Accio Lego

While the reported set numbers are mixed in with Disney Princess sets that will no doubt be minidoll based, it’s worth noting that there’s a distinction made in the placeholder names between “Disney Princess” and “Classic Disney Animation”. Also, despite the small sizes, I think the use of the word ‘classic’ for the subtheme suggests a more mature audience, and minidolls have never really been used for adult collector sets before.

Honestly, I could totally see getting Cruella’s car - I could also totally see getting Cruella’s car + Jasper and Horace’s van as that $55 set. The final car chase from the movie is easily one one of Disney’s most iconic scenes outside of a Princess movie (and therefore done already in the minidoll theme), and I could definitely see it being a big draw to set designers. And skimming through the Speed Champions sets, the price and piece count is somewhat consistent with two car sets in that theme.

With those piece counts we’re probably looking at small vignettes or vehicles. The two smaller sets especially have piece counts I’d normally associate with large molded pieces or a larger number of minifigs than standard. I could see the ‘Kiss the Girl’ boat scene from Little Mermaid with the molded rowboat or an 101 Dalmatians scene with some new molds and prints for the dogs eating up the budget at expense of piece counts like that. There are also enough Disney horses out there that I wouldn’t rule out a large molded animal featuring in one of the sets - for that matter, the lion and lioness molds would also fall into that category and Lion King is an extremely popular movie that really doesn’t fall under the purview of a CMF, this could be Lego and Disney’s solution to that. The largest set has a more typical piece count for that price point, so we’re probably looking at a small building or a vehicle there.

So I hadn’t heard anything about this before, but the Harry Potter theme seems to have suddenly gotten plushies? Currently only Harry and Hermione are in stock (and while the rest are marked ‘out of stock’ I suspect that’s just code for ‘not stocked yet’ because there’s no way Voldemort would sell out before Harry). Anyone know what’s going on with these or when the other characters will be stocked? I think I might need that Hedwig.

That doesn’t really surprise me. There have been multiple classic Disney sets that have gained popularity on Ideas, and if there’s any year to take that free market data and actually make real sets it’s next year. It will be interesting to see how a set wave will affect the choices for the CMF lineup. I expect there will be some ‘obvious’ choices that will be skipped over because they’re appearing in a set, like Snow White (fingers crossed for a Lilo and Stitch set so we can finally get Lilo), but the licensed CMFs also have a history of enhancing the sets released alongside them by including characters or variants that don’t fit in the set itself. For instance, I could easily see them doing a Snow White set that included the titular princess, a couple of dwarves, and the Witch, while the CMF has the villainess in her Evil Queen form. It will definitely be interesting to see what comes out of all this - I think there’s definitely a higher chance of not having paired characters now.

Honestly, I’ve suspected for awhile now that lego would take advantage of the fact that there’s no way to do a Diagon compatible Gringotts while also including the vaults buy just - making the vaults a separate (more kid friendly) playset. Makes perfect sense to me that they’d do a D2C Gringotts building (although I highly doubt it would go as high as $500 - $200-$300 seems more likely at that scale) with a 18+ rating, and then a set featuring the vaults and mine carts as part of the regular wave of playsets geared towards kids. Heck, I could even see them doing two versions of the Gringotts dragon for the two sets - there’s definitely room there for a playable design vs. a screen accurate one that’s more static, and I’m pretty sure that Hedwig & Hogwarts Icons and Triwizard Challenge & Hungarian Horntail have have proven that having both a kid friendly playset and an adult friendly display piece out at the same time doesn’t hurt sales.

It just came out this year, but it’s not particularly new, and I could have sworn I’d seen European AFOLs saying they’d gotten it, but I’m not necessarily good at keeping track of these things. It’s worth noting that the Lego Store only really distributes these kinds of polybags through promotions - we’ve never actually been able to buy them at retail from the Lego Store. Typically, you can only actually buy them from third party retailers, usually big box stores (I’ve only ever seen them at Target here in the US, and I think Walmart carries them as well). Obviously, the exact stores vary from country to country, so you really need to ask people familiar with your area about it if you want to track them down.

I think the biggest obstacle of an Oswald Minifigure vs the confirmed brickheadz is the engineering of the ears. Brick built ears are just going to be sturdier than molded ears on a mini head, and while lego managed to pull off Bugs Bunny, Oswald’s ears are positioned differently on his head and (depending on the version) arch in a way that might strain a mold’s ability to pass Lego’s strict quality control standards. Of course, that’s the sort of internal thing that none of us have any way of knowing whether or not it will be an issue until an actual reveal.

Yeah, both movies are prime candidates from merchandise. They’d probably do spectacularly if they were released today instead of the early 2000s slump (and Disney seems to agree, given the similar genre and themes in their upcoming release for this fall). Space pirates and steampunk submarines are probably things that could sell like hotcakes even without a Disney license honestly.

Honestly, several of these are very much ‘wait how haven’t they done that before?’ kinda things. Honestly, the biggest reason I can see for those big three to have been avoided before is molding issues. They’re all fairly large and have protrusions that have the potential to be too fragile if designed wrong (long neck, back sails, thagomizer), but I think some of the new introductions in the Dominion sets prove that it’s well within Lego’s engineering abilities, so hopefully we’ll see some cool classics for the first time next year. There are also a few on that list we could have gotten if lego had done the Camp Cretaceous sets properly and given us multiple well designed waves instead of the barely coherent sets we got that all had Claire or Owen shoehorned into them for no reason (I’m not sure what marketing executive got into their head that no one would want sets without the Jurassic World lead actors in them, but they vastly misunderstood what the actual appeal of dinosaur sets is).

The news trickling in suggests the brand is going to somehow celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original film next year. No indication of exactly how that will be represented in lego sets, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some throwbacks based on the original trio of movies. Not sure what new molds we could get out of that though, since I’m pretty sure most of the dinosaurs from the original trilogy have been done before (then again, has lego ever done a proper brachiosaurus or other sauropod? That’s a pretty iconic shot from when the characters first land on the island and I can’t remember if Lego has ever done a ‘long neck’ previously).

Sadly I suspect the increased price is down to increased prices for all lego sets in general rather than an additional Minifigure from the moments books. As for how the banners might have been adjusted from the moments book format enough to warrant a change in name, I can’t help but wonder if we’ll get some sort of option for wall mounting. Banners are meant to be hung up after all. It’s worth noting that the moments books never had any house affiliation in the set names. Sure the Transfiguration, Charms, Potions, and Herbology Moments sets were all softly themed after the head of house that was teaching the class, but ultimately they were depicting classes shown in the movies before anything else - hence Seamus in Potions and Neville in Herbology (two Gryffindor characters who were used for comic relief in those scenes in the movies). In fact, the original moments sets not really being as heavily house themed as they could have been has been a common nit pick I’ve seen, and I suspect one of the reasons so many people express interest in house common room versions of the moments sets is because it would force lego to strictly stick to that house’s students in each set, as opposed to loading everything up with more Gryffindors. Just going by the set names it certainly looks promising, seeing as the house names are all front and center. I think it’s also significant that the ‘moments’ monicker has been dropped - for all that certain adjustments were made for the format, at the end of the day each moments set depicted a specific scene from the movies, which is presumably why they were called moments. Dropping that word in favor of naming the sets after the objects they presumably collapse into, like the Hogwarts Magical Trunk, hopefully indicates that we’ll be seeing subject matter that isn’t a specific representation of a movie scene. After all, the biggest hurdle for us getting all the house common rooms in lego form has always been the fact that half of them never appeared in the movies, but they have all made appearances in various video games, and lego has been doing more and more video game material recently, including a Star Wars set. I don’t think we’ll be getting Hogwarts Mystery or Hogwarts Legacy exclusive characters or locations any time soon, but a couple of highly demanded locations like the Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff common rooms that many fan favorite movie/book characters absolutely inhabited despite the movies not having time to show it, that’s something that lego could sell. Of course everything is just speculation and guesswork until we get more official information.

Exactly, and if they were actually going to pull any forgotten character/movie from the ‘00s out of lack-of-merchandise-hell I’d much rather see Kida from Atlantis or a Treasure Planet character. Those two movies have far more unique visuals and character designs.

I doubt they’ll ignore the Disney+ series entirely, but I think the way Star Wars has been forced to handle it is a much better format: small to medium sized sets focused on introducing several characters from the same show along with decent builds. For all the Marvel CMF was well executed, the one thing I saw multiple people whinging about was that all of the four shows featured had notable characters ‘missing’. Doing full sets would circumvent that (and leave more CMF slots open for themes that don’t get multiple waves of sets per year).

Oooo… piece counts are fun for speculation. The polybag is interesting. 55 pieces is significantly more than the 2018-2021 ones (the 2018 one with the fiddly brick built owl cage was 40 and the other two were 31), but significantly less than this year’s Hogwarts castle (67). It’s also definitely low enough that it must include a Minifigure, so either looking at a very generous Minifigure scale build or a another microbuild+minifig set up like this year. The house banner piece counts are very intriguing. We don’t know exactly what they’ll entail yet so we’re sort of in the dark on subject matter, but I think it’s interesting that Gryffindor is noticeably lower than the others at 285, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff only have an 8 piece difference and both come in slightly over 300, and Slytherin has a whopping 349. That’s a very similar spread to that between the largest and smallest Moments sets (including this year’s), which might support the idea that we’re looking at a similar format. At the same time, all but the Gryffindor Banner have higher piece counts than any of the Moments books, so it looks like we won’t have a large portion of the budget eaten up by custom printed panels. The Room of Hidden Things and Lake Task sets are about what I’d expect. The Lake Task set clearly has a lower PPP ratio because of new molds for the Grindylow (and hopefully shark Krum and the merperson as well).

I think a great deal of it is that it just came out at the wrong time (although having several scenes that were objectively terrifying to children probably didn’t help either). A lot of the Disney animated movies from those years flopped and were pushed to the back of the shelf, and given some of the gems that were in there I’m tempted to blame a marketing department that didn’t know what they were doing or something. Atlantis, Treasure Planet, Emperor’s New Groove -the list goes on.

Not to mention the movie actually has hybrid live action/animation scenes

You must have just not hit us at the right time. Trust me, we’ve definitely been complaining about the lack of Fang. There was certainly plenty of discussion about it in 2019 when the Las test Hagrid’s Hut came out, and every now and then it comes up again. For that matter, you could probably go in to the new animal molds thread and find several non-Harry Potter fans who want lego to do a Fang just because it would mean a new mastiff mold.

That’s a mop, not a broom, and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have an antistud on the base to allow it to stand up on its own (but correct me if I’m wrong).

Theoretically, I’m pretty sure there are mechanics on this forum that allow for collapsible text boxes, they just aren’t particularly easy to figure out how to insert (I can’t figure it out for the life of me). We could also do something as simple as inserting Spoiler Warning lines when we’re going to talk about advent calendar stuff, and/or using bold or italics to make it easy to skip over those passages. I just don’t think a separate thread would work because you’d inevitably have some who forgot or didn’t get the memo or the separate topic would simply get lost when we had a news dry spell and people would use the main thread for advent calendar discussion anyway. Setting up some common sense guidelines on how to talk about the confirmed advent calendar content seems slightly more manageable.

Technically, the Room of Requirement with a fiendfire snake is a part of the Battle of Hogwarts, just not part of the main action sequences

You’d hardly need a new mold to give Sorcerer Mickey a pre-enchanted broom and bucket. They just put out a new broom head in the Harry Potter theme, it doesn’t exist in yellow yet but that’s just a recolor.

Honestly, I think it will depend on what kind of designs lego goes with and what MOCs you have in mind. We’ll definitely see something along the lines of house crests/mascots, which have the potential to be useful for certain projects, and anything quidditch related could be useful for sprucing up a Quality Quidditch Supplies. It wouldn’t surprise me if they reused the time turner print either, which could be useful for MOCing the Department of Mysteries time room if you want to recreate parts of the Ministry that didn’t make it to the movies. But I can also see a lot of print choices not really being useful for system scale stuff. Yes, but the mega bracelet pack includes 22 unique designs, which translates to at least twice that many printed tiles in a set. Clearly, these things aren’t always proportional to the price of the set, and there’s a great deal of behind the scenes budgeting (i.e. entirely different licensing agreements) that could affect the makeup of this kind of set. And for all we know, the mysterious Hogwarts House Banner sets could will slip some DOTS compatible prints in there so they can spread the budget around - we just don’t have enough information to gauge anything at this point in time, we don’t even know what the $15 set is supposed to be.

Sounds like my desk is going to get a makeover. Pencil holder is nice - good thing I’ve already got several appropriately themed pens. The Desk Kit sounds interesting, we’re probably looking at a collection of things there: some sort of organizational caddy, one of the photo/note cubes they’ve done several time in the theme, maybe a photo frame, and some of those bag tags and/or patches framed as labeling devices. Given DOTS usual makeup I’m betting the $15 set is a 2 bracelet pack in yellow (Gryffindor or Hufflepuff) and grey (Ravenclaw or Slytherin), with the requisite red, black, blue, and green DOTS to make things suitably house themed. Bracelets seem to be their most popular items after all.

So if the upcoming CMF is truly meant to be a celebration of the centennial as opposed to a series 3 that just so happens to coincide with the centennial (warily eyes series 23 which was certainly not a celebration of Lego’s 90th as suspected), my guesses would be as follows: 1. Sorcerer Mickey - one of the most iconic variations on the mouse, who also has a habit of featuring in grand celebrations. From Lego’s point of view, he also happens to be the most iconic version of the character that can’t really be shoehorned into a standard playset. - (I’m not going to put a Minnie variant here, simply because there is no Minnie that corresponds to Sorcerer Mickey, so hopefully that combined with the limited number of characters will convince the designers to skip her this time) 2. Snow White - the star of Disney’s first feature length animation 3. The Evil Queen - either in her Queen or hag form to face off against Snow White 4. Pinocchio - Disney Animation’s second feature length film, which also happens to have a live action version releasing soon 5. Cruela DeVil - 101 Dalmatians introduced a new way of transferring animators sketches to film cells that defined how Disney animation looked for decades. The film itself is also a persistently popular mainstay, and combined with Cruela herself getting a recent live action origin story she’s an obvious choice. 6. Belle - The Little Mermaid might have been the film to kick off the Disney Renaissance, but with Ariel and Ursula appearing in series one it’s not a hard choice to turn to the film that kicked the studio’s revival up to 11. 7. The Beast - if you’re going to do one half of Beauty and the Beast, you’ve got to have the other as well, hopefully featuring the faun legs most recently used on Werewolf Lupin. 8. Lilo (with Srump) - okay, I just want series 1 Stitch to finally have his best friend, but is that really too much to ask? 9. Sully - with Toy Story having its own line of sets that has thoroughly covered it’s characters, Monsters Inc is the next best property to represent the breakout of the CGI juggernaut Pixar 10. Baymax - recently got his own adorably wholesome Disney+ series, not to mention being extremely recognizable. 11. Maribelle - Encanto is the most recent Disney Animation installment, and by the time this CMF was being developed it would also have established itself as a smash hit, and an obvious choice to round out a series representing Disney’s entire history. 12. Bruno - someone at Lego (or Disney depending on how high up the chain the decision was made) is kicking themselves over putting Abuela in Encanto’s single full-sized minidoll scaled set instead of Bruno. No way they’re going to pass up the opportunity to slip him into a product line that’s also considered highly collectible by adults. There’s definitely some gaps in here because I tried to avoid movies that had been done in previous series and I skipped over movies that didn’t feature bipedal characters, but I think a proper celebration of a century of Disney animation could look like this.