Mylenium

Statistics currently speak a different language, unfortunately. The number of cases still rise even in Italy and they have been on lockdown for weeks now. Again, expecting anything to change before the end of May in the US is perhaps going to end up in disappointment IMO. Seeing what's going on with kids and their Spring Break attitude on TV even makes me fear you may see a lot worse. Don't take this the wrong way: I know how many US people struggle even under regular conditions, but you may need to prepare for some really tough shit to be thrown your way those next few months... Mylenium I'm sure you do just as well as I do. 19-year-olds dying of CF certainly isn't funny even if you only know them in passing from doctor's visits. Well, psychology. I keep forgetting the exact name, but there's this proven theory of people doing exactly the wrong thing in pressure situations even if they have the option to do the right thing. Same for panic buying and so on. and let's face it: Politics is a big part of it. Nobody wants to look bad and take responsibility in this type of situation. Mylenium

You can assume whatever you want, but perhaps you're simply missing a hint of irony. As I said I'm living through such shit for years, so forgive me when I'm having a laugh when people find out they can actually wash their hands more than once a day... That's all I'm saying. Mylenium

We won't. That's the whole point. Nobody can produce mass doses of vaccines overnight and inoculate millions of people. And forgive me, but even you are sounding naive on some level. We have no reliable numbers about Africa, certain Asian regions or for that matter Russia, Moldova and several other Eastern European countries. Even if we manage to quell the storm in the Western hemisphere, there's no way of telling how the virus will survive in these areas. I would even go so far as to make that same assessment for the shit show that is the US health system. It's simply scary that this virus could survive and proliferate an some backwoods communities in Tennessee for years. Any assumptions of quick victories are just plain irrational. Take it from someone with a serious lung condition who had to practice "social distancing" and all that for years... You ain't seen nothing yet! Battling resilient infectious diseases is not as simple as isolating people for a few months. On some level I'm even rubbing my hands and laughing like a mad man while watching all this go down... Mylenium Unlikely. Currently the US are still in the exponential growth phase. Things will get harder before they get better. I wouldn't estimate anything to get better before end of May in the US. Mylenium

Don't be naive and/or listen to Trumpian conspiracy nonsense. This thing is here to stay. It's not going to magically die off in any form. For the time being it's really about flattening the curve to not overburden health systems, but otherwise this thing is going to be with us for the next decade with outbreaks only getting potentially smaller with every cycle due to better treatment options. The next two years are going to be particularly hard with no vaccine or tested reliable antiviral agent being available. That is simply that. Mylenium

Whoa... Perhaps we need to start a building challenge where only those colors are actually allowed to bring their value to the attention of the public. Obviously I 1000 percent disagree with any such statements. Mylenium

Chrome is poisonous in certain forms and it's hyper sensitive to scratching and flaking. I'm pretty certain this raises a ton of red flags at LEGO these days with them trying to be all kids-friendly and environmentally responsible plus of course the potential annoyances of customers asking for replacements of their scratched parts. The best we can hope for may be an even shinier version than the glossy silver and gold stuff we have currently or some other such coating-based approach. Mylenium Begging your pardon?! Those colors you want to cull are important. Just look at Friends, Disney Princess, Trolls or even the latest Creator 3in1 Toy Store set. It all depends on your personal preferences and tastes. Mylenium

Check older color-related discussions like e.g. when Coral was introduced last year or the general color discussion. You will find that there's a lot of vying for Sand Red for instance due to its obvious uses for architectural stuff. Other than that it's the same old "Anything can happen" debate, but I would like to exclude things like Chrome completely from it to begin with. No point in obsessing about specialty items which we all know LEGO with a 99% likelihood will never produce again for technical and quality reasons, even it seems an obvious thing. Personally I have three (or four) top demands/ wishes: A decent plant green, because currently none of the existing colors actually qualifies as being representative of genuine plants. A curry-ish yellow with a slightly green tint that fits somewhere inbetween all the brown and tan tones. A genuine apricot. Given, that there's all those Bright Pink/ Dark Pink, Lavender/ Medium Lavender and so on combinations I'm quite surprised that in all these years it doesn't appear to have occured to anyone how this would nicely fit into these color sets used for Friends, Elves and so on... Perhaps bring back Maersk Blue (or a close match to it). It so nicely complements all existing blues and greys and as well matches with Sand Blue. Aside from that I would also like to see some colors simply being used and produced more. I find it just baffling how hard it is to e.g. hunt for elements in Bright Light Blue or why LEGO isn't using more Trans Medium Blue for ice and water when it would be a more adequate "cold" color for these things instead of the turqoise-ish Trans Light Blue. Mylenium

Well, presumably it's down to younger generations having the attention span of a mouse these days and the mere concept of a structured debate being foreign to most people to begin with. That and the fact that users expect everything to have an immediate answer these days. I get that a lot on forums where I'm helping out with technical issues for computer stuff. Everything that doesn't yield an answer in five minutes is taken as ignoring someone and if you tell them that they simply bought a shitty machine they're even more offended. Specifically to LEGO one has to face the facts - with the company pumping out so many sets, minifigures and whatnot there is little room for deep discussions without entering fan/ fanboy vs. more critical views territory. It's an inherent issue with a commercial hobby driven by a single, quasi-monopolistic vendor can only up being a wank contest of who does a review the fastest and gets the most views, even more so since there is a quadrizillion LEGO blogs, YouTube channels and so on. A forum in the traditional sense can only lose this game. Personally I value some longer exchanges even if they end up being heated debates and I have the bad habit of tuning out after a while when there's too much TL;DR or personal insults are thrown around, but I guess you can't blame the younglings for being defined by their social media usage and not coming here. It's no longer 1994, after all. I don't really agree with your statements on "conformism" and whatnot. That's ultimately the point: A blog is a blog and its comments are meant to be forgotten and forgettable. It's more that this (and social media and YouTube and, and, and...) have evolved/ devolved into universal opinion platforms and their commercialization gives the ma lot of pulling power. And also let me be clear: Most blogs (and forums and social media) are quite liberal in the sense that they adopt a laissez-faire attitude in terms of the underlying legalities or consciously chose to ignore them. That is until shit hits the fan and they get a cease & desist or whatever. If one were to really be pickish about bit, we'd all live in a moderator dictatorship. A few posts getting culled or locked every now and then to me is no indication of anything. Mylenium

I tend to agree. The longevity and sustainability is clearly a case of TBD, but these days even kids having smart phones that aren't supposed to have them under a certain age I can't see this making too much of an impression except for the youngest ones. Other than that aside from a few of the special pieces there's likely not much here to gain for adult LEGO aficionados. Mylenium

Why would he need to? It's most certainly a deprecated/ abandoned/ orphaned trademark - if it was even ever registered as such - and thus not legally defendable. Also trademarks are handled verbatim, meaning "exactly as registered" and in this case they would be registered in different classes, anyway. Throw on top differences in legislation in different countries and your case basically has no merit. That's the old gag of Apple Inc. trying to take down every logo that remotely looks like said fruit even if it's totally unrelated even to computers and such... Suffice it to say that we can have fun debating this endlessly, but I would begin by arguing that Mr. Corsten with an estimated value of at least 130 million Euro sure enough has the money to have hired a bunch of good lawyers and if there even was any issue, by now they have long figured out the legalities of it. Mylenium

You're misunderstanding me. I have no doubt that this stuff will sell, regardless, it just feels kinda redundant to me. That and that perhaps I'm having a hard time envisioning how a character with a complex appearance (you know, the spiky shell, the wild red hair etc.) might potentially look as a minifig. Same for Donkey Kong and some others that I so loved on my Super Nintendo way back when... In any case, perhaps I'm just too skeptical. Let's just see how this pans out. ;-) Mylenium

...and it's not that most people actually would need them. There's a good number of Nintendo figures of all sizes already. Just saw some in a size similar to minifigures in a Gamestop for 4.50 Euro and most of them looked more detailed than a minifig ever could... Mylenium

So far I'm not getting much out of it. The smartphone or whatever it is in the Mario sleeve already kinda turns me off in the sense of "Do they really have to... (make an app for everything)?". It remains to be seen how this turns out. Let's just hope we'll get to see something real soon... Mylenium

Check the instructions for set 75936 Jurassic Park: T. Rex Rampage, the gate in particular. the muddy tracks are just what you need. and based on that of course the answer is easily that you are going to need tons of such elements (they also conveniently come in white for snow) and all sorts of other slopes, curved slopes or wedges. It will just take lots of experimentation and likely quite some finicky building with lots of jumper plates and such to get curved and irregularly roughened edges. Mylenium

I don't think it will change anything. This is the old thing of "traditional family companies" where the successors are vetted and nurtured to inherit their parents' empires from early childhood. Unless some of them are rebellious and really don't want to be pressed into that mold, not much ever really changes. that and of course once a company grows beyond a certain size the day-to-day operations are handled at a different management level, anyway. currently there is no reason to change much as long as LEGO's expansion in the Asian markets goes reasonably well and their traditional markets don't break down completely, so I don't expect anything revolutionary to happen... Mylenium

Maybe you are? Are you actually reading what everybody is writing? Or maybe it's just a general USA thing? I mean if, as per my previous post in this thread, one the biggest YouTube reviewers struggles to procure his goods within a certain timeframe and radius, then doesn't that mean things can be really terribly bad and the distribution and sales infrastructure kinda sucks? And you hear crazy stuff like this all the time with people driving hundreds of miles to specific Walmart or Target stores just to get a specific set for their day one reviews. This is for all intents and purposes quite insane. Isn't it only natural that smaller brands and in particular not regionally produced brands might suffer even more under such an atrocious system? Mylenium Correct. Mylenium

Both are doing even better if you directly compare the regional German sales of LEGO GmbH and Playmobil, which both are somewhere around the 450 million-ish Euro. Mylenium

Oh please! We can stand here all day and I can explain to you what I'm observing on the German market and you can in return go on droning on about the US market and nothing gets done. I'm not going to pretend that either would be the ultimate truth, but here in Europe the pecking order on the toy market is pretty clear: LEGO first, Playmobil second - or reversed, depending on which market studies you trust. Therefore dismissing Playmobil out of hand and saying their stuff doesn't sell at all is just plain stupid. I'm not even going to apologize for calling it that. Where the US market is concerned, my observation is that it is extremely uneven. If someone like Jangbricks is unable to purchase all sets of a LEGO release cycle for his reviews within 200 miles of his living home in different large stores, then it must mean that either it is up to the discretion of the respective store managers or supply chain management/ logistics in the US are really that terrible. In fact I'm also following Mega Construx and a few other toy brands as well and the story is pretty much the same there or even worse. So with all respect, Playmobil not being available in certain US regions probably has other underlying reasons even if you concede to the fact that they are of course a German company making a majority of their revenues here and across the rest of Europe. Does that mean that people in the US wouldn't want Playmobil, Bruder, Schleich and otehr stuff just like they want LEGO? Certainly not. It's just some factors standing against a wider market proliferation, some critical ones of which are beyond the companies' control at this point, it seems. 'nuff said... Mylenium

Let me be blunt: LEGO is utterly clueless about digital business. We don't even need to wait for Hidden Side or the Control+ apps to implode on itself, we already have a graveyard of failed digital projects from lackluster games to Dimensions. I have serious doubts that anything good will ever come from it and to me that's just expensive stuff they are burning money on without ever making it back. And it's not like the world is waiting for LEGO to compete in the gaming markets. The same could be said in the "trashy creative toy" markets for Dots. So if we're talking experimentation, they clearly have the wrong priorities as far as I'm concerned and that's what makes me sad. There's still so much potential elsewhere, it just seems nobody at LEGO is able to see it... Mylenium

A bit presumptuous, isn't it? I can only reiterate my point: If Playmobil, Schleich and others can sell knights, pirates and some other stuff by the bucket, then there must be something to it. You don't even need to get into some of the reasons I've laid out. Of course there are further-reaching implications for a globally operating company like LEGO, but where does it say a well done knights theme that might be hugely popular in Europe couldn't gain enough traction to be relevant outside this market as well? After all, it's common for movies, music and what have you to work across cultural and geographical borders, so why do so many people assume it would not work for LEGO themes? Mylenium

And there's the rub: Not everything needs to be made "kids-friendly" nor re-invented in a cyber-punk-ish way. Playmobil's new Novelmore series is already making an impact and it's as traditionally "fantasy knight" as it gets. Similarly, Schleich's knights vinyl figures have sold out every year and even some figures from just a few years ago are already coveted collector's items. So it seems to me that the issue is not that knights couldn't be profitable or interesting, it's just that LEGO are going about it the wrong way and producing stuff that is not interesting to people. Rinse repeat for other themes and genres... Mylenium

Ninjago has as much to do with "ninjas" as apples with cucumbers. To attribute its success to that just seems more than a stretch of the imagination. More to the point it's perhaps that Ninjago somehow managed to play on different themes like robot mangas, a tiny bit of ninja-esque fighting and a lot of other influences. Point in case: It's definitely not about the ninjas. Mylenium

They can plan all they want, but of course million-people cities and transportation being shut down will affect them as much as any other company. That's just typical corporate BS. Mylenium

It's going to cost them, that's for sure, but how much is an open question. Then again one could go on endlessly about the delusional state of some companies about the markets in China and how important they actually sometimes are (or not) on a broader level. It's definitely going to put a dent into their end customer sales. That can't be avoided when shops are closed or nobody is going to the mall out of fear of contamination. Otherwise it should have limited impact. LEGO has had factory in Europe and the American continent for longer than in China, so whatever they need could easily be produced regionally as well without having to sit out a quarantine on some shipping containers. The Asian markets may be a different story, but I would argue that in a time where we're dangerously close to scraping on a global pandemic - despite all those containment measures - people have other things to worry about. Mylenium

But is there ever actually a "good time"? Isn't there just "They could do it any time (if they commited to it)"? I agree that LEGO perhaps are missing out on something that would potentially sell without even much marketing when we're talking about Knights and Pirates. After all, Europe is plastered with castles and other such stuff and it's ingrained in our cultural DNA just as pirates are a natural part of colonialization history and seafaring exploration. Still, one has to recognize that these days you probably couldn't get away with stuff that was acceptable in the past. It would have to be more elaborate and detailed and culturally respectful, so a lot of research and development has to go into it. And where a Space theme is concerned, that's pretty much the same, but to the power of ten. The whole point of Star Wars being so successful is that everything is meticulously designed and fits into a larger universe, literally. You would have to pour so much effort into this, that it's probably not worthwile - that is unless you're going for a corny retro B-movie look or something like that. And in my view that's perhaps the single most important consideration: Do they have the resources and manpower to pull it off at a level of quality that would actually result in a sellable product? I don't think so. They're far too focused on licensing franchise stuff, expensive one-off sets and their existing series, all of which already may tie up their design and production teams. After all, if rumors are to be believed, work on "Hidden Side" started five years ago and it's still in a somewhat flimsy state. Maintaining multiple such series could be quite a challenge, if you get my meaning... Mylenium