Faefrost

The official images are mainly 3d renderings. Sometimes prints do not carry over to the render or have not been added to the software yet. Especially on newer parts with odd or uneven surfaces. The program knows how to re skin a torso or minifig head. Those wings are giving it some trouble.

Unless I am mistaken the creators of ideas projects can post or freely distribute plans for their Ideas project (many do link or put them on their ideas page). What they cannot do is sell plans or models etc.

Lego's action themes have always followed certain pop culture queues. If the Uncharted Natham Drake movie currently in production does well we may see a new Adventurers theme.

I actually kind of like the Wookie ship. You can kind of see it's lineage and what brought it about if you have been watching the Clone Wars. It has a very similar feel in some ways to The Halo. Sugi's Bounty Hunter ship from the show, and how it was used on screen. (And not how it came out in lego form), Particularly pay attention to the series of TCW episodes that comprise the "Wookie Hunt" story arc. Asohka some young untrained Padawans, and Chewbaca are trapped on a jungel island. The hunting grounds for Trandosians, who hunt the most (or least in the case of the kids) game. After two episodes of Rambo flashbacks the cavalry arrives. General Tarfal and his men rapelling from the side doors of Sugi's flexible light assault ship. Now this incident was near the end of the clone wars. Tarful had used precious funds to hire the merceneries to get them to the Trandoshians hunting ground and help stage the assault. The Halo was a small fast ship that operated and hovered well in atmostphere. It had large side doors and drop cables that allowed a wookie force to rapidly deploy and bring the fight to the trandotians. Tarful was the wookie general. He saw how well it worked with the bounty hunters, it makes sense he would try to devise a similar capability locally. Hence the Wookie assault ship. The set looks like it has some interesting pieces, And those 3 new Wookies. That is the crown jewel.Army building Wookies. How about speculation based on rumors of the movies? For example JJA just filmed a charity plea while standing on a new blue colored live sized movie prop of a Ralph McQuarie style X-Wing, in new blue trim. Is it safe to speculate that we will likely see that ship in lego form?

ooo! Major bit of news regarding who Evangeline Lily will be playing in Ant Man. From SDCC panel. (Somebody may want to make sure Tanma is sitting down). Also some early reviews of Guardians of the Galaxy are starting to creep out. http://www.aintitcool.com/node/68169 Short answer, it left the reviewer reliving the feeling of walking out of the theater after seeing Empire in 1983. This is not going to suck.

It's kind of a shame that they did Arctic over as a City sub theme. The Arctic setting could have allowed for some real cool and horrifying Adventure fun.

Just to remind everyone. While we go nuts and collectors assign obscene aftermarket value to these things, to Lego this is just convention swag. Marketing materials. Freebies for convention goers. And here is the other thing about this that we will never know or realize. As marketing materials, there is a good chance that there are other parties involved, who are quite likely kicking in the costs of these things. Notice how all of the give aways at the Comic Con are always licensed? Remember no licensed product gets made or distributed without the IP holders direct approval if not their explicit direction. Marvel and DC (and this year WB) sign off on these, and chances are they pay for them. And Marvel and DC love us with our worked up nerd rage. It stirs chatter. Keeps us reading message boards. Keeps us talking about how much we love and want their characters. They cheaply build desire through frustration. As far as these slipping out under the wire. Once again these things are practically valueless to TLG. They were cheap to make and chances are somebody else is paying. Spreading a few plastic figs around is far more effective and way cheaper for Lego than the normal business requirement of paying thousands of dollars in bribes to convention staff in order to get their booth set up in time. Once again, reporting this to Lego or demanding they take action is meaningless. These are not actual product. They are marketing fluff. The actual assessed value that Lego would put on a police report (assuming they were stolen from a booth) is somewhere around $2 per fig max. OMG alert the FBI! From Lego's point of view it's the same as losing a case of t shirts.

I swear the presence of Whoopi in the movie is to help camouflage the weird and unnatural looks of the Turtles. With her there the turtles look good and normal by comparison.

The availability of the Polybags is not entirely with Lego. From Lego's eyes the Poly's are mainly considered as promotional items and merchant exclusives. Register impulse items for the big box stores. As such the big partners get them, not typically the official Lego stores (which get different types). The sporadic availability has more to do with the local stores. They get a few cases in and put them out. But they rarely ever seem to consider them an item to be managed, restocked or rotated. In many cases they save them and dump them all on holidays that use Stocking Stuffers or Easter Basket type items. For the most part the local staff tends to completely forget them until someone cleans out the storeroom and discovers a box.

Very...ummm...Miller'esque? I shall call him "CRAZY STEVE!"

LR gave Lego lots and lots of nice new Western molds and tooling. I am sure we will see it again. I'm sure it will not be quite the same as some of the classic Western sets however.

I think the safe bet is this one will have a similarly limited quantity.

Your account is flagged. You probably got flagged by the system for use or requests above or substantially outside the established and tracked norms. At which point they asked for evidence and proof of purchase. This is a quite normal business practice. Most people will never encounter it as most people will never in their lifetimes trip the flags that modern CS and QA systems track. So they asked for information, you responded in a way that raised more flags (true or not. It said A. You had no proof of purchase and it said or implied you were a minor), hence your whole account got flagged.

As someone who has worked a number of big electronics cons for my previous employer, this dude didn't "steal" these. He extorted them out of the Lego marketing and setup team in order to get anything done by convention center staff. Things like to get the booth setup. The booths space cleared of your neighbors crates. The electricians to actually show up (because you are not allowed to plug in your own power cord. Union rules. Failure to follow leads to real life violence.) In short these were probably bribes. Every single convention marketing team carries extra packs of swag to use to bribe con officials. Convention centers truly are extortion rackets. My old con marketing director would have killed to have a case of these things to grease the wheels. They cost Lego almost nothing. The criminal con center thug can flip it for good return. Whereas my guy was stuck using C notes or my show computers as bribes. Note how they said that there were 1750 of each minifig handed out. Strange number isn't it? You would expect it to be an even 2000. It actually is 2000. It's just the show lead gets 250 of each set as side for "discretionary marketing purposes". As I said, bribes. If the dude selling these is an actual convention center event coordinator with the power to get things done on the show floor, yeah he could easily be worth 50 figs to the advance setup team.

For those doing all sorts of wild mental calculations in favor of a new UCS Falcon. I hate to put it this way, but no your theories don't make sense because comparing UCS to system scale retail sets is Apples and Oranges. They really don't have much to do with one another beyond this, system Scale Retail sets will always take priority if there is a marketing reason for doing so. Think of it this way. There are probably, maybe 100,000 10179 UCS Falcons in existence that were sold. There are probably 2-3 million 7965's. And that's just one of the three releases. The two types of sets are marketed into two entirely different worlds of customers. But the retail channel at a near $100 price point is the much much sweeter roi every time. The UCS Falcon is a neat product that is nice to have. The retail system scale ones are a core anchoring product. We will probably see a new retail Falcon just before or with Ep VII. It is that comfortable point where old meets new and would anchor the entire line without spoiling the movie.

Heck the 2012 one wasn't even a real Hospital. It was at best a shady clinic where you pay your physician under the table in bootleg KreeO parts and more human organs came out then went in. But don't worry I am sure it is scheduled to be knocked down as soon as the 2015 Demolition Crew arrives. They will have to start demolishing everything. All the old condemed buildings. All the houses now used to push bricks of narcotics and hold Kragle snorting parties. All the abandoned business like that little bike shop and cafe that was run out of business by the roaving bands of rabid wolves. Dear Lord... Lego City REALLY is Detroit. All that seems to be missing is some sort of Robo Cop Program. I'm starting to see the appeal of moving over to the friends town!

And the 15 cents per piece and low fig count were the exact same numbers and same complaints we had with the Rancor set last year. It seems to go hand in hand with the big complex multi mold figs.

Apart from Smaug? Smaug probably ate up most of the themes new mold budget all by himself? How many new parts is he? Am I wrong in suspecting that the wings are either sailcloth or thin plastic sheeting with ribs and joints embedded? I don't think the set has any further new molds unless there is a new widespread construction piece that is not obvious from the picture. I do think it has a lot of pieces in new colors. I'm not sure I am grasping the hate from some? This is pretty much everything we have asked for, within reason at a price point. Smaug looks like he is everything most around here pretty much demanded. A huge new molded dragon with lots of articulation. Early reports did describe it as a play set and not the much more static gates of Erebor. Which honestly would have been difficult to pull off at minifig scale, to little real play benefit. As an interior play set it actually looks fantastic. While not quite to the level of say the Death Star or Ewok Village, it seems to have far far more than we normally get going on. The closest thing I can think to it would be the Fantasy Era Dwarf Mines or the Lone Ranger Silver Mine. Both of which were utterly fantastic sets. And this looks to be about twice the size of the LR set. The colors and parts look amazing. A middle earth and castle builders dream come true with all the sand green and pearl gold. Literally rivers of pearl gold. Like most Licensed Lego Sets, it does not seem to recreate one single specific scene, but rather gives the setting where you can play out several, probably from the 2nd and 3rd movies. Which is likely why the fig choices seem less than ideal. And honestly I would guess that the Dragon ate up a huge amount of the fig budget. Bilbo Dwalin and Balin make perfect sense. They are all core to the mountain scene in the movie. They are the nobles. Fili and Kili? Possibly this was the only reasonable place to slip them in for this wave. It is a safe assumption that they play a much bigger role in the 3rd movie than Oin and Gloin, so their absence from the Bo5A would be much more noticed. Even if much of that involves weird elf dwarf romance that sure as hell never came from a book. The price complaints are legit. I think they priced it above its reasonable selling point. But it's not like that is anything new in these Middle Earth sets. Weathertop and Mines of Moria were both priced way too high. The Goblin King was abominably high. Even Helm's Deep was too much at MSRP. At least this one has the Dragon.

Is it a good witch or a bad witch? Sorry sorry could not resist. That thing is awesome in just every imaginable way. I can't believe you got all of that detail in at a reasonable minifig scale.

The Brickshow has a review up. With one somewhat alarming piece of data. They report a rumor that the production run on this set was only 10,000 pieces. So it you want this, grab it fast.

Probably will not see him until 2016 or 2017 waves I hate to say. He's scheduled to be the big bad for Justice League. Hmmm? Thinking of the upcoming movies, I wonder what the odds of seeing a Sandman Morpheus or Death minifig are? (Heck Lego has the personification of Death looming in both Marvel and Avengers. It will be interesting to see how or if they deal with it. ) With no major WB DC movies out in 2015 I think we have the best chance to see some wonderfully broad and unusual characters. Stuff from comics and TV. Like looking at that X-Men jet, this would be a great year to do a mid to high priced T- Jet with Teen Titans centered around Robin, Cyborg, Starfire, Raven and Changeling with a good foe like Deathstroke. That could give us Deathstroke without dipping into the darker more adult Arrow take on him. It would still have the Batman hook by being centered on Robin. And would have very very broad age appeal given the different shows and books. Figure we will probably have at least one other really good Batman set for the Anniversary. I noticed that Walmart was finally starting to discount out the long lived Batcave, so something new along those lines may be looming.

Is it me or does Green Lanterns jet (!?!) look suspiciously like Hawkeyes from the Hulk Helicarrier set? There also seem to be a lot of pictures floating around where the canopy and transparency colors seem strange. I hope these are just prelims and the actual set colors use true emerald green.

May 1, 2015, it's Avengers in the Spring, Ant Man in late summer, Star Wars for the Holidays. Captain America 3 and Batman V Superman are 2016.

It's better than I was expecting. Certainly better than Mines of Moria. At least its a true three dimensional multi level playset with all sorts of things going on. Not simply a pack of figures standing in front of a grey/black/tan wall. It reminds me less of Orc Forge and more of the Fantasy Era Dwarf Mine. While I would prefer the main gates, this isn't that bad... Except the price.

I get the impression that it is not so much the time spread as it is that sort of dividing line between the classic battles of antiquity. Colorful uniforms, laid out formations and firing lines, and a distinct fog of history vs what is considered Modern Warfare. Mechanized Army's, truly horrific weapons like machine guns and poison gas, complete wastelands of battlefields, all well documented and ingrained in the public conscious. WWI is generally considered the dividing point between the old and the modern kind of warfare. The first fully truly modern war. It's an understandable and valid dividing line, even if it does seem a bit dated. It should also be noted that Lego has not been shy about depicting stand alone WWI era vehicles. They have made both the Sopwith Camel (twice) and the Fokker Tri Plane. Not to mention many of the vehicles from the adventurers lines. They have just avoided putting them in expressly military settings. As with the licensed sets Context is critical. And at the heart of it all Lego's policy in this is not a "grey or fuzzy line". It is a very understandable position that I believe everyone in the company agrees with. Lego is a Child's Toy. The name means "Play Well". At the end of the day the toy makers do not want to be making toys that depict the horrors of the world that might reasonably show up at the children's front door. They wish for children to be children and childhood to be childhood and to not contribute to kids growing up too fast. Each and every product will be independently evaluated against that rather basic standard. While some of the interpretation and individual sets may be open to debate, the underlying goal is not, and it is quite clear.