Faefrost

Mine just arrived. It's a neat set, although this might be the first of these I leave sealed in the box.

Technically no. Nor has the possibility of any 2015 PotC sets or Indiana Jones sets been eliminated. Nor if you want to get picky has Avatar, Lone Ranger and Speed Racer been formally closed. They rarely talk about the end of licenses, and they would absolutely never talk about them while the Hobbit or a similar related line is still on shelves and releasing more. All we have are rumors that those who have supposedly seen early copies of the 2015 retailers catalog report no or no new LotR listed in it.

The DK books generally need a certain number of sets or figs to fill them. Just from eyeballing it it seems to be around 3 years or 5-6 waves worth of material in order to justify a book. That is why I assume that any book would need to incorporate both sub themes. Now they don't need to have a figure that is inclusive to both sides. Heck it could be something completely off the wall. But for the books they tend to go more for obscure variants of main character rather than more obscure characters. At least for the licensed theme books.

Spider-Woman was deliberately created to be entirely isolated from the Spider-Man license. She was created to block the then Spider-Man TV rights holder from creating a female spider hero. (Well technically it was to prevent the Incredible Hulk show from making a female hulk, but the fear covered all the outstanding licenses, hence we suddenly got She-Hulk, Spider-Woman and Ms. marvel) The two characters share nothing in origin and never crossed paths until almost 2 years into her initial comic run. If anything she shares the most with Nick Fury and the Avengers licenses as she was created by Hydra. I get the impression that a lot of her backstory is being used for the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver in Avengers 2.

The problem is a DK book would need to cover the full range of Middle Earth sets. Both Hobbit and LotR. Old Bilbo would be a great match for that. Or yet another Gandalf. Faramir less so.

Remember Lego makes things based on the information given. For whatever reason Michael Rookers Yondu was a character that the film producers kept a little closer to the vest. They showed some shots of Rooker himself but there was always the question of finished effects, such as would he have the classic comic fin. I think Yondu was a character that they were planning on using some digital enhancement and the look was not finalized until later in the game. Whereas we had fairly good art and publicly known designs on Nebula for well over a year now. The same with Nova corp. those designs were nailed down pretty early. Knowhere escape has fantastic figs. As for the rest? Rockets mining pod is an absolute delight, as is Groot (in case you don't consider him a fig). The rest of the build with the platform and little catapult is nothing we don't all have dozens of.

At best from Customer Service you will get a polite reply that basically comes down to they have no idea what you are talking about. CS would have no knowledge of anything involving SDCC figs. They are not product. They are not merchandise. They do not go through the sales or distribution channel. They are exclusively the domain of, and never leave the control of, the marketing sub group that handles SDCC. It is doubtful they even appear in CS's computer system. You know more about these figures than anyone at Lego positioned to speak with the public. At best they may have enough peripheral knowledge to think to forward your request to someone in Marketing. Your letter probably has the marketing people a bit confused. They really have no concept of end users, or honestly reality, on a good day (granted Lego may be different, they may have a top notch marketing department fully in tune with every aspect of the company the business and the customer base, rather than the typical assortment of shady characters and refugees from behind a Starbucks counter, but I doubt it.) you may actually get a reply from them at some point, if they ever sober up enough. I would not however count on them reading it. I have never encountered anyone in marketing that would read anything past the second sentence. They tend to only make it that far if there are pictures. Once again, to Lego these are valueless marketing fluff to be distributed by the marketing fluffers. Typically they really don't care who gets fluffed as long as somebody gets fluffed.

Most merchants do not charge your card until the item ships. The easiest way to check on it is just to go to shop.lego.com and look under order status. I find the order confirmation emails and the shipping notice emails often seem to go missing. But the web site seems pretty accurate. As far as how accurate the ship date is? It varies, and will often depend on what exactly it is, and how much control over the supply chain. As examples, Exo Suit is probably extremely accurate. If anything it will ship sooner than expected. That is a new product that they have total control over. Death Star is probably pretty close to accurate. That is an old product that is starting to EOL, and they are most likely shifting inventory around. Compare this to the IR receivers a few months ago. The expected ship date on them kept getting pushed back. But that was a part that required outside overseas vendors so Lego did not have total control over it.

I thought these are the newer Hero Factory type ball and sockets, that have a pretty solid amount of friction and hold poses well? They've used them in most of the other Space and Action Mecha with no real issues? The two GS mechs, the Samurai mech etc?

That's actually not too far removed from the Gamestop exclusive Elrond we got way back with the LotR game preorders The only real difference is the splash of chain mail near the neck.

I would love more GotG sets, but oddly they did a real good job of nicely covering all of the key vehicles with those three sets. After seeing the movie it is amazing just how dense those sets are. For this sort of thing Lego is at its best with Swooshable spaceships. And a sub theme that allows Swooshable Spaceships partnered with colorful superhero types, pure gold. But they did cover the bulk of the major ships. Pretty much everything except the Ronan and Ravager capital ships. Neither of which look particularly well suited to Lego.

We had a fairly nice Black and Grey Vader Tie right before 9492. While not anywhere near as good as the newer a Tie, it is still much better than the classic blue ones. I think we will see a Tie Interceptor first, just because it has been many many years since that was last seen. At it was never done without the blue trim.

One other issue with keeping them loaded is their tendency to go off randomly when you dust. I have lost a few missiles to parts unknown during cleaning.

Because typically even big furry overcoats are somewhat tailored to the wearers form. Whereas Firefighter Turnout gear and Lab Coats typically are not. They are by design protective over garments that just hang straight from the shoulders regardless of the shape beneath them.

Mine shows as shipped with a delivery estimate of Tuesday.

Of the Marvel movies the best villains have been Loki, Red Skull and Arnim Zola and Robert Redford's Alexander Pierce. You understood the motivation in all of them they had depth. Sam Rockwell was kind of interesting and fun as Justin Hammer. You could see some potential there, but the movie didn't do anything with it. (He was better in the Mandarin prison short). Of the rest? Iron Man's villains have mainly been meh. Malekith in Thor was a snooze fest. I think John Hurt actually was asleep himself while playing Thunderbolt Ross in Incredible Hulk. Ronan actually comes out pretty well on the list. He's a good well played generic villain. He doesn't seem erratic or badly written. It's just everything you see of him is him being evil. There is no nuance. No backstory (beyond who he has killed) no real sense of purpose. At least he wasn't mumbling through his lines like Mickey Roarke and Malekith. DC has had much the same issue. In recent years they have 1 truly great villain. Heath Ledgers Joker, and the rest range from okay (Liam Neesons Ras Al Ghul) to laughable (Bane) to dear gods please make the pain stop and get it off the screen (Zod in Man of Steel). About Gamora seemingly trying to fill 2 roles at once

As I edited in above. The big goal in waiting and watching is not just to find the outlet, but once you know or suspect a store employee is involved, especially a manager, to see just how widespread it is among the staff. It is rarely ever just one employee. And when it is a manager more often than not it is two or more. 2+ inside people can much more easily get around inventory control systems.

For purposes of a crime report it is almost always MSRP or documented value. It is the value to the person stolen from. Not the speculative price. So your UCS MF is technically only worth MSRP unless the change is formally documented. Either through a sale (what you paid for it) or if it was in some way appraised. At least for purposes of a crime. How your insurance values it may be different. These types of retail theft are nasty for the loss prevention department as they often involve someone who essentially is the local inventory control officer. They will always catch them, it just takes more time to work through how it's happening. Which is often more valuable than the lost merchandise itself. They probably watched this one for awhile to track the merchandise all the way out to the reseller. Plus if they suspect it is any sort of manager they will watch like a hawk to see if it is more. Because in most cases it is. A buddy of mine is a retired police detective lieutenant who works these days as an inventory loss prevention consultant. Every known and then he drags me along as a side consult to run discovery and help find the IT holes for him. The stuff I have learned about what goes on in stores you would never imagine. As far as doing inventory. To my eye Lego stores typically have very tight inventory control. At least as it faces the public. The entire layout of all Lego stores as well as certain elements of the helpful staff are precisely for that. Next time you go into one, look at the store from a theft perspective. There are open fields of view throughout. The staff can see every customer and every piece of merchandise at all times. The staff are very warm friendly and helpful. Once you select an item they quickly bring it up to the counter for you so you don't have to carry it around. This minimizes the amount of product in motion at any time. They know where every box is all the time. Plus the staff is constantly "facing" the shelves. Going through squaring up the boxes, bring forward the next box, filling and restocking holes. Yes this keeps the store looking good and increases the customer experience. But a neat well groomed store is 1000x harder to steal from. When all the boxes are squared up it is way easier to see if any are missing or moving with just a glance. I would hazard a guess that where the Glendale thefts happened was at the point of back end inventory. Most Lego mall stores do not have adjacent store rooms. Rather the main storage is elsewhere in the building. Through tunnels and up and down elevators. Lego stores I believe typically carry enough storage to restock the shelves at least twice with the larger stores having more. It's while the product is in motion that things can go missing. And it is harder to catch as the person doing it is the one reporting the inventory movements. So 5 boxes leave downstairs storage, only 4 make the shelves, but the computers all report 5. It doesn't get flagged until sales numbers start mismatching. Or a pallet of old or retiring product gets sent back for clearance and processing. Anything missing from there will never be noticed locally in the store and may take weeks to wind its way through the system.

Some good guesses. That's what it looks like at first glance, until you start to realize how a lot of the back end deals and Marketing flow works. In truth it is probably closer to this. 1. The product actually being marketed via SDCC exclusive figures is SDCC itself. The pay to attend event. 2. SDCC is probably providing the contract for the show exclusives. They want them as crowd pullers. So they get certain vendors to make SDCC exclusive products and giveaways. The cash flow is probably something like Lego has no booth fees and a ton of convention costs are comped and such if they do the figs. (ask yourself, otherwise why would a toy company do so much for SDCC?) 3. The customer is SDCC. That's who Lego probably has the exclusivity contract with. Lego gains the benefit of free advertising at the biggest nerd show. The people that get the figures are not the "customers" they are the recipients. They are ultimately the product being sold. With the Figs Lego is helping to pull in more paying attendees to SDCC and altering how other vendors see the show and what they spend. 4. Lego benefits via cheap if not free exposure at the worlds best known largest nerd fast. Not bad for a run of 8000 custom figs. The figs are exclusive because SDCC benefits from them being exclusive and they are willing to reward that exclusivity. Lego goes along with it because the reward is something that is worthwhile to them and serves their purpose.

Re Gamora Overall I would say that your impressions of this one will vary. I put it third in the listing of the MCU, behind Winter Soldier at 1, which is just an incredibly well crafted stand alone movie. It works as pure cinema above and beyond being a part of the MCU, and #2 being Avengers. GotG has the slightly better cast chemistry and better humor, but Avengers just nudges it out for reasons of being the big long desired payoff, landing it, and in a word LOKI. Guardians sits at third. But its a thin margin separating it from Avengers.

Are you sure the question isn't 'Why is Groot so small in the movie?"

in looking at some better pictures of that SDCC Rocket Raccoon and Warbird I just realized something. I suspect that we are correct and that the fig is not a true SDCC exclusive. But not for the reasons we normally think. I think we have a fully uniformed Starlord fig somewhere in the pipeline, and the SDCC RR fig just used its Torso. That symbol on the front of the jacket is Starlord's crest or icon. So maybe that fig is just a recombination of parts that we will be getting?

A couple of questions to ask yourselves, just to help you all understand the truth about how these things work. Remember, these things are Marketing Materials. 1. Who or what is the product that is actually being marketed with "SDCC exclusive Minifigs? " 2. Based on 1. Who is likely paying for these Marketing Materials? 3. Who is the actual customer in these arrangements, and through what manner is the customer being serviced? 4. What are the benefits in all of this to Lego?

Santa's Workshop

I just ordered 2 from US S@H, 2:00 am here. They went through no problem. I actually placed 2 orders. I ordered 2 Exosuits and a Mini Cooper. Also got the free mini mini coop. Finished it up and then remembered the Research Institute was out, so I ordered one for my wife.