tafkatb

Yeah, some of those sets were... not the greatest. I do hope the current line takes a cue from the early days in terms of set size, though - I'd like to see a few smaller vignettes that could fit in among the larger portions.

Not just wishful thinking - look at the Harry Potter line. Hogwarts Great Hall and Hogwarts Whomping Willow fit your criteria pretty much exactly, with more rumored sets for this year to continue the expansion. Depending on how long the theme sticks around this time, one might very well end up with a castle that surpasses the Millennium Falcon, just composed of smaller segments that could be rearranged or omitted as they see fit.

Clear (official) images typically show up around a month or so before release. Sometimes way earlier, sometimes not until the very last minute, but a month seems to be a solid bet.

"Oh wow, the Harry Potter topic is flagged as HOT; there must be a whole lot of discussion going on about a new set reveal or - oh. OK then."

I hope it's a motorcycle; we've yet to see one get the Creator Expert treatment.

I was on the fence about the Hall of Armor back when all I knew was the name and price, but seeing the finished product with its modular design and Igor armor puts it over the top for me as a must-have. Kinda wish it included one of the really weird armors like the Hot Rod or Disco, but it still looks awesome! Can't wait to add in the other suits I've accumulated.

There's no official release date on it yet, but this September marks the show's 25th anniversary.

I'm really excited for this! Can't wait to build it with my wife; she's a big fan of the show. I do hope the final design scales it down quite a bit. The original submission has something like 1700 pieces, but I don't think this needs to be all that much bigger than the Big Bang Theory set to cover the most important details.

Spoilered my answer for anyone else who wants to guess:

I actually really like that RC! It's scaled pretty well for a minifig, and the army men are a pleasant surprise. I'm noticing that the more sets I accumulate, the more I seem to appreciate small builds... ?

I'm pretty firmly on Team Regular Minifig Heads here. I really like the Buzz I got from the Disney CMF series a few years back, and I'm excited for the release of a Woody to match. Overall the set looks really good for a 4+, but I'll hold out for reveals of the rest of the line before I decide whether to pick it up. Most likely I'll just get the RC set, but this one's mighty tempting as a potential add-on to my Fairground Mixer.

Dang, there's a lot to catch up on since I last checked this thread, so forgive me if someone already mentioned this, but I love that the inclusion of Ant-Man in the War Machine Buster means we can do a role reversal of the "Tiny dude is big now" scene.

Doesn't make any less sense than Crusher or Destroyer or whatever else was rumored, does it?

War Machine Buster sounds perfectly fine to me if it's a Hulkbuster-style armor for War Machine.

That's weird, considering those are the exact names I found months ago, before the wonkily-translated list with "Battle of the Assembled Avengers" was making the rounds. I dunno why this person would suddenly backpedal and say they're fake, unless they were spooked about compromising their source. But like others said, no point in getting all caught up in scraps of information when official reveals aren't too far off.

I agree about the "little bit weird" observation, and in the best possible way. It's funny, every photograph I've seen of the Vibrant Coral pieces (even the official box art for the Pop-Up Party Bus) really fails to capture just how... well, vibrant they really are. This color really has to be seen in person to be truly appreciated. There are definitely some colors that fluoresce under a blacklight, and their official names reflect as much: 47 Transparent Fluorescent Reddish Orange, 143 Transparent Fluorescent Blue, and 49 Transparent Fluorescent Green.

Yup. In early 2012, I was working in retail and would occasionally scour our store's internal inventory system for updates on upcoming products, which was how I found 21014 Villa Savoye ($69.99) and 21015 Eames House ($59.99), both with a slated release date of September. I never turned up any pictures or anything, but presumably there's at least a rough draft somewhere in LEGO's archives if it got as far as a name and price being released to retailers. But then September came and went with only 21014 hitting the shelves, and 21015 was nonexistent until it resurfaced the following summer attached to the Leaning Tower of Pisa instead. Anyway, I try not to dwell on that too much - even if I naïvely hope, every year, maybe this year they'll dust off the plans for that one and put it into production - since as Tom notes it's pretty clear the Architect Series just wasn't commercially viable, especially as the theme as a whole has gotten wider mainstream distribution. Besides, it's probably a good thing for my own budget that my interest in this theme has waned in recent years, because there's no shortage of other sets catching my attention these days. I try to take the optimistic approach that while it's not a great time to be a LEGO Architecture fan, it's still a pretty great time to be a LEGO fan overall.

There have never been two Creator Expert vehicles in one year before, but I guess there's a first time for everything.

It's at least got the spiraling setbacks to lend it some variety, so it wouldn't be quite as repetitive a build as something like the Seagram Building, but I agree that in general towers are less likely candidates. Then again, I also thought that buildings that had already been done as Architecture sets were unlikely to be revisited as Creator Expert sets, then 10234 and 10253 came out, so what do I know? My dream set for this line would be something Greek - a Parthenon, or maybe even a full Acropolis if they scale it down. And wasn't there some talk a while back about a Creator Expert-level LEGO House, or was that just referring to what became 21037?

It's a toad, on a stool. It's a pun. No, really! Mark Stafford confirmed as much, but he also said he enjoys seeing others' interpretations.

All valid points as well, and I suppose the discussion over what qualifies a building as capital-A Architecture will never be any more clearly resolved than what distinguishes a book as capital-L Literature. I can certainly say one point in favor of the new ESB set is that being a similar size/piece count to last year's Statue of Liberty means it can convey the proportions and sheer height of the building much better than the previous iterations.

The Empire State Building is still undeniably way more of a tourist attraction than it is a hallmark of design. I have a degree in architecture and I couldn't even name the firm that designed it off the top of my head. (It was Shreve, Lamb, & Harmon, by the way, who are noted as "best known for designing the Empire State Building" in the first sentence of their Wikipedia article.) In my more cynical moods I'm inclined to agree with @Lucarex about just renaming the line and being done with it. I mean, I try not to be one of those cranky old why-doesn't-TLG-cater-directly-to-my-sophisticated-tastes AFOLs, but a tiny part of me will always be bitter that the planned Eames House set was scrapped in favor of a Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Keep in mind that sets displayed at these events often have preliminary/placeholder minifigs, so I'm not getting my hopes up too much for character rosters just yet.

Nice to see these all in one place! I'm still trying to decide which one should be my "definitive" Unikitty for my LEGO Cinematic Universe display. I'm partial to the one from Cloud Cuckoo Palace since it's the first one, but she almost seems too simple now that so many variants have been made.

I vastly prefer brick-built creatures, to the extent that I didn't buy any Jurassic World sets because of the molded dinosaurs, and I'll genuinely be a little upset if Buckbeak or the dragons are made out of a handful of giant prefab parts instead of something more along the lines of the creatures from Newt's suitcase. Sure you lose a bit of proportional accuracy, but as far as I'm concerned that's just part of the LEGO aesthetic akin to minifigures having claw hands and no noses. If I buy a LEGO set, I want to actually build stuff, you know? If I wanted perfect screen-accurate representation, I wouldn't be bothering with LEGO at all; I'd be getting the figures from Hot Toys or the Noble Collection.