Faefrost

LOL! I was thinking the same thing. You know the set will come with a couple of rats. It wouldn't be too bad if they knock a floor off of it. Also assuming that it is a front facing only and not a freestanding or corner building. I would not be surprised if that is pretty close to the type of roof we see. I'm also going to predict that the top floor will house an artists studio of some sort.

I always thought it was a weird homage to Space 1999 and Gerry Anderson shows. It looked like it belonged more there than in the SW Universe.

Keep your eyes peeled. The Target by me just put some of the larger first wave sets on clearance. $40 for 70704 and $55 for 70705.

Right now the best deals are coming from some of the large scale online merchants such as Amazon. Amazon does not have to be quite as controlled about segregating by region, and they allow someone in a low customer high cost market (Australia) to instead purchase in the high customer, lower cost market (US) and the shipping is often still less than the local pricing. But unfortunayely that then raises the question "if I can buy direct from the US via Amazon at the lower prices, then surely they must be able to make all of the pricing the same, and it is some conspiracy to rip me off that they don't!" This is a miss perception. Individuals can score pricing by doing what are effectively person to person or low volume custom deals in this manner. But the lower price is achieved by effectively shifting the purchaser from the low volume high cost market to the high volume market. In the above case you are being treated as and benefiting from being a member of the larger US consumer market. This can be fudged for small direct purchases, but to attempt to do it in a large scale runs afoul of unfair trade practicises. TLG would be effectively selling Lego in Australia below actual costs and subsidizing it from US sales. This is the sort of activity that tends to generate WTO actions. Baring free or open trade zones, most imported products have to be locally priced to encompass their local costs to market. This is where Amazon is running into problems with some more protectionist nations, such as France.

Prices are cheaper in America because they can spread the fixed and needed costs of doing business over a much larger pool of customers. Prices are high in Australia because the relative costs of doing business are higher and are spread among a much smaller customer base. Relative wages have little to do with it, beyond how it adds to those fixed costs of doing business (ie if wages in Australia are 30% higher than the fixed costs of labor for Lego in Australia will be 30% more) .

It effects a certain block of time right after the movies release. Think about when Lego released all of their Marvel stuff last year. Primarily their Avengers stuff. It hit Toys-R-US about 2 weeks before the movies release. It moved ok. Then the weekend the Avengers movie hit the Lego sections looked like they had been looted. Most stores near me sold out by noon Saturday following the Friday release. Now granted the Avengers sets by themselves were nowhere near as good as the LR ones. (Great minifigs, so so sets, and a bit overpriced), but the pattern is still clear. The kids will want a piece of what they really liked on screen. And that also illustrates the huge problem that Lego now faces with the LR movie. While people do not always agree with the reviewers over what is a good or bad movie. Parents tend to pay close attention to what is a "kid appropriate" movie. And the reviews for LR pretty clearly label it as not real good for the young 'uns. Which wipes out that whole built in marketing mechanism. LR is probably selling as well as an in house classic Western theme would do (note how well the new Castle seems to be doing). So the question is what did the expensive license bring to the equation if the movie crashes and burns?

One thing I noted in the new DK Yoda Chronicles book. (The one with the blue marked Stormtrooper). There is a picture in there of Yoda and Siddious dueling in a floating Senate pod. It's one of the few scenes in the book that is not made from an actual released or announced Lego set. But it looks like it really could be one.

There is something about that set that just makes it an unbelievable dust magnet.

My Wife blessed me with this one for my Birthday this week. I'm about halfway through and so far it has been a fun build. I'm already looking for ways to tweak it. (Hmmm! I wonder how hard it would be to get a set of stickers to convert it to 1977 Star Wars?)

I think the best hope we will have of ever seeing any of the specialized suits from the game will be things like the exclusive figures in the DK books. I can't imagine them using something like a Robin specialty suit in one of the sets?

The baseplates are made of styrene, So the liquid type model cements that bond Styrene by fusing it, not simply gluing it, will work. Use a miniscule amount on a hobby brush. Line up the crack so it is flush and where you want it, and just touch the brush to one end of the crack and let the glue wick along it via capilary action. Be very very sparring, as it can melt the plastic if you over apply it. It will fuse the styrene back to a solid piece like it had not been broken. Apply it from the bottom side so you don't risk damaging the printing.

You've seen Star Trek? Right?

I think more than anything else Mara Jade has always been at the heart of any potential conflicts between the books and the new movies. The problem is George Lucas's personal vision of Luke has no romance or marriage. He has said that he pictures Luke as the classic celibate Monk. So if the new movie is built from his story outlines and notes, it probably will not include or mention Mara Jade, regardless of how popular she is as an EU character. I think the suspicion that the main characters will be Jaicen and Jaina is probably spot on. The second young female, maybe a Tennel Ka equivalent? (The actual Tennel Ka might be tough to include without the earlier novels, or to square with the TCW depiction of Dathomir and the Nightsisters). The late 20's male, probably a roguish love interest for the female lead. 40 something military guy? Either some sort of Imperial or enemy type, or maybe someone like Coran Horn?

I think that the LR sets have sold fairly well starting months before the movie came out. Hopefully they see that as a desire more for new Western theme sets rather than simply an interest in the LR license. It's possible Lego may make more money off the movie than the movie makers.

There has been a rumor floating around for years that some Lucasfilms licenses have non compete clauses with terms or language that specifically prevent the license holder from taking on certain "directly competing" licenses. In other words the Star Wars license might have prevented or discouraged Lego from going after a Star Trek license. (Although this may have softened in recent years. I think Hasbro and Revell have finally been allowed to have both very recently.) it's also just as likely that TLG would opt not to take on a ST license because it would directly compete with their existing product line and not necessarily grow the purchaser base. Weirdly the fact that Hasbro is the actual owner of the IP might not be an absolute exclusion. While it seems like it really should be, wasn't there a story going around that Hasbro actually approached Lego about making a Transformers line, and didn't resort to Kree-O until Lego declined? Has it been confirmed that Lego is getting sets from the next Spider-Man film? This might just be wishful thinking on my part, but given how horribly Sony has done this summer there may be a path to Marvel Disney getting at least some elements of the SM license back from Sony if they throw enough money at it. SONY is almost to the place Marvel was at when they sold the license to Sony years ago. Which would be great for us, as we might see some live action based SM sets.

Direct currency conversions really don't have that much to do with the pricing variations. At least less than we tend to think. They probably pad the pricing a bit as a buffer against currency fluctuations in order to try and keep the prices as stable as possible. But it's not the root cause of the perceived disparities. Really it's "total costs of doing business in a given market, region or country" / "expected number of purchasers in that market, region or country" + "margin to turn a profit". That's it. That's the root of it. Australia has higher prices than the US because the ratio of costs of doing business to paying customers is higher than it is in the US. It's not Rocket Science. It's not a deliberate slight to one region or another. It's not a conspiracy or an evil corporation being evil. It is more often than not simply the basic math of international business. For our Australian friends relief is probably within sight. When the new China facilities come on line it will probably go a long way to reducing some of those fixed costs, simply by reducing the supply chain, and putting the factories within a zone that may allow greater sharing of costs. (That will depend on Australian trade arrangements with China, but guaranteed they will be more favorable than current trade arrangements with Denmark or Mexico.) Europe is a bit more hosed, as the only thing that will flatten the equation for them is lower taxes and lower energy or labor costs.

Have hey ever gotten any licensed female figures head or face to actually look like the actress? I can't think of one that doesn't seem at a minimum somewhat off? With the worst of them being in the Super Hero lines.

One other thing that all of these discussions overlook is that Bilund is probably not in any real way doing comparative global pricing. There is not some meeting where they decide "we will charge this much in Germany, this much in Canada, this much in the US and this extra much in Australa because we hate them". The safe assumption is that local pricing is set by various regional business groups, and is based on their costs of doing business. US pricing is set by Enfield, Conneticut. Australian pricing is probably established in the NSW offices. Up until very very recently with the rise of global Internet merchants, these offices probably rarely even noted what the pricing in other regions was.

There is a great video of Robertsons lecture linked in a few other threads around here. It is wonderful, and gives a good synopsis of what the book is about. Highly entertaining and educational even for those not interested in business stuff.

I wouldn't mind picking up multiples of the Silver Mine at a shelf clearing discount. There are a lot of uses you can put that set to.

So what happens if the movie that the Lego licensed theme is based on does poorly at the box office? How much of an impact on Lego sales does that tend to have? I'm not saying that LR is a bad movie, but it's numbers are not all that great. Will this be another PoP? (Which could work out for us AFOLs since these are all fantastic sets that may be available at discount) I'm hoping I'm just being pessimistic. I would love to see more of this wonderfully detailed Western Theme.

In the new show it is built from an old Subway car, and is designed to also run on track. So it would not be out of place to turn it into a neat train piece.

Simply Marvelous http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zPCvoYsB6Y

Isn't one of the current overplayed pop songs "Lego House"?

It kind of goes both ways. I think I am more prone to pop in and watch a Star Wars movie while I am building a Star Wars set, than I am prone to run out and get a Star Wars set after watching a movie.