Faefrost

Agreed. It just hits all the right notes. A clean yet distinct design. A nice seasonal theme without licensed IP. Gives them some use for their CMF specialty molds, and is about the same size as a mid level Creator set.

Lego doesn't price cut the D2C sets anymore. Instead they just offer double VIP points on them when they go on sale.

Most of these are simply what I categorize as "Little Billy Discovers LDD!" When they have not yet grasped many of the finer points of the software and are instead using it Minecraft like to turn little squares into bigger squares. That surely must be shared. A few however make me weep for humanity.

I really hate to be "that guy", but I am honestly growing weary of the steady stream of "Women of..." Projects, both here and elsewhere, that seem more primed to pimp an agenda, than to actually be interesting in and of themselves. I mean this sucker seems deliberately geared to attract support from The Mary Sue and Jezebel crowds. And this sort of thing is starting to get more than a bit of cultural blowback. (Note the recent Ghostbusters mess.) What makes it worse is while seeking to showcase some unquestionable admirable women, it fails on two major levels. First, it's a rather dull and uninspired Lego project. It's a frame to stand a few minifigs in. Wow? The second failure is subtle. You have to know more than a bit about NASA to pick up on it. But somebody is missing from that set. Somebody major. Somebody important. And no I don't mean Christa McAuliffe. No rather suspiciously Commander Eileen Marie Collins is somehow mysteriously absent from the list. For those unfamiliar with Commander Collins, she was a USAF pilot and instructor who became an Astronaut. She flew 4 Shuttle missions. 2 as Pilot and 2 as Commander. She was the first woman to command a US Space Craft and Mission, and did so twice. An extremely rare accomplishment. She is known as one of the finest Shuttle Pilots ever, having a record of absolutely perfect landings. Her final mission was in command of the Shuttle fleets "Return to Space" following the Columbia disaster. She is arguably the most famous and accomplished female Astronaut since Sally Ride. In many ways the Jessica Chastain character in "The Martian" was modeled on her. Yet she for some strange reason gets left off this list? Why oh why could that be?... Oh right! She's a Conservative Republican, and does not self identify as a "Feminist". Yeah, sorry no. This project isn't an inspiring feel good piece designed to get girls interested in science. It is deliberate political propoganda with an undercurrent of revisionist history and erasure.

I've built a Modular Dentists office. The second floor of my Comic Corner MOC. I modeled it mainly on my Wife's actual dental clinic. It was surprisingly easy to do, and generated a lot of distinct and interesting builds. I was able to fit the four main areas in no problem. Waiting room, Front Desk/records, Chair/Treatment area and a small section of counters/lab area.

I think the Ghostbusters Ecto-1 is the best designed, most solid build. And the best overall ret as a product. It really has no flaws or downsides, a number of really innovative techniques, and a solid self contained vehicle and figures. It tells its story well. The ExoSuit, DeLorean and Wall-E all suffer from a few frail points or design compromises. Most of the others just feel lacking in some other way. Yeah the Birds set is great art, but isn't particularly fun. And yeah I am biased against Dr. Who and BBT. I tend not to like that sort of lose or open form play set. I prefer a nice complete fully framed in subject such as a vehicle.

I'm not saying that you should consider selling the child in order to fund the Lego... Just that there might be some long term tax benefits to doing so. Check with your accountant.

Actually yes NASA stuff is an IP and they do require licensing. But it's not a particularly difficult license to acquire, nor is it expensive. Not to mention NASA themselves tend to buy huge quantities of the licensed products to stock the gift shops. Lego has a long standing and very positive relationship with NASA. Due to the almost case by case nature of it it is one of the few times were it doesn't run into a problem as an existing IP.

Someone tried using a 3D printer to make monorail track. The results were less than satisfactory. We often fail to appreciate the incredible precision and extremely tight tolerances engineered into every Lego part. The monorail track required a high degree of precision. Current consumer 3D printers just can't hit that level yet.

Lego won that case. A few clone brands were found to be infringing, including the older Megabloks design. (Not the new Monster High ones, which are well outside Lego's designs and IP.)

The biggest thing Lego stomps on is anyone using the Lego name or branding. Any Bootleg E-Bay auction do get efficiently hunted down if they use Lego anywhere in their descriptions or search terms. Heck we have had a few members here run afoul of that system. Other things like custom minifigs are harder to police.

The Voltron one would also be quite timely as World Events Productions is doing a big merchandise push to coincide with the new Voltron TV show that just hit Netflix last week. (on a side note. It is amazing. It's by the same team that did Avatar the Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra.) The only major issue is likely to be somebody may already hold a conflicting license. Mattel has a North American Toy License for the original show. They used it to produce their large 24" Matty Collector Voltron. And Playmates may have the toy or action figure license for the new show. Oh and there are rumors that Bandai may or may not have a license for a high end die cast (finally! After 30+ years!). And God only knows what the status of long time license holder Toynami's licenses are at this point? If any of them have a Construction toy license it would likely be Mattel. They definitely have or until recently had an Action Figure and Plastic Vehicle license. Of course Voltron also comes with the other issue. It is a split property. WEP owns Voltron outright in North America, but Toei owns Beast King GoLion, the show it was made from, in Asia and Japan. So Lego would likely need to license it as GoLion in some regions. Now that is not as insurmountable as some properties (looking at you Macross). WEP and Toei generally have a good relationship and have been known to cross license. Certainly not the 30 year bloodbath that is the behind the scenes Macross/Robotech wars. If you haven't figured it out classic Japanese robots are one of my "other" fetishes. I try and pay attention to where certain licenses go.

IP licensing can be complicated. The Jurrasic XXX stuff considerably more so than might be readily apparent. There may be a third party that has a piece of the licensing rights to one or more of the prior JP films. Hence the rename to Jurrasic World, a shift in colors and logos. It insures the current franchise holders of the complete merchandise take, without having to deal with partners from 20 years ago. That Jurrasic Park set was never going to happen. Just too many clear conflicts going on there. An active IP license for the new property with Lego. Potential conflicts between old and new. Veto of current IP owners. And the one that I keep mentally circling back to, the Jurrasic World license likely specifically precludes JP sets as an element of a non compete. Movie merchandise can be very very strange. The merchandising rights are often assigned by movie, not by global character IP or franchise. And how it works today is not how it worked 20 or 30 years ago. Remember the only pay George Lucas took from the original Star Wars in 1977 was the merchandising rights. The studio gave them away to him in lieu of pay or a percentage of the gross. How studios handled these rights has evolved over time. By the 90's everybody involved wanted a piece of the merchandise pie. By today the studio tends to keep tighter reins on those rights, and keep them exclusively to the corporation. Lego's 2 prior movie based Ideas sets involved movie properties that by Hollywood standards have a fairly simple clean concise path for merchandising. The movies were made by established parties and major studios with enough sway and experience to not use the merchandising for production horse trading, and to keep control over it narrow and tight. Ghostbusters is famous for that. (Well besides the Filmation lawsuits.) the two studios best known for keeping a tight fisted grip on merchandising, and an eye towards utilizing it long term, are Disney and Warner Brothers. Fox and Universal have never had quite the same long term approach, which makes some of there properties much more complicated.

The problem is that above and beyond the more classic issues, it has become much more complicated to define infringing items. - in the old days you had true counterfeits. These would largely involve recasting of existing products or exactly reverse engineering them. This is true counterfeiting. It was very easy to flag as such. - in the more recent past we ran into the modern Chinese factory problem. They work Monday to Saturday t make your product, then they work Sunday for themselves, using your tooling to run off their own bootlegs. This is clearly a form of theft. Once again reasonably easy to make the call on in the marketplace. - but then we come to the modern problem. The new one. Here's a great example. This is WeiJiang's MPP-10 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Wei-Jiang-Transformers-G1-MILEPOST-Commander-Masterpiece-MPP10-Optimus-Prime-/281877204670?hash=item41a130cebe:g:lWgAAOSwp5JWZFLI It is clearly a bootleg of Takara's MP10 Masterpiece Optimus Prime. But WeiJieng did not simply clone the figure. They took its core engineering, reverse engineered it. Scaled it to double the original size. Made some improvements. Changed or improved the materials used (the WeiJiang Bootleg is Die Cast, the original is ABS Plastic.) And released it under their own name. And this is where it gets really really grey. WeiJiang is using their own tooling. They copied the engineering, but not the parts themselves. It is clearly infringing on the Transformers IP, but it isn't a counterfeit. What this means is the Middleman, E-Bay or Amazon cannot act without an underlying complaint. And even then it is a very very grey area. The Chinese company has applied their own transformative changes to the product enough that it is truly distinct in every way from the original. As long as they do not use any clear trademarked indicators, such as the Autobot Logo, they are much harder to fight then the traditional recasters. And it is much harder to keep out of the marketplaces. (Forget E-Bay, the WeiJiang oversized die cast transformers can easily be found on US Amazon.)

I would suggest grab it as soon as you see it. Most Lego stores never even saw the Curiosity Rover it came and went so fast.

I think the Gingerbread House is the no brainier this go round. No third party IP, broad appeal, fast seasonal sales turnaround, lots of data from the Winter Village. I say this a lot, but I don't think anyone ever really grasps it. IP licensing is very very complicated. And each license is unique. The licensee and licensor will also never ever talk about terms conditions and specifications of their specific license. Some licenses may be broader or narrower. Some will change over time, etc. so they cannot and will not give blanket rules about pre-existing licenses as regards Ideas. All they can say is that a pre-existing license greatly complicates the review and increases the likelihood of failure. This is because they cannot talk about pre-existing licenses. Ever! The First Rule of Fight Club, Don't Talk About Fight Club! They can't even hint that X or Y might be a possibility. Or that Z or Q are an impossibility under the license. All they can say is exactly what they have said. But this does not mean that there is any real hope for some of these projects. There is not. It is just that discussing this reveals terms of licensing agreements that they are not permitted to reveal. And each license may be different. Star Wars is going to be one of the more problematic licenses for Ideas. It is safe to assume that anything that appears on screen in the 7 movies, and especially anything created or designed by ILM, is well and clearly spelled out already in the existing license. Disney/Lucasfilms has the expectation of those items to already be a private and contracted matter between the two companies. These subjects will be quickly rejected as pre-existing art. About the only hope for a Star Wars project would probably be an EU subject, that has no official art or design yet.

I'm going to leave this here. As it perfectly frames the problem. http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/06/15/jack-ma-says-fakes-better-quality-and-better-price-than-the-real-names/ This is Jack Ma, the founder and CEO of Alibaba. Talking about the issues of counterfeiting. Needless to say Ma's views on the subject seem to parallel Gawkers views on personal privacy.

I would not completely rule it out yet. Yeah 7000 piece count is never going to happen. But Just from looking at it, Lego should be able to halve that just as a starting point. The main build is not that far removed from the Haunted House. They could easily get that within the same ballpark as a Modular. Now whether they are willing to go that far is an unanswered question? But this is one design that clearly has plenty of room for parts reduction without compromising the core project itself.

That's why I keep thinking the only way to pull it off would be some form of technic beam as the primary rail. Use a power functions motor and maybe have a small rubber drive wheel with nubs that catch the technic pin holes to allow for traction and climbing? But and parts would have to be extremely versatile and multi use. And to the OP, at least one of the original Monorail mold sets failed many years ago. Lego determined that it was in no way cost effective to replace. So the molds were retired. I believe they were all eventually destroyed when they purged a ton of obsolete tooling back about 10 years or so ago. The added complication is the motors. Components that use electricity have to go through a ton of testing under European regulations. It makes developing specific motorized parts such as the old monorail motor much more complex and expensive. It is a large part of why they went to the more standardized Power Functions system. This way the only need to test once for universal parts. Put you are never going to get that narrow classic monorail out of PF stuff.

The old Monorail sets sold poorly. And for what did sell, Lego lost money on every set made. There is bad business history there. The Monorail sets stand as a crowning example for the business side of "see this! Don't do this ever again!" I would think at best we might see some system for elevating the existing Lego a Train tracks to be used with futuristic subjects. The weird thing is that the problem wasn't unique to Lego. There was some sort of futuristic mass transport fad in the toy industry in the late 70's to early 80's. They all tried semi similar products. Does anybody remember Mego's Micronauts pneumatic tube transport system? Tycho put out some weird future train sets around then too. Every one of the products bombed and lost money. In some cases they killed their overall product line or the company themselves. At this point the only way to get a new Lego Monorail would be to design one that would run on Technic lift arms as rails and use existing motors are parts.

To dust off an older post that I just noticed. Since I have had some experience dealing with business side IP and licensing over the years. While none of those will really fall under that clearly stated rule you ask about, all but one will run afoul of another, not publicly stated but clearly implied and even more damning rule. Here is a critical thing to keep in mind. For licensed IP, if they have produced the licensed subject as a Lego set in any form, but particularly in minifig form, there is virtually no chance it will or can be produced under the aegis of Ideas. It means they already have contracts in place governing the specific subject, so it is the domain of an internal development group in conjunction with the IP rights holder. There is an exceedingly remote chance that the IP owner might fall in love with your fan project, but a safe bet is it would need to have something else distinct besides a change of scale. If you need to, you can think of this as the "Tumbler Rule". And yes the "internet rules lawyers" will come out with "but they never say..." Etc. Trust me, if they have made an IP subject before, the chances of them making it through legal in an Ideas review are just this side of impossible. They are absolutely impossible if it is a current and active license such as Star Wars or Marvel or DC. Similarly Lego's internal IP will be strange. Stuff submitted under broad Lego IP, such as Classic Space or Pirates or Castle is by and large fine so long as it is unique. Stuff presented under narrower in house IP such as Ninjago, Nexo Knights, Chima etc will be rejected by the lawyers without batting an eye. Especially if it is from an current, recent or active theme. Now in an abstract, the one that might be interesting is the Wall-E, simply because Lego's existing license goes through their Ideas group. I still don't think it will fly as it falls within that same area as the subsequent Minecraft sets. There is a rule that subsequent sets are exclusively between Lego and the IP Holder and not the Ideas winner. I think that would be the point there. The Taj Mahal is (I believe) a public building and unlicensed subject. So long as it doesn't duplicate prior Lego work it should not trip any reviews.

And some of those decisions likely added to this change. It makes sense to prune the clear conflicting projects before they go into the review process and force extra work for all involved, or false hope and fan bickering.

While no official word yet, that one is almost definitely a 99.99999% No. The most basic rule regarding pre-existing licenses is they will not put out a new version of something they have already released or already have pre existing work on, under the Ideas mechanism. Even though the Frozen Castle was posted shortly before the official set came out, it would still fall within this rule. For those that have not picked up on this, if it is a licensed IP and the subject has previously been made, especially if it was made in minidisc scale, it will not pass a Ideas review. While they have never laid this all out as a single statement, it is pretty easy to piece it together from things they have said over the years.

They have said that Ideas or CuuSoo (back at that time) sets based on existing licences have a far far harder time at review. They have many more hurdles to overcome. They don't outright deny them because every license contract is different. And ultimately the decision on whether to permit an Ideas set goes to the license owner, not necesarily Lego. The licensor may absolutely fall in love with the Idea, as clearly happened with Dr. Who. They more commonly may find conflicting issues with the existing contracts. The third party design and royalty can be a huge issue for some contracts. But each is different.

I think the "non starter" stuff that clutters up Ideas is kind of the price we have to pay. Remember this is still at core a children's product. A toy. So allowing the kids to participate ultimately helps Lego's goals. It's the digital equivalent of hanging little Billy's finger painting on the refrigerator. It's something we "serious adult types" just have to tolerate. Doing otherwise damages the brand. I know people often call for size limits, but I still don't think that is a good idea. Rather I would prefer if they were to refine and republish some of the old "guides for passing review" and "some suggestions for what makes a reasonable production set" type of papers. You don't need to make a hard and fast rule. If you say no 10k piece projects than you will be inundated with 9,999 piece ones. Don't give rules lawyers ammunition. Just give some clear guidance on how design decisions impact review. Let people know in an easy to find posting, how increasing part count leads to diminishing review chances. Actually talk about parts budgets and change budgets. Don't set hard rules. Instead give the Ideas participants more information to help them design better ideas. But that's just my 2c.