Faefrost

I always love how European Fire Apparatus looks so oddly stubby to the North American eye. And that is a wonderfully rendered truck.

Hmmm? I just noticed something really strange with those pics of the Episode VII Millennium Falcon. There is glass in the cockpit windows sitting in front of a green screen? That is highly out of the ordinary for a shooting set or film production miniature. They normally leave the glass out to avoid any hard to control reflections, and then if needed insert glass in post production. Especially for interior detail sets. The only MF shooting set or model that actually had glass in the OT was the Hoth hanger partial exterior mock up.

And in one simple page of posts you guys once again stir yourselves up into the over reaching expectation of a Bolg bonus figure of some sort... Would it be nice to have? Sure. Is it even remotely likely? Heck no. Promo figs will most likely be stuff like Bilbo variants. Say old Bilbo or Mithril armored Bilbo. Generally a hero or the main villain. Something with a named recognizable actor behind the,. The only ones that will even mildly deviate from that are the S@H polybag giveaways. And I would not count on one of those for this apparently last wave. We might get one, but I suspect the odds are slightly better at a Las Vegas airport slot machine. It is way to optimistic for a store exclusive, on the simple basis that it is likely that the stores don't really want one in this theme. They did not do real well with the ones they had in prior waves. TRU is still trying to clearance out Barrel Escape sets. The demographics for the Middle Earth themes don't work great for the regular big box stores. They tend to skew a little older. This does well in the dedicated Lego stores, but not as well on a Shelf at Target. Remember stores have to buy their exclusives. (Or there is some sort of complex marketing kick back system involving the stores, TLG and the IP holders.) the stores probably want exclusives in other themes this cycle. And store Polybags are 99% of the time built around figs or fig parts that they have excess of. We do not see new characters or prints in them typically. The exceptions are the special exclusive promo figs that S@H will give with a set $ purchase.

I think for most lines the pricing is about where we would expect (if not want) and for the most part the Modulars have a fantastic price per weight. ( people complain about the PR's price relative to size, but by weight it is inline with all the others. It just has less airspace inside the finished build, unlike the PC or TH.) That will depend mainly on what color you are looking for? Town Hall might be the best just for the shear volume of reddish orange parts it contains including some unique to the set. But they all offer a good supply of very desired parts.

Mostly just Aintitcoolnews.com

I think the Magenta arms were only used in the Alien Conquest line. The associated torsos were black with magenta printing. The closes torso you will find is one of the older Harry Potter Dumbeldor's, which is a "light purple".

Oooo! A few more major spoilers This time regarding Ant-Man. Some players that we have seen before. If what I am hearing is true Tanma may be presently surprised at it all, Apparently the Ant Man movie may spend a bit more time in the past including Oh and some major DC Spoilers. Do not read if you want to avoid a major piece of the Batman Vs Superman movie.

Regarding his sig picture. Lego doesn't really price by number of parts. They actually have a rather complex structure where each individual part type has an associated price or cost that is added to the overall set price or budget. At the heart of it is really price per gram of plastic. The 10 cents per part thing is one part a rough buyers way of eyeballing value in an overly simple way and 2 parts myth. Remember Lego doesn't really market "part count". It is only prominent on North American boxes because it is required to be there. Euro boxes don't have it. AFOL focused sets will have overall higher piece counts, and lots of little parts, not because Lego is padding numbers, but because that is the type of build experience most AFOLs seem to prefer. More small detail parts. Fewer big "<insert that tiresome argument>" ones. Lots of texture and fidly bits and greebling. But at the end of the day the price reflects the production cost and margin for each individual piece in the box. Which ultimately goes mostly by weight, barring certain production complexities. We should always take care not to let observational bias rule our judgement and perceptions. Someone did a rather nice study of the sets a year or so ago, and found that once you factored in certain fixed minimum costs for packaging the price by weight curve was a much much better predictor, and seemed to slay many AFOL myths including elevated costs of licensed sets, and the infamous price per piece formula.

Oh, R X! You got my hopes up with Rex. I was hoping there was confirmation of a Captain Rex story arc.

It depends. Many of them are from sets that have some form of lab area in them. As an example the two Agents Scientists. One has a rather nice lab workstation inside the Mobile Command Center, with microscope, and screens. The other comes with a rather elaborate structure involving a clean hazmat/radiation room and using robot arms to manipulate materials through a window. Baxter Stockman and Doc Oc have more comic book gear. Giant killer robot for one, and at best a brain swapping machine. The Monster Fighters mad scientist set has a ton of lab gear. The Two City arctic sets have small labs in their buildings. The Alien Conquest Scientist has what looks like a CT machine in the back of his truck. The CMF's mostly have flasks.

Sure. If it helps you sleep at night. Or it could simply be that after all the last minute changes coming from PeeJ and crew Lego just said "fluq it" it's a high problem lower yield license partner. Just swap the last LotR wave for a Hobbit and be done with the damn thing. And then go see if WB or Disney has anything juicy to replace it with. Preferably some thing that does not involve short hairy kiwi's with a tendency for last minute decision making.

There could be a few possible characters. Although a lot of the more sparkly cosmic types might be viewed as intertwined with the Silver Surfer. The first somewhat likely candidates that come to mind are Quasar or Mar'vel or maybe one of the Titans (god I hope they don't use Starfox.)

I'm with you on the Harley design. I kind of hate where they went with her graphically in new 52. The character in her classic look mainly from the animated series, has a huge following of young girls. Heck, she is probably the single most cosplayed character of any of DC's properties. And then they do THAT to her. /sigh. Let's say it's not a look that I can see Lego really opting for in a play set. Maybe the colors. Maybe even the hair. But I know that Harley is one character that DC have gotten a ton of push back from their marketing and merchandising partners over the new 52 redesign.

I think what he was saying was a new mold has been ordered, but there may be enough existing stock in the parts warehouse of the grey robot arms that another ExoSuit run might not need to go back to the factory to have new arms made from the new mold. Does that make sense? They might only start using the new mold for the next run of the Exosuit if or when they don't have enough parts already on hand ready to go. (Or the parts might end up mixed).

There are quite a few scientists floating around recently. There are two in Arctic meant for the indoor labs. (I think mainly bearded dudes) There are 2 in Ultra Agents, a girl in regular lab clothes and a guy in a clean suit. There was the mad scientist in the Monster Fighters line. A really great one in Alien Conquest, doc Brown in BttF, a CMF mad Scientist and female scientist. If you want to stretch things a bit there's also TMNT Baxter Stockman and Super Heroes Doc Oc and Harleen Quinzel.

James Gunn also revealed a few things about GotG2. (Is it a spoiler if the director openly says it in a published interview years before the movie is even started?)

I like it. It has a cool kind of 8 bit camo look going on.

There is a way to specify the sorting by pricing, quality, number etc. But it might be when looking at your full list and not in the "wanted by shop" sub section.

because the Laketown set where Bard kills Smaug is a pivotal point of the movie (and book). You kind of can't set the stage for the black arrow and the Windlass without having Bard to actually do the shooting. Remember these are playsets. Not collectable figure packs. Each set lets the little kiddies play out some sort of story. Bard shooting the Dragon kind of needs Bard. They can get away with leaving Smaug out of this set as he is the big showstopper of the line, and this set is just to more or less give him something else to interact with. But if you have the black arrow you can't skip Bard. And that illustrates part of the problem with how everyone around here views any sets. We forget that they must be somewhat self contained play sets above and beyond being parts of our collection. The small stories in the set must play out as well as the bigger ones. They don't have to perfectly match the movie or the book. These are not scale models. They are a childs playthings.

I am obviously in the minority around here. But I am not particularly outraged by these sets. I kind of like them. And I can see the path to all of the figure choices. Witch King - as everyone seems to agree its a good set. Three fantastic figs. Galadriel works for both themes. We finally get a Witch King (granted not the RotK one) and a new armored Elrond. Heck Elrond could be a decent army builder. Use the torso with a hood and green cloak. Have them led by the GameStop Elrond. Not perfect, but a decent solution for armored elves of some kind. Lake Town 2 - I think this is mostly what we expected. Yes it is a retread Bard. But it has to be. The entire scene is about Bard. He needs to be in the set. And it is sort of one of the most critical scenes of the trilogy. The scene picks up from the end of DoS so he is still dressed the same. The new Orc hairpieces seem decent. I suspect they are something that may be used going forward in other lines. And can be amortized as such. Whereas Orc helms might be copywriter to the movie and limited to license. Tauriel makes the theme a bit less of a sausage fest. The kid is useful for MOCs. Battle of 5A - people got way way too wrapped up in fantasy must haves. It's a mid priced set. For that it covers representation of all 5 armies (as defined by Jackson) and it gives us the named characters that are what kids generally prefer to play with. We get Thorin King under the Mountain, we get Dain Ironfoot, we get Bard as the new leader of Laketown. There would be a few other "nice to haves" and yeah another Legolas. But Legolas is kind of kid bait. The Eagle is there because Jackson defines the Eagles as an Army and Worgs as simply part of the Orc force. Plus we have a Worg in an Army builder set currently on shelves. No eagles yet in Hobbit sets. Regardless of the books, Azog is the big bad of the movies. He is who will face off with Thorin I am sure. We were never real likely to see a Bolg, I'm sorry. Maybe if the line took off ala STar Wars we might have seen him in the fifth year or so. Most of the more general movie going Lego retail purchasers don't even know his name. (Granted they didn't know Yazneg either). Azog is the villain who stands out on screen. I think they dumped their entire bigfig budget into Smaug. Even with that the chances of seeing a new Boar or Ram mount would have been remote. The Ram might have risked prodding from Blizzard and the boar while much desired probably could not be amortized via the single set at that price point. I don't think there was ever much hope of Bear form Beorn. Everyone kept picturing this set as if it was the big tent pole set. It's not. That has always been Lonely Mountain. Lonely Mountain - they gave us exactly what we pretty much demanded. A large articulated nicely detailed big fig custom Smaug. And on top of that it still seems a nice large set. The included characters don't seem unreasonable. The 4 Dwarf nobles in new torsos and a new Bilbo. Bilbo had to be in one of them. (And they only did the one and left out Gandalf this time. Color me surprised.) can't have the Hobbit sets on the shelf with no Hobbit any more than you can HP with no Harry blooming Potter. The actual build looks surprisingly dense in terms of things to play with or that reference parts of the film. The only disappointment is no gates of Erebor, but be honest, we all knew they could not do those justice in a retail set. They would need a $250-$300 UCS set. So the disappointment in these isn't that Lego gave us bad sets. These seem like really good Bo5A movie sets. It's that you have wound yourselves and your expectations up so much that they have as usual exceeded any practical realities. (I guess that's why they call this genre "Fantasy")

I think if we do get a Cyborg he will use a headpiece somewhat like Terrabytes from Ultra Agents. In all other ways he would be a regular sized fig.

I'm guessing that last pic is not the MF. It looks kind of like an Imperial interior.

The only problem with this "activism" is it tends to somewhat ignore the actual tendencies of children. At a certain age boys tend to drift into a "girls are yuchy" phase, during which they mainly seem to feel that way about all girls and tend not to play much with toys representing them. Whereas girls seem to go through an "actual real life boys are yuchy" phase, which has less of an impact on their choice of plaything. Honestly I think it shows from pretty early on that men are morons.

It's good but has its flaws. It sticks mostly to the story, although the end point is kind of the polar opposite of the original, and not in a good way. The acting runs the gamut from fantastic to almost as bad as Viper in The Wolverine. The overuse of color correction starts to grate on later watchings as do the matrixy time/speed shifts. The soundtrack would be fantastic if it in fact had anything to do with the movie. The director obviously dumped his favorite "period" music into it, but didn't really give much thought to "which period". (The movie is set in 1985, with major core sections in the 30's, the 50's and a very brief Vietnam scene. Yet all the music is from the Vietnam era. It doesn't work. Some actual 80's music would have really helped.) Overall a solid "B". A decent but not utterly fantastic movie. That tries just a bit to hard for a style that kind of horribly dates it on later viewings. It's much the same as Sin City. It was a really neat effect the first time you watched it, and something different. But different alone does not always stand the test of time or repeat viewings.

It actually works well the other way. My wife has commandeered my Laketown to be her "Winter Village Fishing Pier". Apparently you catch fish with a catapult.