Flawless Cowboy

Let me be more accurate: It is the 20th anniversary of Clone Wars ‘03, but nowhere has Disney or any toy manufacturer using the 20th anniversary of “Clone Wars” branding made it clear that they are celebrating the ‘03 show at all. It seems to be completely arbitrary.

1. Yes, Red 5 does appear in ROTJ. There’s even a canon comic that explains how he got it back after leaving it parked at Cloud City. Ultra hair splitting. No, the CW anniversary isn’t specific to Clone Wars ‘03, it’s actually Disney’s branding of the general “Clone Wars” that has made its way downstream to Star Wars toy manufacturers. Clone Wars ‘03 is no longer canon and Disney probably cares little for it. If Lego doesn’t want people putting stock in anniversaries, they shouldn’t be putting branding for anniversaries. 2. No, they haven’t, and Kenobi’s set wasn’t a contradiction, I was listing all the prequel sets which is a measly three. The fact that only one of the three prequel sets isn’t clone-focused reinforces my argument that Lego cares quite a bit for clones, but doesn’t put much stock in prequel film sets, especially non-clone prequel film sets.

I never said anything about a 2023 gunship or that Lego doesn’t have a track record of underwhelming anniversary sets. What I’m expressing is that it can be underwhelming on both the ROTJ and Clone Wars front, doubly so when there’s outright branding for the anniversaries on the boxes. As a result, there’s major, and rightful expectations for these anniversaries to be honored. Lego can slap a logo on a box if they want, but then they shouldn’t be surprised when people ask for specific sets.

The 2023 501st battlepack, which is based on a video game, is as relevant to “Clone Wars” as a tie bomber or x wing (which both do technically appear in ROTJ. We’ll see what the swamp speeder is, but so far Lego has, in my opinion, truly honored the anniversary with only the two helmet sets so far. Which is a tad weak. Also, Lego clearly has a strong track record for clone-inspired sets, but on the prequel film front, they have been lacking. Currently, only three sets (Kenobi’s Starfighter, AT-TE, UCS Gunship) are explicitly from the prequels, and the only one not retiring this year is the AT-TE. The last time Lego released a non-clone prequel set was 2019 in the form of Anakin’s pod racer for the 20th anniversary.

You can pick them up for dirt cheap on bricklink. There’s no reason to re-release them.

The UCS AT-AT released the year after the 40th anniversary of ESB. Jabba’s sail barge is rumored to release next year. Anniversaries are…loose guidelines for Lego, they could absolutely release a Jabba diorama next year. I’m personally most excited for the throne room, it’s too iconic a sequence in Star Wars history! I’d be happy if these were the sets with one major change: no more 501st. Please, enough. It’ll be five years of 501st domination since 2020, we don’t need more after two battlepacks. Rex can show up alone in a cheaper set.

To each their own, but I genuinely feel the N1 is awful, and the number of serviceable mocs floating around at the time of its reveal didn’t help its case. It’s severely oversized, fragile, and poorly detailed despite its massive surface area. It captures none of the sleekness of the ship. The cockpit isn’t even sealed off from the back. Yellow “paint” piece applications are bizarrely out of place. It reeks of a rushed development.

Lego designers often have little, select information to design sets for new shows, an unfortunate byproduct of Lego’s need to capitalize on the Current Big Thing. It results in sets that range in quality from great like the Inquisitor Scythe to quite poor like the N1 starfighter.

MandR said to take that info with a grain of salt, we’ll have to wait and see. The fact that the remaining sets based on the new movie were also cancelled is not a good sign for the theme.

He didn’t say “cancelled”, he suspected it may be moved to next year, whereas the language he used for the Temple of Doom set was a clear cancellation. And in the upcoming Mandalorian mech set we see Din wielding the dark saber, fighting the spider droid. Neither of these things happened. Remember that these are children’s sets first and foremost and lego will eschew screen accuracy if it means the set is “cool”. Kids and adults alike will buy it for Rex alone.

Now that piece count would make a lot of sense. Fingers crossed!

1,083 pieces is far too low for a gunship in 2023. Lego builds, assuming a constant size, trend upwards in piece count, not downwards.

I’d kill for an MBS Jabba’s Palace (I’m assuming the sail barge isn’t coming this year according to the leaks). The price sure seems high, but given that Rivendell recently released for $500, and the rumored Avengers Tower will come in at $525, slapping on a “Star Wars tax” and upping the price to $650 doesn’t seem that outlandish to me. As you said, time will tell.

The Ahsoka show and by extension the Ghost have almost no casual adult market penetration right now, there’s zero chance Lego would put what is essentially a brand new vehicle (for live action at least) in the same MSRP strata as iconic vehicles like the Star Destroyer, Falcon, or AT-AT. A play set, sure anything is possible, I mean they turned a ship that appears on screen for 5 minutes in one episode of the Bad Batch into a $170 set. I was thinking it might be a modernized version of the MBS Death Star from 2016 with little dioramas, but then I thought how that would conflict with the existing 18+ diorama line that already has Death Star scenes like the trash compactor or the upcoming final duel. Seems superfluous.

Lego surely won’t be make a $650 prequel set any time soon, much less a Venator after the Star Destroyer just retired. Ghost, even less so, as of today, it’s only appeared in a children’s animated show. It took years of market saturation and praise for a live-action Mandalorian aimed towards a general audience for Lego to consider turning the Razor Crest into a UCS set, and by the time it came out the real ship was obliterated on screen. Death Star 2? Perhaps, although the price and piece count point towards a minifig-heavy set.

I really hope the $650 Fall set is an MBS, it’s criminal that there’s only been one on the market for the past three years. An updated Ewok Village+Endor Bunker would be ideal for the 40th anniversary

I suppose it would make sense to have Bo inside the spider slicing it up I wish, but I feel like this would’ve been apparent from the promotional images

So the spider has an interior but…what goes in it?

The spider looked grey to me, although it was dark

If the mech is around 500 pieces, I can’t imagine Lego producing a good-looking Yavin IV temple with just double the pieces (especially if the rumored 12+ mini figs eat into that ~1,000 piece count). My fear is it’ll look very barebones, worse than the Vader castle in 2019.

Eh I doubt it’ll be another Trouble on Tatooine, the mech is a 500+ piece beast with display-level detail, whereas the Tatooine set had a speeder plus a junior’s tusken tent and ballista

The mech looks superbly detailed. I hope it has an interior, or some feature where the humanoid cyborg is integrated into the set. The dark saber is finally here, and the Bo Katan figure is my favorite of the year so far. All the play sets this year (except for the battle pack side build) look display-worthy, as if they wouldn’t be out of place in an 18+ MBS set. People may not be getting the sets they wanted this year, but the sets Lego is putting out are seriously good looking.

Snubfighter displays well, love the tiny curves and greebles and the new tinted cockpit piece. Minifigures are neat, although the pilot never shows up on screen, at least in episode 1. The grey color scheme makes sense as a generic pirate ship, only Vane’s fighter had the red paint job. Given the uniqueness of the pilot figure, I don’t see this set or the figure as things to be massed, unless we get pirates in future sets.