Faefrost

I don't know if anyone caught these over here? But in the Ninjago TV show they featured the Pirate Captain Soto, who is a near match for the CMF Pirate Captain fig, and "No Eye Pete" the Helmsman (and his seeing eye Parrot) who sadly we have no fig of. Captain Soto was the original Captain of the Pirate Junk "Dentiny's Bounty", later used by the Ninjago Ninja.

I think it was implied somewhere in the text on that page, that the Space Armor and Hulkbuster may appear in the background somewhere. Probably in the Hall of Armor / workshop.

Neat little set. Although I wish it had come with a Togruta to help better set the scene. No matter how much I try I just can't bring myself to count battle droids as figs.

Woohoo! My local Lego store had 7869 Battle for Geonosis on sale for $19 last night. I had avoided this one at full TRU markups, but at that price Captain Rex gets added to the Army.

But follow this thought process to the end. What is the one character that we do have some confirmation will appear in episode VII in some form? Old Han And Lego has played with this sort of thing before, after all we have a "Young Han" child figure. Something like this maybe? http://www.brickset.com/minifigs/?m=atl015

Yep. And if you look at the Cargo Center set over in City you will see a similar mechanism in place for putting ear pieces on attached to the brimmed cap. Also Tonto's bird comes off in the same way.

Wait until they are not just dry but "cured". So the acrylic is not just dry to the touch, but fully hardened. Then wipe softly with a soft clean cloth or paper towel to smooth any imperfections. Honestly once you get the hang of dipping and letting the excess run off you will not need to do a lot of buffing. The stuff self levels very well. I normally only bother to buff on something that I have had to hand paint the acrylic onto, to eliminate any brush marks. "Curing" is the same as with paint. (Really this stuff is the same base liquid they use in some paints.) Curing means that the paint, or medium has fully "chemically out gassed" all of the liquid. It normally takes longer than simply being dry to the touch. In most cases I let dipped parts sit overnight at a minimum. If you want to speed the process you can use a food dehydrator.

That looks great. It could almost pass for a scale model railroad. As always your signage and printing is amazing. I shudder to think what sort of clientele you would get if you hung up a sign saying "Lubritorium" today?

Over in the future set ideas I had suggested that the Grey Havens Ship would be the perfect way to end the LotR and Hobbit lines. A nice big exclusive like they did with Diagon Alley for Harry Potter.

I'll have to dig through for some pictures when I get back to my desk. I used it a little bit in my comic corner MOC. I noticed the effect from building the Unexpected Gathering set. Lego only puts the wood grain on a few boards of the fence and it is enough to convey the illusion of the wooden fence.

The only way I can see them doing a CMF firefighter would be to do similar to the s9 police officer. Basically a classic New York Style Fireman with. New leather "New Yorker" style helmet with the shield on the front. and some new tools. Big handlebar mustache, black great coat.

With the printed wood grain tiles, I've been finding that in a lot of cases a little goes a long way. Just mixing a small number of the 1x4 printed wood grain tiles in with your brown tiled floor tricks the eye into seeing the whole floor as worn wood. Whereas tiling the whole floor with the wood grain ends up looking too busy in most cases.

The licensed sets are a two way street for we fans. Yeah we grumble about them, and how they cut into our beloved classic themes. But the licenses, when tied to a corresponding movie release, often provide such a huge revenue boost over the regular comparable theme, that we get a ton of great new parts. Just look at some of the little things in the LR sets. New pistols. New bird. A new design that allows hats and hairpieces to be combined. Plus some amazing minifig prints.

The series 2 Mime has kind of an interesting torso, with the black and white shirt with black vest. Plus there are a ton of distinct and scruffy faces throughout the CMF's. Case in point the series 4 Samurai.

Let's not forget that the Corsair ship sneakily serves several Lego audiences. Yeah, it's an obscure RotK scene, but it's still a Lego ship. And Lego ships carry their own fan base. And Lego does ships very well. It's a set that is designed more for cross theme appeal I think. Granted Ponies would have plenty of cross theme uses, but I think the existence of the new Friends Pony mold may supercede most of them unfortunately.Part of the problem may also be making the Pony rideable. In both the Friends Pony and the much earlier one (Belville?) The horse was reduced in several dimensions and you could not put a minifig in it. But for the Hobbit you would need to be able to saddle up, so the Pony would need to be as wide as the minifig. This would result in a very strange short fat looking horse.

That rock and lava came out amazing. It wonderfully conveys that feeling of heat and motion. I stand in awe.

You are partly correct. There weren't a huge number of Pirate movies back then, and what there was was mostly awful. But even today, with some highly succesful ones, straight up Pirate movies are still not that common. But it wasn't just big budget movies feeding into that spark of interest back in the early 80's. Pirates were weird. They never did real well as a stand alone property. But they found themselves insinuated into so many other genres and subjects, mostly on TV, that they had a very strong pop culture undercurrent that continues to some extent to this day. Saturday Morning cartoons in the US were notorious for this. Pirates in space, Scooby Doo, Ghost Pirates, Robot Pirates. It went on and on. Plus a lot of the stuff that kids were being subjected to then was re runs of classic 50's and 60's shows that once again leveraged Pirates with enough frequency to keep the concept out there. Back then Blackbeard was having more TV guest appearances than Milton Berle or the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. It really was a very very strange decade. The whole Ghost Pirate thing on TV was pretty common, in large part because it was cheap to pull off. Real Pirate movies or shows were expensive to make. But dress a guy up in a Blackbeard costume and have him scream at somebody on Fantasy Island. Dirt Cheap. It went on for decades. (Over on the cartoon side of things Hanna Barbera and Filmation both seemed rather enamored with Pirate themes and space/ghost/old man wilkins dressed as Pirates as well) But I think we are getting off course from 2013 rumors etc, so I'll be good and shut up now

Sadly yes. I'm old enough to remember the early 80's and most of the 70's.

Yes. Although you can accomplish much the same thing ordering random minifig parts from Pick a Brick.

Nope. These are the long desired "Gothic Arches". New pieces that show up in a few sets this year. The shape is different from PoP. The PoP middle eastern arches have a double curve to them. Historic MOC'ers heads are exploding to finally be getting these.

This is probably the closest they have gotten in minifig form. The un named CMF Pirate Captain from series 8, last year (picture compliments of Whitefangs marvelous review thread http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=73557) Although this fig also seems to have a lot in common with Ninjago's Captain Soto

Minimally at best,a nd mostly only in some design aesthetics. The Ultimate Spiderman Cartoon draws more from Marvels Ultimate series of books, the best and biggest being Ultimate Spider man. But even then there is a lot of deviation. About the only similarities are school age Peter and some ties to Nick Fury.

It's possible, but those bins are also a mechanism for thinning out a supply of surplus parts. I don't think they produce the revolvers in such volume. But you never know, you might get lucky. I have found muskets in the ones by me. It could also be that they try not to put modern weapons or firearms in a set or setting that does not allow them to control the context. (ie Guns in Monster Fighters or Space themes or Dino's are fine, but they will never ever give City Police firearms.)

There was a big release "The Pirate Movie" with Kristy McNichol and the dude from the Blue Lagoon, (it was awful), There was a Tommy Lee Jones Pirate movie (Nate and Hayes?) which all but killed the genre. There was Yellowbeard from some of the Monty Python crew, There was the Kevin Kline Linda Ronstadt Pirates of Penzance, And there was the Roman Polanski Pirates, all within the front half of the 80's and all big lush budget theatrical releases (granted all were pretty awful in one way or another. The most watchable of them was Yellowbeard,a nd even then I recomend much rum). But the point is, that there was something triggering 2 or 3 big budget Pirate movies a year back then. Something had Hollywood looking that way, and in return that caught the toymakers eye. Part of it might have been the success of Pirates of Penzance on the stage. Hollywood as always being completely incapable of an original idea, and this being two decades before they discovered comic books. I think a lot of it wasn't so much an interest in "Pirates" per se, as an interest in "Swashbuckling Adventure". This was on the heels of Raiders of the Lost Arc recapturing the legacy of Erol Flynn and similar. Pirate themes were just an attemot to spawn off that desire for pure action type movies and play.

The wife got me the QAR for Valentines day to go with my Black Pearl. This thing is bigger than I expected. It's now sitting in the middle of my desk until I can rework a shelf to hold it.