical innovation. I concede that the variety of models in the Technic theme in the past few years has fallen quite a bit since a golden age of ~2005-2017, but I've gone through the entire back catalog of Technic on Brickset and I can't see much difference between the variety of sets available today and the variety of sets available in any ~3-year window of the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s. Technic in that period had just as many repetitive small/medium cars and motorcycles as it does today, it's just that today's sets carry licenses that don't seem to affect the cost much. The mechanical complexity of today's "car transporter gang" (as RacingBrick calls them) is equal to or greater than the mechanical complexity of the small/medium cars and buggies of classic studded Technic, and there are about as many year-to-year changes in mechanical features and authenticity. Same goes for the motorcycles. Although we don't get as much construction machinery as we used to, the truth is that Technic's bread and butter has always been small, boring, repetitive little cars and buggies, especially if you count the Racers sets of the 2000s that were temporarily branded under a different theme before being brought back home to Technic after ~2013. We still get interesting small, medium, and large Technic sets that either have no license or have a license that either doesn't really impact the set itself (the Mack garbage truck, the Airbus helicopter) or actually elevates it (the Mars Perseverance rover). I refer to the small propeller plane from 2025, the cargo spaceship from 2024, the Sun-Earth-Moon orrery from 2024, the fire plane from 2023, the Perseverance rover from 2023, the Airbus helicopter from 2022, the wrecker truck from 2021. Those are as creative and mechanically interesting as any of the great Technic sets from the past.

I had ambitions of writing a big long novel of a post in this thread, but realistically I'm not going to be able to take time for that, so here are a few quick thoughts (ok, maybe this is a long post after all): Another distinction we need to keep in mind here is the creativity of the set designers vs the creativity of the theme lead or the bean counters who fix budgets and specify the design briefs. For instance, take the Hulk monster truck. On the one hand, that's not a very creative idea. Build a monster truck in Hulk colors and sell it for an outrageous price. However, that's not the set designer's fault. Set designers have to work to design briefs and budgets that are fixed for them beforehand, and they have to work within the constraints of the part stocking system and guidelines for sturdiness and durability. Within those constraints, they have very broad latitude to do what they want. So, given the brief of a Hulk monster truck, Adam Grabowski went ahead and had fun building a nice little monster truck. The creativity displayed there is in the technical execution, and as consumers without access to the details of the design process we don't see most of the creative decisions that go into that set design. Now, as for the design brief itself: was that a creative idea, or not? On the one hand, obviously not! On the other hand, isn't that kind of a fun, wacky, zany, creative idea that's more off-the-wall and out-there than something plucked straight from the MCU or the comics pages? This leads into my next point. There's creativity of concept, and creativity of technical execution. I concede that unlicensed themes have more creative freedom of concept, but I contend that licensed themes drive more creativity of technical execution. This is because licensed themes, and licensed sets in mixed licensed/unlicensed themes, and sets closely based on real-world inspirations though without formal licenses (e.g., Architecture and Botanical sets, the nice Creator 3-in-1 models of real-world animals like the tiger, the fox, the giraffe, the flamingo, and the panda), have canonical source material that they need to match, and it looks or feels wrong if they don't match. It takes much more technical creativity to design an 8w Speed Champions model of a Ferrari F40, or to design ten distinct 8w Speed Champions models of individual Formula 1 race cars, than it does to design a generic 8w sports car or a generic 8w Formula-style race car. Similarly, it takes a good deal of techncial creativity to take advantage of new parts, techniques, and building standards to design a new version of a Star Wars standard that is more detailed, more accurate, sturdier, or with better play features than the previous version, while still looking like the source material - or to design a new version that is smaller and less expensive without sacrificing too much detail, accuracy, or playabiliity. This is true across all scales and price points of licensed and quasi-licensed sets. Fidelity to the source material drives technical innovation and spurs creative building solutions. This is true even in unlicensed themes like City and Friends, as the level of detail and innovative technical solutions in those themes have been elevated by having to make their generic cars compete with the licensed cars from Speed Champions, and when the Speed Champions design lead moved to City. Creative building solutions from licensed themes are then picked up by unlicensed themes, elevating build quality across the board. The high standard of building we expect from official Lego sets today is a direct result of the proliferation of licensed and quasi-licensed products. Now, what about the creativity of the end user? As an extremely online AFOL with no kids, my best points of reference are Rebrickable and Flickr or Instagram. I see no difference in the creativity of alt builds for licensed sets and unlicensed sets. Virtually any set can be rebuilt into a form that is completely different from the model in the instructions, with no source pattern to follow; virtually any set can be rebuilt into a form that emulates a completely different source material than the model in the instructions. True, cars are best suited to rebuilding into other kinds of cars, and starfighters without wheels aren't very well suited to rebuilding into cars, but those are basic limitations of the available parts without regard to licensed status. It's a function of the versatility of the parts used in the primary build, not of licensed or unlicensed status. But I will venture to state that licensed sets are often more versatile for rebuilding into a wide variety of different things than unlicensed sets are. That's because licensed sets, to achieve a close resemblance to the source material, are often forced to use versatile parts in creative ways, whereas unlicensed sets can often use very specialized parts in very straightforward applications that don't lend themselves to reuse. The example I'm thinking of is quite old by now, but it illustrates a wide gap in versatility of parts in licensed vs unlicensed themes that were almost contemporary. Which set is more versatile for rebuilding into something completely different, the Insectoids 6907 Sonic Stinger from 1998, or the Star Wars 7141 Naboo Fighter from 1999? I know from experience that the 7141 is pretty versatile. I rebuilt it into a fighter jet, a light freighter spaceship, a dragster, a mech, a boat, etc. I can't imagine doing that with the 6907.

I bet the Christmas AT-AT will be made to look like Santa's sleigh somehow.