Faefrost

I know they have talked about their new color injecting system, and how it allows them to use neutral colored pellets and color them as needed. I think it came online about 5 years ago. I have no idea how extensive it is, or what exactly it is and is not used for? Is anyone else hoping that this is another split pair of 16 x 32 buildings like the Pet Shop? I was looking at my display and realized that two 16 x 32's would fit in so much better. Plus I can see them doing a restaurant with a smaller footprint, and not needing the full 32x32 for the effect. So I was hoping we get more to it.

Yeah, I try and think that way, but keep failing. Hugh Jackman was frowned apron because he was almost unknown and cast at the last minute. Michael Keaton there was backlash because at that time all he was known for was comedy. He had never been seen in a weightier role. Ledger was backlash mainly because it was unknown and very different than Nicholson's more classic take. Yes all of them proved us wrong. But there was a large amount of unknown there. The problem is Ben Affleck is not an unknown. He is very much a well known quantity. So well known that the Ben Affleck persona tends to overshadow the role that he plays. Much like Tom Cruise or Will Smith. He comes off great in parts that he directs, or in parts created specifically with him in mind, because the roles are basically designed to put Ben Affleck on screen. But Batman is not that sort of role. Batman was not created for Ben Affleck. Historically when Ben gets that type of role he tends to be awful. And these days I fear we will not be able to actually see Batman, because we will have Ben Affleck standing in front of him. (Sigh! Was Karl Urban unavailable?)

Agents of SHIELD set? Agent Coulson with Lola?

I think at least initially we will just see interior scenes, and not standing buildings. Things like the Living Room with couch or Homers Console. If we do get a free sanding structure it might be something that scales easily, like Bart's Treehouse (and wouldn't THAT be a nice Halloween set?)

I don't think we will see any Super Hero themed Advent Calenders soon. The problem would be the non minifig micro builds. Outside of a few Batman rides there really isn't much to do that is readily Super Hero identifiable. Not a lot to fill an advent calender with sadly.

We may all be suffering from a misconception about DoS and TABA? For the most part we all seem to think that the dividing point will be the death of Smaug, limiting Smaug to just the second film. This might not be the case. The climax of the Smaug story may be in the third film, with the second comprising a lot of the fleshed out Dol Guldar stuff? That would explain the set names. Remember the last minute decision didn't just effect Lego's plans for the first wave. There are probably a few sets that they originally had planned for this one, that have now been pushed back into the third, without a huge addition of new iconic scenes for them to select alternatives from the second. They may have planned a big Smaug set for this wave, and simply pushed it back without replacing it in the release schedule. Just as Jackson is essentially padding out his work to turn 2 movies into 3, Lego is probably mostly padding their plans out to turn 2 planned waves into three. I would imagine that their LotR/Hobbit product managers were more than a bit peeved at Jackson and company over the last minute changes to AUJ, that left them with major product on the shelves that had not been seen in the movie. I can't see that they had any reason to be overly enthusiastic about expending major resources to correct for the filmakers last minute changes. (A ton of toy companies were kinda furious about the change. Especially those who produced Tauriel stuff.)

It wouldn't surprise me if there was such a thing planned. But if so it might have been cancelled before the Black Pearl set was made? The minifig selection for the BP never made a ton of sense. It always seemed some of them would have been more appropriate for the Dutchman, while a number of fairly easy to make BP crew were skipped. I assumed it was so they would not waste new head molds.

Much of the charm if PotC was the supporting cast. To many of which they either killed off in 3 (the Governor, Norington etc) or outright ignored in the 4th ( All of the pearls crew save Gibbs, Murtogg and Mulroy etc. still want a PotC battle pack with them and Pintel and Ragetti). So all the 4th movie had was Jack, Gibbs, Cleavage, and Geofrey Rush and Ian McShane sort of attempting to play the same role, badly considering their normal caliber. (Compare how wonderfully nuanced Rush's Barbosa was in PotC 1 and 3, then watch him in 4 and cringe. ) Don't even get me started on the whole mess that was Blackbeard! I mean really? If you are going to use Blackbeard as the main villain in your Pirate move, wouldn't it behoove you to oh I don't know, read an actual book about the real Blackbeard? Or even just a Wikipedia article? They might have found some surprising stuff. Stuff that would have better informed the movie. Stuff like the real Edward Teach was more akin to Jack Sparrow than to the murderous bloodthirsty Pirate he is portrayed as. He was particularly noted as an astonishingly effective Pirate who had these habits of really trying not to kill anybody unless it was absolutely necessary. He treated prisoners well. Save slavers. He despised slavers and slavery and made it his business to end theirs. He was renowned for freeing slaves, or given the chance hiring them onto his crew. Hmmmm? Doesn't this behavior sound suspiciously like a certain fictional Pirate Captain we have been watching for 4 movies now? Now imagine how much more fun could have been had with Stranger Tides if the writers as realized this? In spite of all of this, I am so hoping the next one is good. I love 1 and 3, like 2, and am praying we never see 4's like again. (Well ok the music was good.)

There were rumors that they had one planned but never produced it. Although my suspicion is most of those rumors were based on the hires sketch models and designs made by the Tt designers for the Lego PotC game. It seems like an obvious choice to make, but there may be underlying design issues with it. We have seen some great MOCs of the ship, but I am not sure how well you could do it with a simpler "set" type build. The Tt guys designed a perfect looking one digitally, but they admit that it would fold up like wet cardboard under real world forces. Plus I don't think the QAR sold as well as they might have liked? And lets not forget that making the QAR and the Black Pearl are kind of the easy design choices, since at heart they ARE physically the same ship. Just trimmed out differently. (Not kidding about this, it's why we don't actually see the Pearl in the 4th movie. It was redressed as the QAR.)

Should I be concerned that your link does not lead to CuuSoo, but instead asks for a Facebook login? The actual link does not match the declared URL. Not a good way to start things off.

Admiration vs Empathy, Why so many FOL and Original projects don't thrive on CuuSoo. Alrighty, I apologize in advance. This will probably be yet another one of my longer winded bits of babbling. Feel free to skip this large wall of text and weird pictures and just skip on down to discussing something interesting. The Topic for today is that that so seems to haunt AFOL’s over CuuSoo. Why do great original projects. Fantastic FOL projects, garner so few votes and so little support on CuuSoo. While anything with an outside fanbase just churns up the charts. What is going on here? We know this is happening. Our good friend GlenBricker has rather clearly tracked it with his numbers and his magic and voodoo. http://blog.brick-hero.com/ So what is going on here? Just looking at the discussions around here we can see that there is a common feeling that this is happening. And some frustration that our fellow FOL’s are not effectively countering it. Here are Just a few examples of clear and reasonable coments from some of our more disturbingly level headed EB forums members, spread over a number of CuuSoo threads. Notice how they all seem to arrive at the same place? (And my apologies for cutting and grabbing some of your comments fromover in other CuuSoo related threads. Trust me it all ties together eventually.) ShaydDeGrai notices the disparity of support coming from within the AFOL community. He is taking steps to correct his own behavior to support fellow FOLS, but why does this need to be? Missing Brick is showing frustration that yet another obscure Niche IP based project has rocketed to 10k using outside votes while more general audience stuff gets left behind. -N13OS- Has the same concerns. But his observations are that yes those from outside the lego community are the main driver.(something verified by GlenBrickers science stuff) And here we have GlenBricker talking about some of the deeper symptoms of what we are observing. Pay attention to the bolded section. In order to begin to explain this, I would like to teach you to two concepts. 1. Admiration – Admiration is how you react when you see a really really good MOC. When you want to look at every detail. See how they put it together. View with interest the story that they tell. Contrast this with; 2. Empathy – Empathy is when you are not being told that story. It is a story that you know already. The presented project speaks to something inside you. It is the feeling you get from things that you build. It is the things you sometimes get from those third party sets that tell or show something that you closely identify with. That desire to make this project or design yours in some way. When you look at a project with Admiration, you are looking at it as some elses MOC. Often a really really good MOC. You wish to stare at it for hours. Learn from it. Congratulate the person that made it, etc. But at the end of the day, it is somebody elses very very good MOC. It tells there story, not yours. Yi=ou like it. You compliment it. You discuss it and learn from it. But you don't seek to purchase it. You have no internal tie to it that feeds a desire to make it yours or megablocks it to your stories. You can spend weeks starring at it in bliss just observing all of the little details and stories and everything. But it is still not really in your head. You don't have some identifying element that truly sucks you in and makes you feel a part of it. Whereas when you look on a project with Empathy, who made it disappears. You know this story. You feel this story. It is already a part of you in some small way. You wish to purchase it and bring it home. People almost always only vote when they feel Empathy for a project. They get enjoyment out of those that they feel Admiration for, but they will rarely vote for them and will almost never purchase them should they become a product. There is also a third category that we will call polite scorn. I think we all know what we mean by it. Polite FOL’s do not often discuss it beyond some carefully worded constructive criticism. Scorn may get a few votes out of politeness or pity. Beyond that it is pretty irrelevant. Now here’s where it gets messy for we AFOL’s - The normal entry point for AFOL and general FOLs for projects on CuuSoo is at Admiration. They are looking at the project through the builders eyes. They can admire their fellows work. But only a small portion of this work will garner any Empathic response in them. Does it fit into your inner world or story? Is it of something you are deeply fond of? Does not just look good, but outright speak to you as something not merely good or well made, but desirable? That’s when it reaches Empathy. - Now the outside fans that come to support s single project have this equation reversed. The various niche sources, well known IP’s, Pop Culture references, TV, Movies, Video Games, give them a built in touch point of Empathy. They walk in the door Empathetic towards the one or two projects that brought them there. Everything else that they look at while on the CuuSoo site will start from a base point of Admiration or Scorn. Now the final kicker. - People only vote for Empathy. - People only pay for Empathy. - Only Empathy will make a project a product. It doesn’t matter how good a MOC it is. How detailed it is. What wonderful techniques, etc. If it does not speak to something familiar inside the viewer, find its place in the internal story that they have going on between their ears, it will remain simply admired. So what does this mean for us? Or for FOL's on CuuSoo? Does it mean that our projects will never ever get made? No. But it does mean that we need to look at our projects and how we present them in a different light. It is not simply grabbing an existing fanbase and pointing them at Lego like a horde of invading frat boys. It is in part tweaking our projects and our presentations to engender a clean emotional response from other viewers and not simply ourselves. Provided I don't bore everyone to death or completely enrage them with this one, in Part II we'll look a little at some of our projects out there, and some of the reasons that they may fall within one of the three categories listed. (Or you can just hold me down and pitch large bricks at my head instead)

Sorry weird double post

The old and newer variant of the part probably just get dumped into the same bin at the factory. We see this a lot when there are slight updates or variations to part molds.

The problem with the Macross set isn't Hasbro or any prior toy deals (does Hasbro actually have any Macross lines?). The problem is the root IP. It's a whole complicated legal mess, but what it comes down to is Macross was owned and created by two different Japanese companies originally. Neither had the funding to cover the whole thing. At some point one of those companies outright sold the western rights to the IP and it's merchandising to Harmony Gold in the US, where it became Robotech. (Note they did not license it to Harmony Gold. They sold it.) the other company later challenged this sale. Needless to say this has triggered almost 30 years of confusing, contradictory and outright absurd international legal wrangling. While who owns the IP when and where is confusing and questionable at this point, the one thing that seems solid is Big West owns the Merchandising rights in Japan and Asia (Macross) while Harmony Gold outright owns the merchandising (for the first Macross series only) in North America. (Robotech). This is why we cannot get all those wonderful Macross Valkyrie models from BanDai and Hasegawa etc over here as regular retail products in the US and Canada. We have to specialty import them. I just can't see Lego sticking their head in this licensing Vipers nest for a 10-20k CuuSoo run. Their licensing department will take one look at this mess and start drinking.

I think you inadvertently hit on a key point. The vehicle set has racked up a ton of long term play time. The more static settings have not.

One other reported rumor is that ILM is seriously ramping up their model shop and practical effects division. Word from on high is that Disney does not want another look alike CGI mess. And it's not like CGI saves them that much money for the fx stuff these days.

Is it just me, or has the discussion about whether or not we might get a Thranduil minifig crossed over into that same level of obsessive crazy, that has so permeated any discussions regarding Minas Tirith? If we get a fig we get a fig. If we don't so be it. Hopefully we get something good regardless. But the levels of obsession are starting to get just a tad creepy.

I think it's a fairly safe bet, that provided licensing does not torpedo it, that at a minimum a Ghostbusters Ecto 1 and 4 figs is what will be produced out of this horribly crowded review period.

Not calculated it, but you can probably make an informed guess that years in which there is not a corresponding source of new material will, at this stage of the game, result in a greater number of rehashes. We are in a dead period this wave. CW ended, the new Rebels has not hit yet, and episode VII is looming in the background. Sales drop off when there is not a corresponding show or movie. Plus it's a e really down economy, so we don't get a lot new this time.

Yeah, I'm actually hoping the Oz set holds back until the next review period. This one is too crowded. I don't think it will matter with the Macross set sadly. As soon as the licensing dept realizes the licensing complexity involved they will most likely opt against it.

The bottle with the ship came from the PotC 4191 "Captain's Cabin" set. I think it also showed up in the 10228 Haunted House.

I thought we once saw a report on the Minecraft set that implied an initial 10k run and possibly 2 subsequent runs of 20k each? 20k total just seems to small for what we have seen on store shelves more recently.

Woohoo! Called this one last year. It's just too perfect a fit for them not to make an attempt. Maybe we will get a huge D2C Cinderella's Castle in a modular style ala the Haunted House? We can dream.

Not just for Lego. This is a good approach for us around here. No one wins in a flame war. The parties involved know what got out of hand. We do not need to know. We can take a lesson from this of "don't be a raving jackass on Internet forums." Everything else has nothing to do with us. It is in our best interests to simply walk away and ignore it all. Move along nothing to see here.

As with all of their "bans" context and situation matter. Lego does not have a blanket ban on "religion". Lego is a private family owned business. That family is Christian and their faith has informed the business for all of its existence. So once again context matters. No they will not do something that seems to back or promote a specific real world religion. Don't expect to see a City themed church or specific modern religious iconography. But classic stuff? I don't see a major issue, as long as it doesn't involve stuff like nailing someone up to pieces of timber. I don't think we will ever see a "Passion of the Christ" type set. But we do have a released set that includes a brick built version of one of the holiest items in Judaism and Christianity. The Arc of the Covenant. They have included other locales with some connection to faith in other sets. The PotC Mill set is a Mission for example. Ninjago and various Adventurers sets have danced into more Eastern themes showcasing Temples or various sorts. I would not be surprised if they were to ever release a medieval friar in a CMF series to go alongside the forest men. And lets not forget the Advent Calenders, Christmas and Easter Holiday sets and the basic decor of the Winter Village. It's the same as things relating to alcohol and military subjects. Context matters. It's ok for PotC to have a bar, but nor City. Superman and Indiana Jones can have military vehicles, but not Friends. Etc.