Accio Lego

That’s my thought. Pretty crazy that there’s a Harry Potter set that apparently has a side build of a couple of pumpkins and a crow and now there’s a crow/raven mold in Dreamzzz. I’m going to manage my expectations though, since it wouldn’t be the first time that Dreamzzz has made a mold perfect for what Harry Potter is doing but the designers didn’t make use of it because they didn’t know it existed (there isn’t total and complete communication between design teams from what I can tell). Can’t wait for the new corvid to show up in straight black though, that’ll definitely be useful.

Okay, adding fantasy elements would definitely provide the variety to make a Pirates series work - especially if you added a classic Siren and an undead style pirate to work off the idea of ghost ships. Throw in some pirates from different cultures and you could have something really interesting. A Zheng Yi Sao inspired pirate queen would be super fun.

jbspielwaren on instagram has detailed shots of all 12 characters uploaded - including disassembled so you can fully see all the elements. There are some pretty cool details visible in the pics that you can’t see in the official shots - like the head of the insectoid alien becomes transparent towards the back and the Ice Planet Explorer has a fur collar printed under her armor. They also confirm that the antennae and hair on the Robot Imposter are separate parts and the Retro Space Girl’s robot dog is sliver instead of grey (she also seems to have metallic eyeshadow, very chic).

Castle is definitely right up there with Space in having a bunch of factions/subthemes throughout Lego’s history, along with plenty of more general tropes that would make it very easy to do something like what we’re seeing with series 26. That said, I’m not sure we’d see something like that next year because there’d be a certain amount of thematic overlap with the D&D series coming this fall. Pirates is a fun enough theme but I’m not sure an unlicensed series would have enough distinct variations for a twelve character series. After all, there have been way fewer pirates in regular series than spacemen and aliens. And while historical or mythological figures aren’t everyone’s cup of tea - neither are monsters or sci-fi and that didn’t stop them from doing series 14 or 26. And those two options could be especially interesting if you pull from cultures around the world.

To be fair, licensed and unlicensed parts are somewhat different. And bigfigs tend to leak much less often than minifigs or new animals.

The back of the leaflet with more detailed instructions for the Ice Planet woman, M-tron guy, and the modern astronaut is up in the usual place. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure the bases for the back assemblies on both M-tron and the modern astronaut are new parts.

Theoretically, if they’re doing SS themed decorations to be compatible with the new Great Hall, the that Flitwick would be the obvious choice. There’s specifically a shot of him levitating ornaments onto a Christmas tree after all, and the version of him included in the very first Harry Potter advent calendar was from later movies despite that first one being otherwise SS themed, so it wouldn’t be a repeat. For that matter, if they’re doing another SS based advent calendar, I wonder if the Dumbledore and Harry we’re supposed to get won’t be based on their talk in front of the mirror of Erised. It happens during Christmas holidays and Harry’s outfit in that scene is technically something we haven’t had in minifig form yet (not sure about Dumbledore though, the lighting in that scene makes it hard to tell).

If you’re just googling ‘Orion’ or even’Orion Greek mythology’ you’re probably seeing a bunch of much later depictions. That’s what I noticed when I tried it earlier anyway. The artists of the renaissance era and later had a liking for Greek myth as a subject matter (that’s why there are so many oil paintings of the judgement of Paris out there) and they weren’t usually thinking too hard about historical accuracy when they were making them. Try googling ‘ancient Greek sculpture’ and you’ll see a decent number of male figures with close cropped ringlets pretty close to what lego decided to use here.

Grawp was definitely well done - but he works because A) he’s significantly bigger than most other creatures, and B) he’s not the fist buildable macrofigure that lego did - they’d done others like Gi-Ant Man and Ares in the Superhero themes before, so the designers weren’t working from scratch. On top of that, Grawp uses the bigfig hand molds in the same way many of the better large creatures have had custom head molds. But the troll isn’t nearly as large as Grawp, you just couldn’t get the expected level of detail on it with a brick built body, so I’m glad they’re molding it.

The leaked leaflet (which can be found in the legoleaks hashtags on instagram) actually shows the astronaut without her helmet and her head is pretty good. It’s actually a white base with the yellow face printed on to represent a communications cap. Definitely a step up from the Ice Planet fig’s head - which is also shown sans helmet and is just a generic yellow head.

Is that EVA suit on the realistic astronaut a new, more accurate part? It’s so hard to tell – I really want to see her in the round. Hopefully with some people clearly finding these in the wild already she’ll show up in detailed pics on instagram soon.

I love how the adult gorilla is designed with studs on the back so the baby can ride it. That’s such a lovely little detail.

The leaker who dropped pics of the red pandas and croc + tiger just posted a sliding scale poll with nothing but a gorilla emoji in their instagram story, so I’m guessing we’ll be seeing the other new jungle animals very soon.

Yes, a Polish fan site released descriptions of the summer sets, and the Great Hall is specifically described as having a new troll in the bigfig style. It’s also described as being a new mold, so it will probably be much closer to a film accurate version than it is any of the current bigfig bodies. The real question is if we’ll get a custom head for those ears.

I don’t think the Leaky Cauldron has enough oomph for a D2C on its own. I think it’s more likely that if the WWW and Ollivander’s + Madam Malkin’s sell well, then we’ll eventually see the Leaky Cauldron in that style - which is a little more flexible in the floor plan than the original D2C style. Maybe in the future we’ll see Flourish & Blott’s + Borgin & Burke’s and Leaky Cauldron + Fortescue’s sets.

So glad that red panda comes in the small set since I’m definitely gonna need that

I mean, we’ve already got the Three Broomsticks, and the 2021 and 2023 advent calendars had explicit builds for the Leaky Cauldron and Hog’s Head respectively. I don’t think there’s a content issue stopping us from getting a Leaky Cauldron - it’s probably more along the line of it simply being awkward to figure out the design of something that has a normal front and the magical portal at the back - especially since all our previous Diagon Alley buildings have left the back completely open for playability. With any luck, now that we’re on year two of getting a set of Diagon shops in the summer wave, the trend will continue long enough for the designers to figure out how to do the Leaky Cauldron in a way appropriate for a retail set.

The extra long minifig legs would be too slender in my opinion. If you look at the troll from the movie it’s rather bottom heavy in both its torso and limbs. It really needs custom molds for all the parts to make them accurate.

Yeah, I’m wary too – I’ve never seen a render like this leak before and it would certainly be easier to fake than anything physical for someone who knows their way around the right software. But on the other hand, nothing shown looks too much like an overblown fantasy and everything matches up exactly with the description leaks from before. If this does turn out to be fake, I think I’ll find myself wondering if the original leakers saw the real thing or this (it is super early for this much info on the September series after all).

Preliminary renders of the D&D cmf have leaked on instagram. No new regular animal molds, but we’ve got the rat in black (with red eyes), the songbird in dark tan (I think) with printed markings beyond the typical eyes and beak, and the shepherd puppy in dark grey with a lighter muzzle. The mini red dragon looks amazing too!

That’s my hope personally, and given that this is the biggest non-D2C set they’ve ever done for Harry Potter I can’t imagine they don’t have the budget for it.

I could definitely see them doing a new head mold since tigers have broader and fluffier faces than lionesses and other big cats. Maybe something like the sabertooth head without the teeth. That might also give them the chance to do some dual molding or printing with the ears so they’re the right color too. The big cat cub mold should be perfectly serviceable for a Tiger cub though, the babies are a fluffy around the face as the adults.

The Artemis program plans to return manned missions to the moon, which will include the first woman to set foot there. Artemis is the Greek goddess of the moon and also the twin sister to Apollo. The name for NASA’s original moon mission program was Apollo. So there’s a lot of purposeful symbolism and deliberate symmetry going on with the name. Now, the last Apollo mission flew in 1972 and Superman II came out in 1980, so I imagine the Superman writers simply correctly predicted the obvious name choice for a new set of moon missions decades ahead of time, because they knew that the people at NASA are all massive nerds. Fun Fact: the actual capsule used in the Artemis missions is call the Orion capsule, named after a legendary hunter from Greek myth with strong connections to Artemis, who placed him in the sky as the eponymous constellation after his death (and we’ll be getting a minifig of him in the upcoming cmf). I do hope that May 15th release date holds true worldwide. My dad has a birthday only days later and he’s a big space geek who’d love this as a gift, but last year the Mars rover came out in June in other regions but was delayed in the US until August so we had to make it a Christmas gift instead of a Fathers Day gift. Fingers crossed that doesn’t happen again.

The translation is rather rough – I sincerely hope that we are getting an enchanted ceiling, but “illusion of heaven” could also technically be interpreted as another version of the Mirror of Erised like we got in the 2018 set. Fingers crossed it’s the ceiling though, since this might be the first and only Great Hall we’ve gotten that’s actually big enough to accommodate a roof thick enough to do the tiles on the outside and a faux sky on the inside.

Yeah, I’m skeptical of that timeframe too. All they’ve got right now are a shortlist of writers/showrunners – it’ll be ages before they even have a final script and a full cast. And unless they’re stupid they’ll need their Hogwarts sets to be just as well made and durable as the movie ones, which will take a significant amount of time on its own. Then filming with dozens of child actors (who can only work so long per day) and all the VFX post production… if they get all that done in 2 years it’s not going to be the quality they need it to be to keep going for all seven books.