Faefrost

It gets worse. New Agents, the City subtheme is Arctic (which is a bit more adventurous than say "package delivery services"), The Star Wars sets are almost entirely OT, There look to be a few more Middle Earth sets, and The Movie theme will have the new Classic Space Cruiser and that completely insane pirate ship. I'm gonna be soooo broke

I got it from Amazon. So if you are somewhere served by them they should have it.

There seems to be some sort of major DDOS attack going on on parts of the internet tonight. It brought down the World of Warcraft servers for a few minutes. That may be part of what you are experiencing.

The alt face on the cop is one of the coolest, creepiest figs Lego has ever put out. He's also different from the Bad Cop in the sets. That one has Good Cop as his alt face.

Holy crp! Were getting new Agents sets, new City Arctic sets, a classic Space set over in the movie stuff, Star Wars is mostly OT with no signs of JarJar, and they've started to give us stores and commercial buildings in creator? You all would tell me if I had actually had a stroke and was lying here drooling and imagining all of this, right? And yet it seems oddly topical. First mission, "rescue trapped boatload of frozen hippie's before they can be devoured by rabid penguins."

Mos Eisley! At long last. I'm also kinda stoked for The Ghost of all things. I would love something about the same size and scale and such as my 7965 to balance out the shelf. I've always been bummed that they never made an Outrider. If this list is correct, than my guess is right. Next wave is all OT and Rebels in order to start getting folks prepped for SW VII.

Oh man. The original Agents sets will be tough to top. The Mobile Command Center remains as one of the all time great Lego sets. Dr. Inferno's robot was one of the best robots Lego has ever put forth. And so many others are just amazing. As you can tell Agents is one of my absolute favorite themes. I am so overjoyed at the thought of it returning in some form. And I was just thinking how much a few of the new Ninjago and Lego Movie sets reminded me of Agents in their design.

Don't forget TABA's movie release date was also switched from late summer to Christmas very very late in the process. So it may be like the LR sets, and these were scheduled around the original movie release.

It's absolutely not Lego. The only ship hull Lego ever did close to that color was I believe the Harry Potter Durmstrang ship. Which was a lot smaller. Plus Lego Bow pieces aren't flat like that at the upper edges. But don't just toss it without figuring out what it is. Even non Lego ships generally have some value or collectors interest, if you have all the pieces. Hah! Found it. It's from Character Builder. http://www.characterbuilding.eu/hmaf/large-playsets/ The Royal Navy Type 45 Destroyer. Kind of an unusual and interesting looking set. I'm guessing you are in the UK? It's really strange to see much Character Builder in North America that isn't Dr. Who or Scooby Doo.

I think they basically lifted a customizers artwork and designs and started selling them.

Let's see, the crew is a hippie, a goth chick, a space case, a clueless idiot who seems strangely concussed and whatever the heck metal beard is. The set features a green barfing unicorn cat, a flying cow, lots of whirly spinners and a double decker couch. Somehow I can't escape the sneaking suspicion that the target market is essentially Colorado, starting at midnight tonight. I'm thinking that smoke is not from the ships engines.

It's 2700+ pieces. I'm thinking $180 at a minimum, and maybe closer to $250. Am I alone in thinking the ship probably replaces the Haunted House in Lego's rotation?

That is one weird "bum'ed"ship. It looks taller than it is long. The sails are technic fenders. Is that another full sized Metalbeard mech? If so this thing is enormous. And joy of joys... Benny! (Ok he's not Pirate related, but still Benny!). And Wow the bizarreness just continues. A Flying Cow. Emmett's double decker couch. And 2700 pieces?!? I think we can safely identify the smoke coming out of that smokestack?

Target was handing out 10% off anything coupons to anyone the weekend after Christmas as a goodwill gesture over the Credit Card hacking.

I think we are still being overly optimistic about what if anything remains in the pipeline. I don't think its 3 or 4 sets for each LotR and the Hobbit. I think its 4 or 5 sets total for both combined. I don't think they would have held back more than 2 sets from LotR and 3 from Hobbit, to coincide with TABA. They might have padded it out just enough so that they only needed to extend one production wave rather than two. Remember TLG schedules years in advance, and adding in two more Middle Earth waves to coincide with the extra movie means moving a lot of other stuff. Given that most of their other newer licences and themes that have run concurrently with the Middle Earth themes, seem to be doing crazy good (Friends, TMNT, Super Heroes, Disney Princesses, etc, not to mention the unprecedented fan demand that forced them to bring back Ninjago) there is probably not a lot of flex in the Lego production and marketing / shelf schedules right now. Granted LR, GS and Castle seem to be ending with no immediately apparent replacement beyond Lego movie stuff, and who knows what Chima has left in its run. So who knows where it all stands?

Those are a great example of where it is easier for Disney / Lucasfilms to act than it is for Lego. Lego has to prove that the designs are exact copies of their products. They recently lost such a challenge against sen Bao I believe. Sen Bao had just enough design differences to skirt the laws. But the figs Bob shows are clear violations of the Star Wars trademark and intelectual property. Something that is a lot easier to enforce. Lego has the expectation that Lucas will protect its IP and the value of the license that Lego holds. They would complain to Disney, and Disney would go after the offending clones.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it is unlikely that any Minas Tirith CuuSoo project will see production. No way no how. Minas Tirith is such an important, clear and obvious element of the movies that it is surely already covered under the existing licensing agreement with WB and New Line. As such chances are the license will preclude anyone's third party designs or royalties. If the license has already expired or the line discontinued that it is extremely unlikely that TLG will go back and seek a limited renewal just for one fan set. They would have already done reams of analysis of the line and its business case before opting not to continue it. It's a world of difference from BttF. For us to see a Minas Tirith set it will have to come from the internal Middle Earth design group. Not CuuSoo. As far as Alcarin's "more accurate" Minas Tirith display piece. While more accurate, it has kind of a self defeating niche market attached to it. It would be looking for the convergence point of LotR fans and Architecture fans in order to create a set with no play features, no minifigs and no swooshability. It's a paperweight. A very nice paperweight. But is there honestly enough of a market out there for such to justify it? It would probably have more purchasers looking for an assortment of white bricks than it would have LotR fans. How well did odd minifigless scales work out for the Star Wars Midi Scale ships? It would not surprise me to see a single combined release of 4 or 5 remaining sets. Mixed between LotR and Hobbit. Basically each sub theme seeing a half wave. How much could they have held back when the movies were split to 3? I don't think they would have gone back to design a lot of new sets at that point. They might have simply chosen to stretch the planned 2 releases of each into 3.

That may simply be observer error. Riddles for the Ring did not appear to sell well. Wizard Duel and Galdalf Arrives seemed to more than hold their own.

I think we have been seeing more, and more varied hair pieces and stylings than ever before. Especially on the female characters. The CMF's have certainly seen a bunch of new ones, or some very effective recolors of licensed ones. Just as examples for new the Trendsetter piece is wonderful and I expect we will see some broader colors of that. The Punk Rock girls bob has also been done in black. The ice skater's piece, the Bavarian Girls pigtails. The Gypsy's headscarf do (ok not real flexible). The beehive, As for interesting re uses, the Movie Star uses you aformentioned Delores Umbrage hair piece in a wonderfully useful light blonde. The Sleepyhead's hair is used for a short spiky haired female Superman character. I think Lego does shy away from using some shorter or more male known hairpieces for female characters. Simply because the visual language of minifigs is more limited. They want to quickly and strongly communicate through clear visual queues that a character is a woman. The two main tools they have for doing that, regardless of outfit are their preferred hair style and lipstick (even where not truly in place such as Gail the Construction Worker.)

That gets a little confused. Some of what passes as prelims were actually designs from the Tt games designers for the PotC video game. I think they may have even assembled a real world model. I don't think we ever had any real confirmation of a PotC Flying Dutchman. Granted it wouldn't be surprising if they considered it, and maybe built a sketch model. But QAR and BP may not have been huge sellers, at least not as frontline retail products in the big box stores. (I got both of mine on deep deep clearance discounts at Walmart.)

The architecture sets normally carry a bit more in the way of documentation, do they not? As in the instruction manuals often involve text and descriptions and history of the buildings, requiring language localization? That right there might be a key piece of it. Due to the nature of the building they localized the manual for south east Asia, but did not feel there was enough of a target audience elsewhere to warrant western localized releases? This is a similar issue to what is faced with the Master Builder Academy and the 21050 Architecture Studio sets being US or North America only. The heavy language localization requirements of the included books.

I'm genuinely curious about the origin of that ships hull? I don't recognize it.

A Kingdom Come style Battle Armor Wonder Woman would be real easy to do with existing parts. Just print her legs and torso with gold armor, use the CMF Aztec's helmet and add a WW printed round shield and Pearl gold short sword.

They tend to keep at least parts of 2 waves on the shelf. Or at a minimum have some overlap. They are just now starting to retire some of the first wave Hobbit sets, and the last of the first wave LotR sets. I would expect to see the second wave LotR sets retire before any of these current Hobbit sets.

I'm betting this. I suspect that most of us only discovered this building through the Lego architecture set. While a spectacular building, it is fairly new and not yet really well known worldwide. Which may have somewhat limited the sets marketing appeal globally.