ShaydDeGrai

While not a GWP first day of release story, I can relate to this on one special occasion. I recall one year getting a physical invitation in the mail from my local Lego Store (with a postage paid RSVP card to reserve my spot if I was planning to attend). The invite was for a special "VIP Black Friday Preview Sale" (way back before there were "Insiders Rewards" and all that stuff on the website) to be held the Saturday before Thanksgiving at some crack of dawn hour of the morning. They were opening the store a few hours earlier than the mall's regular business hours, but they let us in even before the store itself opened and let us hang out in the mall outside the store for an hour or so. They served us coffee and donuts and the manager ran a Lego Trivia game with sets as prizes. They had Lego name tags made up for us. We also got gift bags with assorted Lego bling, including leftover GWP sets from earlier in the year. Between the swag bag and prizes I probably got about $75 worth of kits, minifigs, keyrings and parts before I even started shopping. When the store itself actually opened (again several hours before it was open to the general public), we each got assigned a "personal shopping assistant" who had a checklist of all the kits they had in inventory and all I had to say was, "I want one of these, I want two of those..." while pointing things out in the store and my assistant packaged the whole thing up from fresh inventory in the back room. He even got a hand cart and loaded my purchases into my car for me. Oh, and of course, we got first crack at that years' special holiday GWP set and a set that was supposed to be released on Black Friday itself. I can honestly say it was the best experience I've ever had "shopping" (Lego or otherwise). I met some great people, some of whom I kept in touch with for years afterwards and remained very loyal to that particular store (I live within reasonable driving distance to four Lego Shops) for the remainder of that manager's time there even when I might have saved a few bucks at Amazon. There were only a dozen or so of us (not counting kids and spouses) who'd attended the event (which I later learned was targeted at the top 25 VIP purchasers (in person and on-line combined) in the region) but we had a blast. The "privilege" of being one of the first people to click a link on a website just doesn't compare. Then again, the current insider's program kinda pales by comparison to a store that not only calls you a VIP but actually treats you like one (even if it was only for a few hours once a year). And speaking of partying at The Lego Shop, maybe the (theoretical) GWP given out shouldn't go to the first people to buy Minas Tirith, it should go to the first customers who buy at least one copy of the set while dressed as a character from the LOTR. Ridiculous, I know, but more festive and might keep the GWP in stock a little longer

From an economics standpoint, TLG should TOTALLY have larger production runs on GWPs, especially when it's a real exclusive tied to a high-end "flagship" set like Barad Dur or The Enterprise. I'd even go so far as to say that from a marketing perspective small production runs to capitalize on FOMO actually work _against_ the company. Any fan who's going to spend $500+ on some exclusive, near-to-their-heart-themed set is going to buy that set whether they get a GWP or not; some might hold off (or save up for it) , others might and wait pray for a lightening deal on Amazon, but everyone (including TLG) knows they are "destined" to get it eventually and typically have two years or more to follow through. BUT if TLG offers an exclusive minifigure or cool shuttlepod (or both) and only makes enough to elate a handful of fans and disappoints (or pisses off) everyone else. like (several of) their Comic-Con exclusives strategies, it might create buzz, but it's lousy customer relations. Let us not forget that LEGO wholesale distributors typically buy kits in bulk at somewhere around 60-65% of MSRP . They then take their cut and resell the items to retailers who honor (or even discount) the MSRP and make a profit for themselves. If I were TLG, and I had the option of selling a kit like Minas Tirith for sixty cents on the dollar so it could eventually end up on Barnes and Noble or Amazon versus selling it myself at full MSRP, I'd like more of the money to come to me rather than middle-men and competing retailers. Now the guaranteed bulk sale is really nice and TLG certainly doesn't want to walk away from this revenue stream, but the margin is low. Let's say the kit sells for 650USD, at sixty cents on the dollar that kit could be wholesaling for $390 ($240 less than MSRP) If TLG can convince people to buy directly from them, they make rake in two-thirds more money than they do on the wholesale market. Moreover, since "profitability" is already factored into the wholesale price, every dollar they bring in above the $390 threshold is (nearly - still have the overhead of running the website, shipping and handling) pure profit. Enter the GWP. If I can bundle a high priced item (or high enough priced collection of smaller items) with some sort of exclusive and convince a customer to buy direct (where I get, say $200 more per transaction than I would have if they shopped at Amazon) then a decent GWP (FOMO or not, from a marketing perspective) is totally worth their time and effort. I'd make the GWP production run for the same number of units the initial run of sets is going to be and go on bundling them until the set is back-ordered. If the set turns out not to be as popular as expected (or Amazon sales - without a GWP - are cannibalizing the supply chain) and they have extra GWP sets, put them on hold for a year or so then make them available as insider rewards once the scalpers on eBay have driven up demand. As for a GWP for Minas Tirith, without going so far as to tap something that could be a recognizable set in its own right, I wouldn't mind a siege tower or a decent trebuchet and some rank-and-file minifigs.

Couldn't agree more on that front. I'm a major fan of form language (and have lived through multiple eras where overly simplistic designs relied way too much on stickers and printed parts to convey to the user what the model was actually supposed to be). A good design should let the shape and textures of the parts speak for themselves. Failing that, I prefer printed parts over stickers, but those parts should be few in number and essential for the overall design. For my own MOC-ing purposes, printed parts are far less versatile than a plain brick so I don't want to clutter up my collection with a lot of "limited use" parts. Ironically, the one theme where I don't actually mind the stickers is Speed Champions. The switch to 8-wide (and introduction of a fair number of new molds in recent years) has allowed that line to really embrace quality form language and brick-built detail but it still uses some of the most complicated sticker sheets around; but I'm okay with that precisely because the models are race cars and if you real NASCAR vehicles, you quickly realize they are covered in stickers too so, in this one, exceptional, case the presence of stickers (at least philosophically) adds to the realism (even if correctly placing and aligning them is a pain in the neck).

My VERY first elements that might qualify as a minifigure were slabbies from the fire engine set #693 in the mid 1970's. My first minifigure (as we know them today) was either a police officer in a black uniform or a girl with black pigtails, a blue torso and red pants. The cop had buttons printed on the torso; the girl only had a printed face, no chest or leg detailing. I don't recall which came first, but I remember wishing the color scheme of the girl had been the other way around with blue legs and a red top. I also recall not being too keen on the redesign back in the day. After three years of playing with slabbies, articulated minifigs just seemed weird and, well, something of a betrayal of all the kids (like me) that had invested their hard earned allowances and paper route money in collecting sets that were based on the original design. I eventually warmed to the new design after I started replacing the the slabbies' heads with 1x1 round trans-red bricks and started thinking of them as androids in my own little Lego I, Robot society.

I was just cleaning up a bit this weekend and happened across some old LOTR and Hobbit "spare" sets (either kits I never got around to building or extras I bought to MOD-out official sets into something more suitable in scale in my mind - looking at you puny Weathertop, pathetic little Orc Forge and Black Tripping Hazard on a Hinge Gate). If I'm being honest, and no disrespect to the original designers of these sets intended, I really don't think TLG needs to worry about revisiting any of their prior efforts on this theme. It's been more than a decade since those sets first came out and some of them were pretty forgettable even in their heyday (I had an "oh yeah, they DID have a Moria set didn't they. Nice doorway, now where's the rest of it" moment when I found the box.) I can appreciate TLG needing to make sets at various price points when targeting a playset line, but if the game plan is to do one 18+ flagship set a year, the should just ignore any prior art and make the best kit they think they can feasibly market to the AFOL and/or adult Tolkien fanbase. While its likely true that there are current owners of Orthanc, Helm's Deep, and/or a Corsair of Umbar who might not rush out to buy a revisit of those particular models (IMO the three best offerings of the original 2013-2014 sets), I think it equally likely that those people are outnumbered by the number of people (teens who didn't have rich parents, college students, recent grads living in mom and dad's basement until their student loans are paid down, etc.) who wanted those sets back in the day and just didn't have the disposable income to pursue them. There might even be a few people out there who might buy a revisit despite owning the originals (lord knows I need to check Brickset to keep track of all the variations on Snowspeeders, X wings and Millenium Falcons I've collected over the years - and my snowspeeders all look a lot more similar to each other than The Council of Elrond looks to Rivendell.) In the end, I think it's less about the subject matter than it is about the treatment. Don't set out to build a 100USD set, targeted at a ten-year-old consumer, inspired by Helm's Deep; Set out to build an impressive, but practical, model of Helm's Deep then price it and grade it accordingly. Would I, personally, prefer to see something original, certainly but when I compare a set like Rivendell to, well, pretty much everything that came before it in this theme, I realize that just doing real justice to the source material IS original in my book.

I remember back in the day (nearly half a century ago now) AMT (maker of the original Star Trek plastic, assembly required models) put out a kit called simply the Star Trek Space Ship Set. The kit was made up of three (smaller than the solo model kits) original series (well, at that point the only series unless you count the animated cartoon) ships, the Enterprise (NCC-1701), a D9 Klingon Battle Cruiser*, and a Romulan Warbird displayed on a common base. I'd love to see TLG's take on recreating a set like this. * Fun (but useless) facts, AMT actually bought the model kit rights to Star Trek very early on in the show's existence in a clever bit of marketing/producing/fundraising on the part of Desilu Productions (Lucille Ball 's production company) The "D9 Klingon Cruiser" was designed by Matt Jeffries (designer of the Enterprise for the show) as a model for AMT to produce BEFORE any Klingon ships had actually appeared in the show. Later in the series when the scripts called for a Klingon ship to appear, they reused the design on screen. The Romulan Warbird from TOS, had a very short life on screen. Behind the scenes the SFX model had been damaged beyond repair and they didn't have enough stock footage of its prior appearance on screen to make the episode work, so they tweaked the script to say that Romulans were now using Klingon designs and used the D9 model instead.

The R&D certainly does continue. As I mentioned earlier, VR (as a serious research topic) has been around since the 1960's. My own doctorial work was on the creation of new programing paradigms to address the unique constraints of VR (virtual reality), AR (Augmented reality) and post-WIMP (window-icon-menu-pointer) applications. I used to teach a course in this stuff as well as managing an advanced post-WIMP exploration lab. Public interest in VR, however, is very much a multi-decade long cycle of excitement, consumerism, disillusionment and apathy. You give the masses stereoscopic CGI and surround sound and after the initial thrill wears off, they say how much cooler it would have been if the view would update when the move their head and if they were able to move things around by touching them. R&D takes another decade to deliver head and hand tracking; the public flocks back only to eventually complain that the CGI they see in a $100M+ movie that took three years to render two hours of playback looks SO much better than the scene graph getting rendered at fifteen frames a second on their 640x480 resolution goggles. R&D takes another decade to speed up the chips, improve the displayed and invent dedicated graphics processors; and people complain about all the wires; R&D comes up with wireless video streaming and optical tracking and the masses (after punching grandma ashes off the mantlepiece and walking into a wall) complain about foot tracking and the lack of meaningful haptic feedback. etc., etc. I'm pretty sure we'll get there eventually (well, maybe not Star Trek Holodeck "there" but economically viable industrial, entertainment and personal application "there") but the gulf between what's available in the lab versus what a company can expect to market to the home consumer is just too damned wide right now. Twenty years ago my lab had people in headset, pedaling around a virtual world on (essentially) stationary unicycles, tracking hand gestures (optically interpreting American Sign Language and finger spelling) in surround sound pods that could blow air in various directions and were mounded on a gimbal to let us change the direction of gravity in the user's inner ear. It was cool; it was seriously immersive; and, it wasn't exactly state of the art even back then (though it was a serious pain to write control programs for). Even so, with two decades of opportunities to improve the equipment that I cobbled together I still can't see one of those pods becoming a home consumer piece of equipment for the simple reason that it takes up too much space. Maybe it would work in an industrial setting as a virtual amusement park "ride" in a mall, but I just don't see people getting rid of their sofas, coffee tables, consoles and TVs just so they have space for a VR pod in their living room and while subLOGIC's Flight Simulator for the Apple II was able to capture enough of the spirit of the task to become a commercial hit for those who didn't have room for an actual flight simulator in their garages forty years ago, we've seen time and time again that scaling back the VR experience to something that easily salable just leaves people with buyer's remorse. And speaking of pending buyer's remorse (and honoring the fact that this ISN'T supposed to be a VR discussion thread) has anyone actually gotten their hands on this any of these "smart" brick enabled sets yet? I think all of the "reviews" I've seen so far are all based on the official press release and videos, not hands on bricks. Like Hollywood films, it makes me nervous when a studio doesn't preview the product to reviewers in advance of opening it up to sales...

I think it's a safe bet that future Star Trek sets (at least, no pun intended, the flagship ones) will be aimed at the 18+ crowd simply because people who grew up watching (and building real emotional connections to ) TOS, TNG and DS9 are all getting on in years. Wil Wheton's kids are now older than he was when he played Wesley Crusher on TNG ( I think his youngest graduated from college recently) More recent offerings that a younger audience is more likely to have seen, just don't seem to have resonated with the newest generation of fans the way the old series did with my generation. As far as models themselves go, while there have been some gems (story-wise) among the Paramount+ offerings they haven't really contributed anything truly "iconic" to the cannon (probably just because these aren't mass media shows, they fill a streaming niche for a specific pool of subscribers with eight episodes here, a nine hour movie divided into ten segments there, etc. That's a far cry from two dozen episoded a year, every year for the better part of a decade being broadcast for free to millions of views). The biggest thing I got out of the Kelvin-verse movies was learning that JJ Abrams really wanted to be directing a Star Wars movie instead and had no understanding why Star Trek was a different franchise with a different fan appeal, so that source material's a bit of a non-starter for a lot of die-hards. Even Enterprise and Voyager, while their titular vessels could make interesting sets, they just aren't the ST show people tend to wax on about or active seek out from the streamers. I see articles about DS9 and TNG show up on a near daily basis on my news feeds, I'm pretty sure the last time I saw a mention of Star Trek Enterprise was because a former cast member had died. All of which brings us back to TOS, TNG, DS9 and the pre-Abrams Films (which is still a pretty extensive palette to draw from). Personally, my top choice would be Deep Space 9 itself, along with the full cast of minifigs (just like they did with the Enterprise D) - though this could raise a debate as to which Dax to include (oh well, can anyone say GWP Runabout with alternate Trill?)

VR has actually been around for a long time. It goes back to Ivan Southerland in the 1960's. Back then it was a cool gimmick that the media latched onto which set unrealistic expectations and the whole thing died out because everyone was focused on the gimmick and not on the context. The twenty years later, it resurged again (ushered in by genuine technology advances) and, again, company stepped in to try and sell the gimmick, dismissed the context and applications as an afterthought and the media, again, sensationalized the whole thing to set unrealistic expectations among the general public (think, The Thirteenth Floor, The Lawmower Man, The Matrix, etc vs Mitsubisi's Diamond Park and BattleZone 3D, etc) And the everyone soured on the idea again. Another twenty years later and we have another round of cool new (overpriced) devices back by company that still think the gimmick is enough to move the product with actual applications a mere afterthought. Hmmm, not unlike an overhyped "smart" brick being marketed with subpar Star Wars inspired models just to sell a gimmick that Hallmark greeting cards (like the ones that play Happy birthday when you open them up or the halloween cards that make creepy sound effects when you "disturb" them ) have been using for years. As for the chicken and egg problem, I think the biggest issue is that they's been going after the wrong market. Augmented reality would be an easier nut to crack (though even Google's Glass ain't there yet) They shouldn't be trying to mass market the stuff on day one; they should look to things like the way that photocopiers and 3d printers became "a thing": Sell top quality industrial grade units to companies who can afford them and employ lots of people and get their employees saying, "This is cool I wish I had something like this at home" Them gradually introduce cheaper and smaller units, using the fact that they are designed for home use and affordability as the primary excuse as to why they are underpowered compared to the industrial models. Imagine an aircraft mechanic wearing AR googles that can display the schematics and maintenance checklist for the engine in front of them as their working - that gives way to the guy at your local garage whose AR glasses can scan all the parts in his/her field of vision for wear/cracks versus factory specs and draws bright circles around them to make sure the mechanic notices - now imagine sitting at a table staring at a pile of Lego parts and an instruction book and having your AR glasses point out where in the pile that damned 1x1 plate with horizontal clip in Earth Green is hiding. You don't need killer apps with mass appeal on day one, you need people thinking "wouldn't it be cool if..." and then be able to actually deliver the next big step in that direction.

I recently spoke with a former student of mine who was part of that Meta VR layoff. According to him, all the developers in his immediate group were asked how their work related to AI and anyone who couldn't come up with a positive spin as to how yesterday's hot topic could morph into today's shiny new object off the top of their head got the boot (which was nearly all of them). So I guess VR is out AI is in and today's tech giants have the focus and attention span of a dog in a park full of squirrels.

Yeah, I hear the UCS Crack House, Strip Joint and Fake Youth Hostile Run By A Serial Killer sets just didn't resonate with the focus groups.

Welcome back! I, too, am recently returned after a protracted period of anonymous lurking and flat out absence (though one of my ancient laptops still had my old password cached)

I kind of hate to admit this, but I actually was so dissatisfied with the official offering that I actually wound up buying four of them (yeah, I know, I can hear you thinking "Wait, what? You didn't like the set so you bought three extra copies of it? Huh?") Like you, I bought a second copy to complete the gate and have two towers, then I decided the whole thing was too short so I bought two more copies just for parts to make the gate eight studs taller and double the height of the towers. (Sauron now has four mouths and I have an excess of Gandalfs and Aragons, but whatever...)

If I had to pick just one theme that still embodies "the old ethos" of LEGO from my youth (which was quite awhile ago now but I'm trying not to dwell on that...) while also trying to be new and fresh, capitalizing on new parts, colors and building techniques, I think I'd have to go with Friends. I build these sets with my daughter and we both enjoy the experience. We build them, she plays with them then she scraps them for parts and does what she calls "free build" because she doesn't like the term MOC (sounds too much like "mock" and she doesn't want people making fun of her creations - hey, it apparently makes sense to a 10 year old...) Now, to your point, she also loves Harry Potter, but those sets are build once and keep as playsets in her mind - to the point where we have to rebuild periodically to correct for wear and tear and pet-related damage (The Great Hall was not so great after the cat knocked it off a shelf) Anyway, my point is that, even with all the 18+ plus marketing, licensing, specialty molds and grossly overpriced collectables, there are still some really good kits out there that (give or take a minidoll versus a minifigure ) embody the spirit LEGO we grew up with and I'm glad I can share that with my little one. Creator 3-in-1 is another go-to favorite for this (City used to be, but lately it feels like its given into the trend of simpler builds with more specialized parts). Are store shelves skewed in favor of the flashy stuff? Probably, they only have so much shelf space and want to stock the stuff they know will move. More and more these days I find myself shopping on-line (and when browsing things with my daughter, using filters to level the marketing playing field). As a former educator, I'm a great believer in open-ended play and my biggest concern with marketing licensed sets to kids is the risk of encoraging them to recreate existing narratives rather than inventing their own. As I said, my daughter loves the Friends kits, but has never seen the cartoons or any of the media tie-ins, she doesn't know the official names of any of the minidoll characters and just makes up names on her own. I think that's wonderful. While I have little objection to her slowly turning our playroom into a full recreation of Hogwarts for that particular IP I think its important that her own imagination gets an unencumbered place to play as well.

While Smaug wouldn't be MY first choice for their next Middle Earth set, if they were to do it I think it would have to be brick built and large enough to do justice to the character. Smaug should be large enough to swallow a dwarf like a TicTac, so if you want something you can pose with minifigures it would need to be at least twice the size of anything they've done for Ninjago or D&D before I'd consider it a serious offering (and yes, that would make it a very pricey set). What would I do instead of Smaug? Well, I would say the Argonath, but, as you can tell from my avatar, I've already got one of those, and anything TLG came up with in an official kit would likely be a lot small than mine). It might be nice to see them done as a pair of bookends though (I've been meaning to MOC this up for years and just never got 'round to it.) I think Meduseld, the Golden Hall of Edoras, would be a strong contender for the "Rivendell Treatment" I could see that being a cool model for either display or play with enough complexity to appeal to the 18+ crowd. I also wouldn't object to a UCS revisit to Helm's Deep. I have the entire original line of LOTR kits (and frankly, was a bit disappointed by most of them when compared to the sorts of MOCs people had been building for years just based on the books before the movies came out) and while Helm's Deep was probably the best of the lot (especially when combined with a half dozen Uruk Hai Army battle packs) the scale of the set really didn't due justice to the setting. And speaking of scale, they could also revisit Cirith Gorgor and Morannon (a.k.a. The Black Gate). This location is supposed to be the Towers of the Teeth (Narchost and Carchost) and the Black Gate, not The Tower of the Tooth and the tripping hazard as realized in the original model. The original effort was so scaled back, you needed two of them (building one looking at the instruction book in a mirror) just to complete the scene and even then you were left with a "gate" that inspired the meme "One does simply hop the fence into Mordor"