icm

Half a Death Star for $1000. Ned Leeds is dropping his $500 playset Death Star in surprise when he hears about this.

In these potato pictures it kinda looks like Han has a new hair piece. Does it look that way to anyone else?

That's a brand new sentence, especially when it comes to Lego sets.

In my opinion, the 2006 Arkham is the only bad one. The 2017 one looks great and has a really good police car. But then, you can tell I'm mostly interested in Arkham Asylum for the side build vehicles. The ambulances in the 2006 and 2013 models, the police car in the 2017 set, the panel van in the 2025 set. I want to just Bricklink the parts for each of them, but I haven't had time.

Now rumored for January, a Technic version of the SLS rocket at $60. I wonder what Technic function will be its selling point besides simply being able to remove the boosters and the upper stage. Rockets really aren't known for their moving parts. (High performance liquid propellant rocket engines can be very complex, but this isn't a model of a rocket engine with spinning turbopumps, etc.)

It does look pretty good. Nice solid character selection, a decent Modular-compatible building, and a nice vehicle side build. I hope I can Bricklink the panel van (it's a really neat white panel van), but I haven't found the time yet to Bricklink hardly any of the other interesting side-build vehicles from large sets (e.g. the truck from the Cullen house), so it'll be better if I can get it separately on eBay or at B&M.

Eh, wouldn't it be better to list those as owned on your Brickset account and then post a link to your collection? Saves space, is more visually interesting, information-rich, feature-rich than a plaintext list of set numbers. More fun for you too.

Happy to see the Spider-car is only $20 this time. I paid the full $25 RRP for the Miles/Morb-mobile but then with the other Spider-cars (Petey-car, Cop-car, Venom-car) I got them secondhand without the rest of the set for cheap. I might end up getting the whole set this time when it hits 20% off.

Edit - never mind.

The First Order AT-ST was pretty bad, but it's in a different size and price class for the purposes of this comparison.

To be precise, they made a large-scale Bat-Pod scaled to the large-scale Tumbler (it uses the same tires, as it should). The buildable figure is actually much too large for the Bat-Pod or the Tumbler, but the scale mismatch is acceptable for play purposes.

True, the new CTT makes even the Justifier look like a good deal. I didn't think anything could make the Justifier look like a good set at a good price, but here we are.

The set from Space Police 1 that I'd most like to see a remake of is the Spy-Trak 1 rover (6895). Imagine a Spy-Trak 1 remake and a Battrax remake (6941) playing cat-and-mouse or spy-vs-spy in the forbidding extraterrestrial terrain of the living room :)

75288 was $160 on release in 2020 but it was bumped to $170 in 2022.

Would the hype be crazy? This sounds to me like a classic case of "the grass is greener on the other side"-type thinking, or spinning castles in the air. It's easy to talk about a hypothetical scenario that would be so great and so exciting, but the reality usually is that when our dreams come true they're ... pretty mundane, or worse, they don't turn out like we want them to. Remember how quickly the hype for the Prequel Trilogy turned to hate when it didn't meet people's expectations! Ditto for the Sequel Trilogy! Chances are, any hypothetical rebooted Lego Star Wars theme after a two-year hiatus would start strong for a year or two (Lego seems to give new themes higher budgets in their first year or two), then quickly be more remakes and overpriced sets. You would wonder, why did they make this ship instead of that one, why did they price it this high instead of this much lower, what even is this other character or vehicle from new media that I haven't seen yet? When Pirates took six years off between 2009 and 2015 (or four years off between 2011 and 2015, if you count PotC), the hype was there for a new Pirates theme but the Lego community found the sets disappointing and they were more or less a flop. When Bionicle took five years off between 2010 and 2015 (with Hero Factory taking its place in between), the hype was strong for its return, but G2 Bionicle was a major flop and is not remembered fondly. Just taking time off between release years to build hype is far from a surefire move to bring back excitement for a fresh start to a newly sustainable theme.

Here's the secret: without inside sales data, it's ALL lazy takes to get tired of, including the one I was responding to. "I'd buy the heck out of theme Y, therefore if they replaced theme X with theme Y it would sell like gangbusters" is just as lazy of a take. And now we're back retreading the familiar SW-Space rivalry for the umpteenth time.

Unfortunately, the short shelf life of the Blacktron Renegade and the relegation of the Galaxy Explorer and the CS'24 sets to clearance aisles seems like a counterexample to that rosy picture.

I suppose it would have to be the V-19. It's the starfighter-size build that has the least flaws and best price overall, even though it doesn't dominate any category of comparison. The Ahsoka Eta-2 is heavily overpriced, the U-wing is great if you use one of the no-extra-parts rebuilds on Rebrickable but is very flawed according to the instructions in the box, the ARC-170 has bad proportions and dinky wing guns, and the Jango Fett Slave I is just kind of boring, in my opinion. So the V-19 is the only one in the starfighter playset class without major flaws, even though the price is a little higher than I'd like and there's no wing synchronization or landing gear. (The Slave I has no major flaws either, I just think it's boring. It's not a very swooshable shape even with the handle on the back, and I don't like the way the minifigs are stuffed in the cockpit, though I recognize there's no other way to fit them both in.) Honorable mention to the brick-built logo. While it's an 18+ display set with no playability whatsoever, it is incredibly well done, it looks great, and the price is decent.

That's the kind of unpopular opinion that is surprisingly popular (or surprisingly frequently repeated) in online spaces and never makes much sense. They should definitely think hard about what they actually want to do with the theme, but completely putting it on ice is a pretty bad idea. You acknowledge that it doesn't make business sense, so you know that. ... Yeah, LSW has been trending pretty steadily down. Too many 18+ display sets instead of affordable playsets, too many sets that are egregiously overpriced, too much careless lack of attention to detail. There are still a few really good sets every year, but the overall picture kinda sucks right now.

Wow! It's really incredible how much that simple change improves the set.

Might as well say why not just make a Muppets CMF instead? Or Disney? Or Looney Tunes? Most of the characters are animals themselves anyway. Like @MAB said, an unlicensed series of animal costumes is very different from a licensed series of IP characters, most of which are stylized or anthropomorphic animals.

Seeing AustrianBrickFan's speed build of the Force Burner snowspeeder, I do think that the new windscreen and the tweaks to the nose and the front tips of the wings really do go a long way towards making the ship look a lot more like an authentic T-47 than the older models, even though the basic wing build remains the same. The nose underside is still steep and tubby, so I hope they change those up for the next ESB snowspeeder.

A minifig scale version of Hagrid's motorcycle and sidecar sounds like a great set for $20. Finally, a direct remake of the old Sorting Hat set from 2001! I had that one, so I'll probably get this one. I wonder what scale the Ford will be this time, or what else it will come with, to justify that price point. The minifig-scale car on its own is worth $15, and the last two large sets it came with were the Whomping Willow and castle wall ($70 in 2018) and the Dursley House ($80 in 2020). So is it a big car this time (but still much smaller than any contemporary non-F1 Icons car), or is it part of a larger scene that the leaker doesn't know about yet?

I was responding to @Lion King's question.

For what it's worth, LKC is very different in its plan and features from any previous Lion Knights-associated castle in the eighties or nineties, and MTS is very different in the building choices and architecture than the Medieval Market Village it's usually compared to. Neither LKC nor MTS is a direct remake like the Galaxy Explorer, Blacktron Renegade, Blacktron Cruiser, Eldorado Fortress, Forest Hideout, or Majisto's Workshop.