Faefrost

Where exactly did we ever hear of rumored LOTR CMF's? At best those were wishful thinking among fans. This however was an actual official product announcement from a trade show. While yes, products have occasionally been cancelled after announcement, it's pretty rare for it to happen. In this case they have basically said that one series of CMF's will be based on characters seen in the movie. Given that from what little we have seen of the movie, it looks like it will be using a very very broad pallet of figs from all themes and eras, it is likely that the movie tie in CMFs will look pretty much like every other CMF wave... Just that all 16 of them will have appeared on screen.

Case in point. Read all the way through the article and the problem becomes a bit more clear. While the article opens with Canadian retailers blaming "suppliers" for what seems to be a 13-20% difference in the pricing they pay for finished goods vs the pricing that is paid by US merchants. The bottom half reveals a Canadian import tariff of 18%. Gee?

Oh I agree. If they had any doubts about the power of a nostalgia nerd movie property I think they were vaporized by the BttF set selling out in half a day. Right now some Lego guy is flipping through imdb looking at 80's movies and asking "would this work?"

Looking at the CuuSoo front page brings up an interesting question. The two Ghostbusters projects sit within about 20 votes of each other. I wonder what happens if they hit in the same review period?

That is a rather spectacular interpretation of a 2d piece of comic book art into a gorgeous 3d model. I am in awe. (Quick! Somebody get him a picture of a Harrower class!)

It's more likely that Lucasfilms will be pushing a bit on the OT front next year. We know VII will at a minimum feature much of the original cast, and will follow up to some degree on those characters and their story. So it is safe to assume that they will be striving to re familiarize everyone with them as part of the early marketing push for the new movie. It is in their interests to get fans associating Star Wars with Luke Skywalker and Han Solo etc again. Think of it this way. If you were the person making a new Star Wars movie, by next summer which do you want more fresh in people's minds? Empire Strikes Back? Or Phantom Menace? Add to this that from Lego's point if view, if they are unsure which way the focus of the Star Wars license will be going, than it is always safest to retreat to the OT for subject matter.

It sadly may be a long wait. The sad truth of licensed sets is that a theme with a direct movie tie in will typically do orders of magnitude more business than a similar unlicensed theme. Even if the sets only seem out for a short time, or a larger than normal amount may be sold on sale. The business surge from around the movie is so great that sometimes it is more worthwhile to hold a license as active for a few years, and then wait for the next movie before releasing sets, then it is to shelve the license and do a full unlicensed theme. So in the case of Pirates, they may be sitting on the PotC theme until the next film. This is also why so many of the newer action themes seem to have media tie ins.

Shhh! We don't want them realizing its possible to do it now. The old barding piece had more curves in the rear end, making it not a good choice for stickers. The new piece is much flatter along the sides to allow for the hinged rear legs.

Good point on the age issue. I had forgotten that, so yes you do need to require an adult somewhere. As far as exploiting up/down votes, there are mechanisms that can dilute of soften that, but yeah it has its nasty evil Internet downside.

There are some good ideas in there, and also some that are sorta kinda very very bad. I mean really bad. The top of the list for bad is the Registration mechanism. Let's be honest. This is a mechanism to filter out "niche" supporters. Those non Lego types who come charging in to flood their favorite niche project like (/shudder) Purdue Pete. At a glance this seems like a good idea. It's obvious the Lego community hates this sort of thing. But the truth is these, more than anything else, are the people that CuuSoo really is here for. CuuSoo is at its heart an AFOL creation tool. It sparks fan interest. Both actual Lego fans and fans of things other than Lego, and connects the two things. As I said in the main CuuSoo thread. Virtually every AFOL was once a single subject niche fan. Something brought them back to Lego. Something caught their eye and reminded them of the fun. CuuSoo is an excellent mechanism for doing this. The last thing it needs is to put up artificial barriers to entry. You don't want a VIP card to be a prerequisite for CuuSoo. You want CuuSoo to be a lure and a reason for someone to find themselves suddenly having a VIP card. For the benefit of our hobby and our community long term, it means that we have to tolerate the various niche groups on CuuSoo. In the end it works out as a worthwhile sacrifice. (Note how fast the BttF set sold out at the factory yesterday. This is NOT a bad thing. Long term this is a very very good thing.) You make one clear mistake, which is attempting to associate CuuSoo voters with clear Lego customers. It isn't really that simple, and trust me TLG bases none of their evaluations on any such assumptions. (See the other thread for some of my rambling posts on "customer conversions"). Voters to purchasers do not have a 1 to 1 relationship nor have they ever been expected to. In fact in Lego's view, those single project voters, the niche supporters that everyone complains about? They are a better thing than you or I or any of the regular Lego fans. We are pretty much a captive customer base. As you say anyone with a VIP card they know they can make a sale to. And guess what? They already know exactly how many of us there are, what our Lego purchasing habits are, and they can make a fairly educated guess as to who or how many of us will buy a given product. What is valuable to them is new interest. New eyeballs. New people looking at a Lego set or Lego project for the first time. Delayed Projects and Payments would most likely open CuuSoo and TLG to an unmanageable degree of legal exposure. How long can they sit on something? What claim does any designer than have on future Lego projects? It's likely that the straight short term up/down assessment is the only way that the corporate lawyers will even begin to tolerate CuuSoo. There really is no other way. About the best we can hope for would be some mechanism for CuuSoo to pass a project off to an internal group in some manner. But I am sure that even that has quite a few pitfalls. There are some good ideas in there. I personally would love some sort of thumbs up thumbs down rating system to help find good broadly liked projects. So long as the mechanism cannot be exploited or used for griefing. Better categorization would be good, although I don't think splitting the categories into separate review subjects or using varying standards for them would work. Some mechanism to cut down on children and what I lovingly refer to as "Little Billy's first LDD" would be great, but I don't see a non cumbersome or draconian way to do it. A simple up/down vote mechanism would probably do more good for this than anything else. Other than that CuuSoo is well policed for language and content so there really is no reason to tie or separate Adult or Child participants.

And yet weirdly, the line may not in any way have been a failure with Lego? This is one of those strange things that is hard to gauge from our vantage point. Yeah! They may seem to be going to sale prices very fast. But licensed products with a movie tie in tend to do such an order of magnitude better total sales in a short timeframe than a comparable non licensed series, that a fast surge of sales may equate a bigger win, even if they do have a lot of discounted leftovers. This is sort of the conundrum that the Pirates theme faces with PotC.

They did a decent enough job with the main named characters. The LR, Tonto, Butch Cavendish, Red, The LR's brother etc. but those were all characters that were probably developed early and well mapped out for look and costuming. The other Bandits were probably mostly dressed via a "this looks best on this dude" approach by the wardrobe department shortly before filming, with little actual planning, character development or preliminary work.

I've been trying to figure a way to rework this one by combining it with the LR Stagecoach and maybe some Castle pieces, to come up with a nice 4 horse drawn variant.

- if you swap out the legs the Barbarian has lots of possibilities as a bare chested Pirate. Especially with all of the ornate belts. - The Scarecrows straw hat is starting to make me think a bit of One Piece.

I love the battering ram set. The pics are well framed and the entire concept just pops and seems distinct. The catapult is a really nice catapult. However its downside is, as other have said, we get a lot of catapults. It's further compounded by yours having a somewhat similar look and feel to what we would almost expect to find if or when Lego makes a LotR Minas Tirith set or sets. It would work if it is bundled with something a bit more distinct and set defining. But on its own would probably run into trouble.

Something like the Ninjago brick built, but with some sort OS sailcloth or printed plastic for the wings? Much like they did with the old creator Dragon set?

My local Target and Walmart both have a healthy mix of the sets.

It's not a lot of "magic" really. It's more half sword swinging adventure half shield ET story. Not the strongest of the overall Marvel movies. But still good fun. Better than Incredible Hulk and IM2 not as good as the others. Still way better than most of this summers tent pole movies.

I think it will depend on if they have overproduced any GS Minifigs. Don't they often use the in house theme "battle packs" to sort of blow out Minifigs that they have more of than they expect they will need? That's why they often show up later in a series or theme? So you never know. We may see something.

Strange? I've rarely met a kid who doesn't? Bizarro is one of the best known Superman villains. Even though he has never been used in a movie, he has been used extensively in the animated shows for years. Especially in recent years in the very young targeted "silly" shows that we don't take seriously. Lots of humorous cartoon shorts etc. you see him a lot on Cartoon Networks Boomerang Network. So familiarity with him slots in with Legos core target audience. Yeah this might not be the exact version of Bizarro that is known, but he's all that's been released. Spider Woman is equally odd. It is unlikely that virtually anyone has read a Spider Woman comic (well okay aside from me, who has read them all. But I'm weird.) but she has a very very well known visual image, that Marvels Merchandising people have used for years. She has been prominently featured on things like school binders, notebooks, posters, coloring books, and heavily incorporated in scholastic learning materials etc for decades. Numerous action figures (one if the more popular and well known female action figs). She had her own Saturday morning show for a few years. She is like Ghost Rider. People don't know the story. But they do know the art and image. And she has entered the pop culture as a result. Shazam is a bit more obscure. He has been used in recent comics and animated shows. But kids might not know him well. AFOLs and older comics fans however do have a strong interest. Between the several seasons 1970s live action Saturday morning show that we grew up with, to his prominent role in the fondly remembered 1980's Justice League. (The JL /JLI one, not the loathed Detroit league.) Black Adam is even a more obscure although he did receive a lot of attention in recent years in comics.

I would steer clear of Tiamat or anything that can be linked to Dungeons and Dragons for the time being. Kree-O just showed off their new D&D license recently.

Not real hopeful on an invisible hand, just because the Malevolance seems to be the shelf warmer of last wave. But I think we are due for an Obi Wan Eta2, and maybe a Venator.

Congrats to the crew that pushed it to 10k. I'll admit to not being the target audience for this one. It's one of the few games I haven't dabbled in, and I don't really like mini ships. But I still wish them the best of luck in the review.

If Lego maintains their normal approach to exclusives, then it is simply that there really are no other variants to be made. Case in point Spider Woman. Now Lego can reverse previous policy and start producing these (which would cause an uproar in the collector speculator market) or they can leave them buried forever.

Yeah. The arches weren't really a marketing point. She brought it up more as a point of design interest, that the fans and particularly AFOLs had been asking for the part, so they took this as an opportunity to reissue them. If anything it is more PR "see we do listen to ou" than marketing.