Accio Lego

The only thing I could see getting in the way of that is that the Leaky Cauldron is significantly smaller than Gringotts, and doesn’t have much of a ‘Wow’ factor without the Diagon Alley shops to be revealed when you open the portal at the back. That said, if you include a small shop like Gringotts did with the Magical Menagerie, and perhaps include the muggle road out front, maybe even with a Knight Bus side build

The really strange thing is that Lego did Unikitty and Mario blind bag series concurrently with CMFs without taking up actual CMF slots, so why can’t they do the same for these tiny brick built cars?

So this weird F1 series is supposed to be a spring release right? Do we know what the January series is yet? Or is it going to be an unlicensed one?

Malfoy Manor is set to come in January, and let’s face it, Bellatrix is the main villain in the fight that happens there! (it’s also worth noting that while we’ve only gotten 3 Bellatrix minifigures since the reboot, we also got Hermione polyjuiced as Bellatrix in Gringott’s last year, so a very nice skirt print and matching torso currently exist for the character)

For anyone still trying to decide if they want the exclusive Weasley clock gwp, it is indeed a magnet like the classic emblems available in the Insiders reward center. It comes with a base that an included flat piece of metal can slot into, so you can stick it there to display if you don’t fancy sticking it on your fridge (or if you’re like my family, and the previous homeowners thought filling the kitchen with non-magnetic stainless steel was super cool, you don’t have any available magnetic surfaces at all).

Not seeing anything about the prints or double points on the US website, but I’ll check back at midnight EST.

True. I just think that a barrette hat+hair would be better to introduce in, say, a Parisian fashionista character, with said new part, a double sided mime head, and matching torso all included in BaM towers at a later date.

That would basically be the regular mime with a barrette hat/hair combo piece though, wouldn’t it? Mimes have more uniform appearances compared to regular clowns from what I know.

That’s true as well! Can’t believe I forgot about that one.

Interesting, and the Harry Potter theme has also kicked off some lego elements that are now staples. Quirrel in the first wave (followed shortly by the polyjuiced Harry and Ron in 2002) was the first ever minifigure with a double sided head, and now a minifig having an alternate expression is basically considered a must. Then in 2002 Dobby and the Gringotts Goblins debuted alongside Yoda as the first minifigs with short legs if I remember correctly. In other words, minifigures wouldn’t have the features they do now if it weren’t for this theme. (Come to think of it, didn’t the reboot coincide with the introduction of the designated skirt piece? I think it existed before, but I know Harry Potter series 1 was the first time it appeared in a CMF)

I don’t think there was an ‘instead’ option here. The 2021 advent calendar included 2 chocolate frog cards and featured new prints for the Privet Drive sign, Harry’s Birthday Cake, Leaky Cauldron sign, Platform 9 3/4 sign, train ticket, and spinner top. The difference is that that calendar also only had 2 new torsos and 1 new head among 6 characters. In contrast, this year’s calendar has 7 new torsos, 2 new skirts, and a new head – so I can kind of see why there wasn’t any budget left for new tile prints this year. Things like the house emblem tiles, sheet music, and collectible portraits are nice in that sense in that they add detail and richness without increasing the budget as much as a new print.

Yeah, I’m aware that both are just color swaps of preexisting pieces - I just thought it was odd that whoever animated the clip deliberately decided to depict both in colors that they haven’t actually been made in (especially since white is the default color for Pegasus in the first place).

Yeah, hard to imagine that. But then again, I don’t think the Adidas collaboration did all that well for them, so maybe they’re planning for the partner sets to be more play focused instead of a literal shoe this time.

I think the Collector’s Edition is very much the definitive version of the Burrow. It’s got more rooms than the playset version and it includes every Weasley (plus Harry) which will likely never happen anywhere else. Actually, the minifig lineup in the 2020 version is pretty milquetoast - the only ones of any note are the only Fenrir Greyback since the reboot and the only brunette variant of Tonks we’re likely to get. People have actually been complaining for years about the reused heads and lack of skirt printing on Molly and especially Bellatrix. Most of the people here who say they’re not interested in the new version either A) already have an older version and can’t justify the Collector’s Edition budget wise, and/or B) aren’t that interested in the Burrow in the first place. The new version ultimately has significantly more interior room, is more detailed, has a better minifigs, and closes up to make a much better display piece. And for all that some people complain about the floo fireplace taking up a lot of room in the living room - the 2020 one did as well, to only reason it feels different is because the back was open so they could put in a hinge to open up the front of the ground floor so you could see everything behind the chimney better, and the fireplace wasn’t big enough to actually put a minifig inside to use the floo, it just switched between green and orange flames.

lol. Molly’s alt face being angry shouting for her “Where HAVE you been!” speech. The neutral smiling face was already an upgrade from the reused Hufflepuff head but this just makes it perfect. I want a spare so I can make her shout “not my daughter you b*tch” in my Battle of Hogwarts set.

So Lego just announced an upcoming collaboration with Nike, and while I’m not holding my breath considering how the Lego x Adidas one worked out, I couldn’t help but notice that the animated reel they released for the announcement features a white goat with black spots and a (molded) Pegasus in pastel pink. It might not mean anything, but it does seem interesting to so prominently show existing parts in new colors, especially since both could easily be shown in preexisting colors.

Probably more to do with the fact that 6 out of the 7 other characters are specifically based on their appearances from the CoS scene and Bill doesn’t get his scars until the end of HBP.

Presumably because he’s just woken up and has bed head in the scene they’re basing most of these minifigs off of. The piece they used was literally made for someone who just got out of bed, although I agree that for movie Percy especially it’s too straight. If they wanted to do something messier than the school uniform variant from the book, they could have recolored the hair for Jay from Ninjago and had something that still had the tousled look with a bit more of a curl to it. Something I haven’t seen anyone mention yet is just how good Errol looks. I was expecting the grey design from 2010 just on the newer flying mold, but they went far beyond that. It looks to be right up there with the barn owl in terms of accuracy to the real life species.

The Weasley Clock gwp looks nice, with loads of details for a freebie. The configuration looks similar to the classic themes collectible magnets with stands that are currently available in the Insiders reward center. It wouldn’t surprise me if this was also a metal magnet with an included base as well.

Makes sense. Star Wars has been doing non-Lego promos for a while, and even the classic themes have gotten collectible coins and recently magnets as VIP/Insiders redeemable rewards. Harry Potter is getting up there in popularity so it was only a matter of time until they tried out the concept with this theme too. I’m actually interested to see what it looks like. It will probably involve a clock face that’s larger than minifig scale, and it could be really cool to see an illustration of the Weasley clock Lego-fied at a level of detail they could never do in an official set.

Agreed, it’s too much of a big ticket item to skip. And I think it’s kind of ridiculous to claim that the new system isn’t doing scene specific sets when there are only 4 sets in the new system with 3 of them having very scene specific elements to them and half of them only having one movie appearance each. And January promises to continue that trend with the Dueling Club and Flying Lessons being very scene specific with only Charms Class possibly being more generic like this year’s Potions Class. In any case, I find it much more interesting to think of how they’ll construct the Chamber in this system. The nice part about the last one was the ability to combine it with Polyjuice Mistake so characters could open the secret trapdoor and slide down into the Chamber. The question is if they’ll make it so a trapdoor could be placed in different locations in the new system as well. The current modules are slid into the set with nothing underneath them, but they’re also all at ground/subterranean level. With the upcoming Flying Lesson set almost certainly covering a more generic multistory castle section than the Great Hall, I’m interested to see what sort of support structure upper story module slots will have, and if it will be compatible with putting rooms with trapdoors wherever we like.

The thing about Borgin and Burke’s is that it’s not on Diagon Alley, it’s on Knockturn Alley – which branches off from Diagon as you can see with the labeled entrance that’s included in the D2C. It doesn’t belong added on to the end of the street like Gringott’s or even the Leaky Cauldron – there’s no way to properly add it to the existing set without it being invisible from the front and having one of its side walls flush with the open backs of the current shops. A D2C B&B just isn’t likely, people are better off hoping for a standalone playset where the shop is on its own and a little beefier than the two-a-set shops but smaller than the D2C shops. There would be nothing stopping collectors from displaying it next to the D2C, it just wouldn’t be an officially advertised combination.

Technically we did get this in the Diagon Alley D2C. That’s why the dirty faced Harry head exists for them to use in the Burrow. The cloak he wears is just pulled closed so you can’t see what’s under it (allowing the torso to pull triple duty with Ron and Hermione in the same set). Personally, I don’t think that outfit would look right as a more open cloak with just printing. It would be better as a cape over a green torso, and that means it would probably be a bad idea to put it in a set where the minifig was expected to be shoved in a mechanism that the cape could easily get caught in. Far better to save it for a prospective Flourish and Blott’s playset.

It’s entirely possible there’s one already in the works. We’ve had an increasing number of sets without Harry over the past few years, and with Malfoy Manor coming in January that puts later movies like HBP into the frame of possibility next summer. This gwp definitely puts anyone designing a B&B set in the near future at an advantage for not having to use pieces on the floo fireplace and instead being able to focus on the vanishing cabinet and death eater meeting.

They probably wanted that torso to remain exclusive to the Diagon Alley D2C. The head looks to be on the Burrow version of Harry.