Faefrost

I like these two new ones. I agree that they are not as near perfectly awesome as the Van or Mystery Mansion, but that's ok. They still look like good Lego sets. I'm always a sucker for Lego biplanes, even hideous hippy colored ones. I think the Lighthouse looks like the weakest of the recent three (Creator, Friends and this) but still looks like a worthwhile set. Hopefully they varied Shaggy (err Sammy?) 's head and torso prints a bit? While we are getting a lot of him he is the most expressive of the m ain cast and having a good body of head prints for MOC's could be a useful thing. A bandaged wrapped Scooby would be cool, but his body might be tough to fully print like that? I would think that the top and sides of the body are very easy for the masks to slip in and allow the print, but the underside/belly might be a dead zone for the automation to hit.

But this new one isn't a Werewolf ... It's a Furry!

Y'know I am trying to like the new City sets... But the Swamp Police idea still leaves me shaking my head. It's like the cops are hunting down Bayou Meth Labs? The sub theme is both surreal and at the same time a little too close to reality for comfort. A weird mixture of Breaking Bad and Hanna Barbera.

Or whoever but the display together had an oops.

Great review, although I am a little confused? We are complaining about getting parts in new colors? Wha...? I agree that the set is a little smaller than I would like. But I also understand they were trying to hit a mass market price point. It strikes me that it will be both easy and affordable 2 MOC 2 sets together to make it a little more robust. Things like the stairs going up both side, and adding a chandelier which give a better feel. I accept that this is a playset and not a recreation of the movie details. Oh and actually the tree is one of the more accurate things. Remember in the movie, where they met Olaf? The frozen forest just before the castle,mouth all the hanging frozen vines. As someone said it was summer before Elsa flash froze everything. So some frozen greenery is accurate. The ice cream stand... Not so much.

He speaketh that which must not be named! Quick burn him!!!

The main issue is that in most cases you are simply arranging some else's creation, the Lego itself, in expected ways to create your own designs. Now in theory you could probably attempt to make a copyright claim on anything you build. But in practice there is so much parallel developed works of others that it would simply fall under expected use of someone else's product. Ie you cannot copyright a blue wall simply because you purchased blue paint and applied it to a wall. Painting the wall is the expected and common use for paint. To rise to being copyright able requires a certain fairly high level of complexity (at least in Lego's case) and uniqueness. Technic gets into some further strange areas, because unlike other types of Lego bricks you can often use Technic to realize certain non technic specific engineering designs. Say you design a new mechanism or transmission, then you use technic parts to realize the design. You would be copyrighting the engineering work, not the technic design necessarily. And even then the high burden of their being no prior or parallel work still applies.

I suspect aftermarket TH's will run a little pricey as many many of the produced and sold TH's were split up and parted out. The TH has a massive amount of those fairly rare and often unique Dark Orange pieces.

Yay! Hellcat. Although I suspect we are unlikely to see her Defender counterpart "Son of Satan". Some bits of Marvel weirdness are best left in the 70's.

A lot of it will depend on the nature of said MOC. If it is something that is based on a well known or well known type of subject then no typically a MOC would not have a copyright. The reality is the creative limitations in building with standardized bricks means that there will be parallel designs. "You built the same color house as mine!" Or "you used the same design for those window details" type issues are not really valid. Where you may see a reasonable claim of copyright is the cases where someone uses Lego simply as the medium for more traditional art and sculpture. Such as Nathan Sagawya's stuff (did I spell his name right?). It gets into grey areas and is very very hard to really nail down.

As others have pointed out it is known as the Drop Ship Scam. The big tipoff of it is it involved a large pricey CURRENTLY AVAILABLE item for which the price is too good to be true. Often 20-30% below MSRP via a source such as E-Bay. While not immune to it Blricklink seems to have fewer of these. I suspect that it is largely because BL as a specific niche hobbiest resource tends to have a more savy and informed user base who knows the pricing of these specific items, so things that seem suspicious are more prone to be called out by the user community. Here are the things to watch for with these scams. If you receive the product today and call the apparent actual vendor (in your case Walmart) it may still look legit to them. It will not flag through anyones system until the owner of the stolen CC# gets the bill and challenges it. Then the vendor will get a chargeback and notice of the fraudulent CC. That can sometimes take weeks to trickle down. While technically this does count as receiving of stolen property, most Law Enforcement is well familiar with the true nature of it and will not come after you. But the vendors flag you and your shipping address in their systems and will never take orders from you again. So once that CC comes back as stolen Walmart will no longer do business with your home address. However if you contact the merchant and explain that something did not seem right with you receiving a product from Walmart as you ordered it from E-Bay etc they will normally be very cooperative. In most cases the info you have on the scammer is more valuable to them than the product you received and they simply tell you to keep the item. (note. The forgive everything and let you keep it only works ONCE.)

Somewhere back in the Blogs on Ideas (or previously CuuSoo) there were some posts regarding suggestions for presentation and making it through the review process. They don't give any hard rules regarding size, but do stress to keep any submissions reasonable. They encourage the creators to look at current retail product offerings to get a feel for what would be considered a viable ideas product. In short use common sense. They are not going to make anything bigger than what is currently being sold as an Ideas set. This is published as a UCS Superheroes set under the Marvel license through the internal IP and licensing group. Not Ideas. The Ideas project only hit review a few weeks ago. A set like this takes over a year to develop in tandem with the licensing partner. So this was well into development and production long before the Ideas set was on anyone's radar. The Ideas set will fail review as a licensing conflict as did the Tumbler and Sandcrawler.

Actually LT's general style makes it very easy to pick up on where he is from. Flat roofed single story mainly white buildings that clearly communicate that the architects and urban planners have heard of this thing called "inclement weather" but have never actually experienced it first hand beyond "more hot and dry".

Many times. Just look at the $20 and $24 Star Wars sets. Grievous Wheel Bike? T-16 Skyhopper? The Last Anakinn Jedi Interceptor?

The sets are only just barely starting to trickle out to their first stores. You probably have a few weeks before they start getting parted out and sold on Bricklink. And initial BL prices will be high until the sets reach full distribution. I would not count on any Ideas project utilizing or including App bricks. The point being the App bricks themselves are just a tool capable of reacting with a tablet screen. But to do anything they require software development. Which is not within the purvue of Ideas. Without App development the App bricks are just 1x1's that can click on your iPad icons.

For those still decrying the lack of "Army Builder" sets and Star Wars style Battlepacks. If you stop and think things through it becomes real real easy to understand why the Middle Earth sets required more extensive builds, and each set had to have at least one major unique named character to reduce it as a generic army builder. It's shockingly simple once you realize it. Neither Star Wars, nor The Lone Ranger offered or split out a specific "Army Building" license among their IP offerings. LotR and the Hobbit however do. And Games Workshop holds that license. The terms of Lego's LotR license likely kept them a safe distance away from anything that GW might take issue with.

Some of the rumors kicking around give the suspicion that it might be more akin to Fantasy Era. Or it could be the Scooby Doo option all over again. We've been skunked and TLG has signed a "Gummi Bears" license with Disney

I think it looks far better than I was expecting. I like the use of the microfigs to populate out a full nicely detailed control center is interesting and adds a great deal of depth to it as a display piece. I love the working rotors and the fact that it can be lit. I think it looks like a good size. Smaller than the SSD but still big enough to make a nice eye catching work. I'm a little curious exactly what the nitpickers were expecting? I can't see going much bigger being a really viable product? Ultmately the customer has to find someplace to park the durned thing, and wives start getting combative when the answer is "half the garage". Also 5 regular minifigs is exactly what I was expecting. It seems to be pretty typical for the large ship type UCS builds. The lack of Coulson in this set probably means there are plans for him elsewhere someplace cheaper. Maybe we may yet see a Lola set at some point? And there are some interesting pieces in this thing. Pirate fans will be thrilled to get the hulls in light bley. Those printed runways look amazing and are those new clip pieces holding up the screens in the command center?

More likely anything Star wars shown is in a sealed controlled area. They would not likely make a "stuff you can take pictures of" and "stuff you can't take pictures" of division of the Star Wars stuff. They would simply put it all in the No Pictures! room. And as for who would be at the fair? No they don't send the low level peons who know nothing. They send mostly marketing people, who may or may not know what day it is based on the level of inebriation. But they all will know their product well as a product (if not technically). I used to get sent to trade fairs all the time. I was senior technology development and management and the even as a Director. The major shows like Comdex or CES or E3 I never left the floor of the booth. I was there to insure that the sales and marketing people knew what they needed to know about the product on display, and if they didn't know something they could bring the question to me. I used to get sent in 3 days early with the set up team. just to insure that all the product was set and working right. (We also had the big national porn convention in our show for 3 years. so once we finished our setup we offered our services in getting the porn industries tech working. Most greatful people I have ever done any work for . And much nicer than you would really expect.) You are being a little short sighted. Besides having been asked for this very thing often, for the past 10 years, it means that certain contractual issues have been overcome. If Lego is now allowed to make buildable Star wars characters just as they did with super Heroes, then a few other doors may have opened up. It is likely that Disney may be more finely parsing what is and isn't allowed from or by certain vendors. Show of hands, who would like to see Star Wars CMF's? Or Super Hero CMF's? Constraction figures may be a sign that that is coming closer to possible. It also means that those leaked pics of a Boba Fett constraction fig that have been circulating for months might not in fact be a Chinese Bootleg brand.

I would counter that one of the giggest missteps. The one that the big box stores mostly blew out at reduced prices, was the set we AFOLs loved the most. Helms Deep. Show of hands, how many around here actually bought it at list price vs buying it on deep discout at Walmart, Target or Amazon? I think mine was 50% off at Walmart. That's why they dropped the upper end price points for most of the Flagship sets in later waves. (And I think Goblin King did horrible at list price.) it's also likely why we got the Pirate Ship instead of anything Minas Tirith.

There is one slight ray of Hope that might trigger a Fox Marvel mending of feelings. The feud is between Marvel and the head of Fox's movie division. However Fox TV Really really wants to do an X-Men TV series. But Fox does not have the rights to that. So some negotiations above the movie studio head may be ongoing and may end up being more amicable to both sides. Probably way too late for us to see anything FF related however.

I believe you are correct. It looks like a new half wagon wheel type window filler for the arches. Oh that will be so fantastic. I need lot's of those in white for some colonial style stuff. I think they missed their perfect opportunity for the Jungle Friends to carry some horrid tropical disease back to Heartlake City and trigger the Zombie Appocalypse. I really think Friends would do well with a Post Appocalyptic Mutant wave or two?

Okay, now that is an interesting picture. It is fascinating how many of those old classic Sd villains we can do with already existing parts and molds. the ghost diver and ghost spaceman are particularly easy. Just stick one of those glowing MF skulls in a CMF hard hat diver or an Atlantis fig. They have a witch doctor mask from CMF's. They have gypsy hair mold. put the new prospector beard on a pirate and you have the Pirate Ghost.

There are 50 years of wonderful Fantastic Four stories to pull from (Well OK, 40 years + the 90's) and they go with the horrifically bad Ultimate Fantastic Four? Angsty Teen Super Science Hogwarts? Ugh! The Fantastic Four are supposed to be a hopeful story of exploration and discovery. They are Star Trek in Spandex. And instead we get this dark grim blue and orange same as everything pile of... blech! Sorry but FF#200 was the very first comic I ever bought with my own money. I think the very first comic I ever read was a much dog eared copy of FF Annual #2 The Origin of Dr. Doom that I got from my Uncle. The FF is the book that gave me my love of comics, and this? This is not them. (although I will give them credit for one thing. They were right there was so much awful in this brief trailer that "black Johnny Storm" is pretty much un noticeable and does not cause any jarring disconnect. In fact it might be the only thing in the trailer that doesn't cause a jarring disconnect.) It will break my heart if they introduce Anihilus in this mess rather than using him over in the MCU Cosmic side of things.

Correct. The U.S. does not have a national VAT or Sales tax. Sales taxes vary by state, county and city and are calculated at the register based on where the brick and mortar store is located. Most US sales tax is fairly low in the 4-8% ranges outside of the large heavily taxed cities such as NYC, Boston and San Francisco which rum more 10-15%. (Which is why most NYC residents will buy Lego in New Jersey).