Legogal

Wow! Another fantastic house...please don't tell us that you did this in an hour, or we'll all have to quit building! Great details as usual. I have to ask, where did you learn such wonderful English or is it your native language? You explain yourself too well to have learned it as an adult's second language! Please keep building!

I think it will be hard to beat Series 7, so the bar is high for Series 8. And watching little kids spend their 3.32USD in the Lego Store is quite entertaining. That CMF is really important to them!!! It is fine with me if Lego keeps cranking out CMFs forever....it is just too expensive to purchase sets or most rare minifigs in order to get the ones you want. For decades we had to buy huge, expensive sets just to get 3 or 4 figures, so buying the figures alone is a fantastic solution. I still buy the sets, but now have most of the minifigs I want in the quantities I want. It used to be so difficult to collect a few female minifigs. We all win this way!

I finally bought the set at our Lego store.....some thoughts before I build it. The box is huge....the contents take up about half of the space inside. What a waste of resources. And the price seems way too high at 50USD. Around 30-35USD would be more appropriate. I like the Creator 3 in 1 buildings because they give you three builds and can easily be expanded. The first thing to go will be the red roof. Will try dark blue instead; if that doesn't work, will look at gray colors for the roof. I have always detested the original red roof bricks because that seemed to be the only color Lego offered for about 30 years, and it was not attractive to me. Really hated those red roofs for so many years. Never seen red roofs in the US, but am familiar with clay tiles, etc., so popular in Mexico and CA and southern Europe. Wish they would make a clay tile color roof! The three instruction books do look helpful.....maybe that is the major cost of producing this set. It just seems that the buildings should be twice as large as they are so we can put something in them. Anyway back to the building process.....this review was quite helpful Pandora! Cheers!

Wow! Nice park....makes we want to go there and just look around for an hour! We often forget that many parks inside cities are quite small and provide convenient places to enjoy a quieter moment than on the louder streets. The one color statue is wonderful! Makes you wonder who it is! Congrats on a fine build!

Your idea of including a 4625 Pink Box woman is brilliant! Just picked up a few more of her torsos on BL, and her dark purple color would look outstanding next to Shane in this set. I noticed this lovely lady when she first arrived on the scene and also like her posed next to the orange flower torso lady, who reappeared in the Town Hall. Will have to admit that it bothers me to read that so many people don't care for this or that line of Lego. This sounds childish and often becomes irritating in comments in reviews. It seems to me that the conversations would flow much better if folks just kept that thought to themselves....we really don't need to know that they don't care for the Creator or whatever line. The purpose of the review is to engage folks in a positive dialogue about the set's high and low points. Most Lego lines I don't personally purchase, but there is no need to say in a review comment that they don't match my own tastes. I bet that most folks here don't care who doesn't like which theme. Enough venting on my part! Does anyone else feel strongly about this point? And what is your take on this, Pandora?

Ash, i like both of the figures you mentioned above. The Marion head is easily recognizable as a woman while the Helena takes a bit more effort without her hair. We need all kinds of female heads as mentioned above; waiting for more at this very minute! I also adore the HP Luna head! It is so expressive that I wish I owned 50 more. Wild new designs like Luna's head are just what we need to add some life to our ladies!

The Katara head you mentioned is by the far the most beautiful head ever produced by Lego...male or female. It is stunning in the way they used her gorgeous eyes and a few strands of hair to make her look very female, and yet not Dolly Parton-ish with huge red lips and gigantic eyelashes. When I began collecting for just me 4 years ago, I monitored Katara head prices on BL and bought quite a few; I cherish those pieces now and use them with every torso built as a female. I wish they would make a Katara like head with other eye colors....light and dark brown, hazel, green, black, gray, etc., so we could have more faces resembling Katara. I love the large colored eyes because they are much more expressive than the little slit mouths. It would be great to see other hair colors in Katara's bangs so we could more easily use our flock of female hair with the Katara like heads. I like having all of the different female Lego heads because it gives me more variety in building City scenes, but a few more females without large red lips would be nice. How about more of the medium large natural flesh lips used in HP Hermione sometimes? Not all women wear lipstick, so larger natural looking lips would be fine. Same thing with eyelashes....some could be dark and thick, and others could be lighter and less heavy as not all women wear mascara. The heads and the hair are the main way I differentiate the Lego ladies I build, so the more female options we have as to these parts would be wonderful. This is a valid topic, so please don't feel you need to justify discussing it. Lego has made tremendous strides in offering female minifigs during the past twenty years, and we gals appreciate all of the options they have given everyone for building females. Please keep up the good work, Lego!

What a cool thing to do....for all involved! Looks like a lot of fun! Congratulations on such a good show!

Wow! I just discovered this thread and noticed how much the photos have improved over the past two years...what a difference in quality and composition. It is so much fun playing with and mixing up the licensed minifigs because they have so much personality. And their realistic light flesh tones look so much more lifelike to me. Thanks for the wonderful shots here!

Uh oh!!! This sounds like war to me, not FRIENDS! Help....I love my FRIENDS! i chat with them every day as they watch me cook from their perch above our kitchen counter. Sniffle, sniffle......sniffle!

Wow! This was an amazing build by so many folks, and it really turned out to be stunning. So much action and so many different parts added to the beauty and incredible details. It was really entertaining watching it come together over Thursday and Friday even though I was not one of the builders. Folks were so friendly at this layout that it was fun just hanging out around it. Congratulations to the EB team on such a fine build!!! And a special thanks to Stash/Adam for operating the EB Inn in his basement! And Simon did a fine job with his MOC's as well. So many cool things to see....

Nice wheels for Olivia, who does look hot in it! Yup, the girls all need wheels, so let the parade begin!

Wow! Great pictures to show us what is in the box. Small sets are wonderful for small gifts and lighter budgets, so this should do well. We often hear parents saying to their young children in stores that the child has only so much money to spend on a toy, and usually it is around what these sets cost. Love the colors...especially of her chaise lounge chair/beach towel with headrest. These are wonderful for patio/balcony/pool scenes in many other themes. Bodies of water are so much fun in Lego. Let's hope that these girls get some new threads soon as girls love to dress their dolls in different outfits. It is so cool that Olivia gets her own speedboat! That adds a huge amount of control over her life because she is not limited by having to ask guys with a boat for a ride somewhere. What a refreshing idea in real life, too! Thanks for showing us what is in the box!

LuxorV, Do you write cartoons for a real living? Love the funnies at the end....whoever knew that Friends could be so violent? Must take a guy to figure this out! They must be LTAF at TLG reading this review. Anyway, it definitely is an entertaining review! And probably reveals how many of the girls' little brothers will play with their sisters' Friends sets when SIs is out of sight. It is amazing how many folks love bunnies, so I think that this is another winner. (Rabbits eat the plants in our yard, and squirrels dig up every square inch looking for nuts...so we view them less fondly than Friends sets portray.) Thanks for an insightful review....it is so much fun combining Friends with other themes!

Another cool Friends set and a very cool review! Good to hear a drummer's view of this set! There are few female drummers in reality, so this does break some ground as to what girls can do. (But I do feel sorry for their parents and neighbors hearing all this racket!) The parts are wonderful with the pastel colors and curves. Does look like we need smaller drumsticks or Mia will suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists...ouch!!! And a smaller book would be very useful as these Belleville sized ones never did much for HP sets either. The lamp looks a bit weird to me....wouldn't most girls have a neat, jazzy shade on a lamp? Maybe it is a relative of a lava lamp. Thanks for the well crafted review....these sets are definitely addressing their target market's desire to have more things for girls, and that is a blessing! Cheers from Another adult who loves Friends!

Wow! Wonderful review and set! I like the design a lot, but would have gone with azure and not reddish roof pieces. Thanks for so much detail about the next wave of Friends that hopefully will arrive soon in the US. Many stores here tend to be out of stock with Friends sets, so maybe the new sets will help them stock up again. This one will be added to my collection of all the other Friends sets!

Wow! This is lovely! What a wonderful recreation of a famous train! Sorry I can't give advice on train building, but you have built something very cool!

Wow! These are wonderful ads from the 70's! I didn't hear about Lego until the mid-eighties when more US stores began carrying them. We began buying them in about 1992 when my son turned three and started serious building for a child. We don't care for the Wal-Mart chain of stores, but they began carrying the larger sets (like Pirate ships and some trains) at Christmas, and then would mark them down 75 per cent if any remained in February just before my son's birthday. That is how we picked up so many sets cheaply; we would build them together and then part them out to build other things. Our older Lego are pretty beat up after surviving being smashed on cement floors a lot by two sons and their friends. They played with them until they were about 12, and then the Dark Ages began in our house. So it really is neat to see the early ads with the sets that predated those we collected!

A great idea to find the house on Google and then build it! A lovely design....so much detail on the exterior....it takes some looking at to catch most of it. And the interior is cool, too. Congratulations on a fine build!

Wow! That is wonderful! Congrats Pandora!

Wow! We love the Smithsonian museums, too, and this is a lovely MOC! Both the front and the back are incredible, and the elevators are quite impressive. If you only enjoy building the exteriors, don't worry about the interiors. What you have done is quite creative and very representative of the real thing. Congratulations on your very fine work! Our favorite museum in Wash DC is the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art. Pei's diagonal walls would be quite a challenge in Lego. And it would not be complete without Calder's striking and huge mobile in the center. Has anyone seen an MOC of the New Pinakhotek in Munich? As we walked through it last Sunday, it seemed like a good candidate for building with its many arches and light gray walls. Cheers!

DeDe, You are so correct that the ground floor room is too small to do much; I ended up buying two CC's and combining them so there would be room for a larger restaurant, etc. These are gorgeous buildings, and all of the modulars are wonderful in my book. Congratulations on a fine build!

Pandora, Congrats on another outstanding review! Will buy at least one or two of this set probably combining them into a larger beach house. Medium blue is a lovely color....glad to see it used in a house. The two things I don't care for are the red roof and the single minifig. There should be at least a gal and a guy, and they need new torsos IMHO. We have all of the Creator houses (I think) and love each of them. The suggestion to furnish them using Friends pieces is right on. When they are filled up, these houses will look much better. Way to go!