Faefrost

Just put the GotG Nebula figure next to your spacemen. That gives a fair idea of how purple would look. And heck I don't think there is a color that would look bad in the Futuron scheme.

Lets not forget that they have gone back to Blue Grey and Yellow in recent years. Except for the canopies Alien Conquest was one of the best themes for CS lovers in years. The EDF HQ was the best parts pack ever (besides being one of the truly great sets). And right before that SP III actually went back to the OTHER Classic Space color theme. White with blue canopies.

Don't get me wrong. I think Benny's ssS is oneof the best sets Lego has ever made. Absolutely years best. In part because it somehow leverages a strange confluence of our nostalgic youth, new modern builds and design, plus core pop culture media tie in. I would love for them to occasionally do something similar. Say maybe a nice big new Blacktron Renegade or Marauder to go against it? But they have to be careful when revisiting the past too much. I think SP III worked mostly because it went in an entirely new direction. As did the ssS. Something new with just a touch of the familiar.

The Legends line was kind of neat. But it is the perfect example of the catch 22 situation Lego finds itself in with us. And why their keen business sense often reminds them to never listen to AFOLs and crazy people. - we say we want the classic old stuff from our nostalgic youth. When they release it we bitch at how clunky the old designs are compared to modern techniques and we don't buy it. - we say we want new versions and new takes on old stuff and old themes. When they make it we bitch because they just keep remaking the same thing. We already have this and our old one is much better. Why would we need 2 of these? Oh and the new colors suck! We don't buy it. - we say we want something new and original with action and adventure and complex builds and cool features and parts and robots and bugs and missiles and SWOOSH! When they deliver it we complain that the stuff from our nostalgic youth is much better and we don't buy it. (Or we buy it while bitching about it) Honestly I am often surprised that the alcoholism rates in Denmark aren't higher. Just based on AFOLs alone.

My mother in law sent me this article. A 96 year old AFOL ("OFAL"? ummm never mind that's ummm? Yeah let's use a different term) http://www.newsday.com/lifestyle/retirement/at-96-dad-may-be-the-oldest-living-lego-builder-1.8121734 So cool and so sweet. Well except for Gramps gettin all "damn kids get offa mah lawn!" When anybody plays with his Lego.

I was going more for that feel with those Ekranoplans of all of the clustered engine nacelles. Some of the earlier and later ones also feature a kind of forward swept wing canopy (often cloth) that gave it a general shape similar to the set. Plus that mid ship missile launcher. And that the GEV's were designed to operates meters above a fairly flat surface such as ice sheets. It just brought the whole thing to mind. And yeah I realize that the Ice Planet dudes are launching some sort of Satellites or probes (little Sputnik shaped Satellites mind you). It just always seems strange? I mean they are running around a frozen world with these laser chainsaws, you would think they were digging for something in the ice? But nope, shoot and recover the rockets and Satellites. While hanging out in an extremely unpleasant environment. These guys were bigger spies than Spyrius.

Other hobbies besides Lego? BURN THE HERETIC! No seriously, I do model railroading and scale model building. I've actually moved more to Lego as I have less room, and in theory it makes less of a mess in the house. (Spill a few bottles of paint on the carpet and the wife's gets all worked up... And she is completely unreasonable on the subject of airbrushing indoors. Sigh!)

I meant not so much use it as is, but those boat hull pieces stack and can be used to build a larger boat. They are a good starting point if you don't want to work with the complex angles and curves of brick building the hull. And they are available in many colors as they are a fairly old part that is still in production and use (the Ninjago Destiny's Bounty and the LotR Pirate ship both used them recently.) they can be used to make a smaller Ship than the floating hulls or Pirate hull pieces, but still with a bit of width like a Tug Boat.

Loosely related but they have released a trailer for the 30th Anniversary Labor Day Weekend Theatrical re release, and the restored film looks GORGEOUS! This ought to inspire a few more MOC's.

So we should be expecting the life sized bust of Watto soon?

OK this is a weird tangent, but I happened to pick up a used 6973 Deep Freeze Defender this week just to add to my collection of Lego Space capital ships. Absolutely wonderful set BTW. Only 1 complaint, and that's that the ski's on the dual command pods keep falling off (and look kind of stupid). But anyway, this was my first ever Ice Planet set. The line was deep into my dark ages, and I really know almost nothing about it. So I had some questions. Like how does the DFD actually move? Where are the engines? Hmmm? It's only propulsion seems to be clusters of small engine nacelles bolted on everywhere. Okaaay? Different, but doable. Kind of interesting. So what is going on with this theme? As near as I can figure out the Ice Planet team seems to be manning a bunch of mobile ICBM launchers in deep freezing conditions. Including one mounted on the back of the DFD. Hmmm? It dawned on me what this all reminded me of. Some Cold War era Soviet systems. I mean we have the classic multi wheeled SCUD launchers cruising around, and I don't know why but the DFD just makes me thing of those wild Russian Ekranoplan ICBM launching sea plane / boat things that the Soviets experimented with for a number of years. That whole "bolt engines on everywhere" concept. So yeah I guess influences do come from strange places. But I will give em. As soon as you say "Ice Planet" Siberia immediately comes to mind.

We have Dark Blue. They're the heavily armored assault troops

The problem is it is a license. Chances are TLG will not keep a license just to do a handful of sets once the movie or TV series ends. (Yes SW is the exception. But toy sales funded the last 5 SW movies, so it's a special case.) they did not keep Harry Potter past the movies. I think a planned third LotR wave ended up getting swapped for a third Hobbit wave when they added the third Hobbit movie.

I can see that as something like a CMF. Which would be hilaious and adorable. Or do a pink or purple female classic space man with broken chin strap. But not so much in a regular play set. Appreciating the joke there requires a certain amount of ummm? life Experience shall we say? Acquired wisdom? Let's put it this way, beyond Benny in the movie to appreciate the broken chinstrap as a gag you almost need to be sporting an AARP card. The kiddies? They would just want to know why their brand new helmet is broken?

I think we can almost guarantee Erebor appearing at SDCC. At the minimum. It is likely the show piece set for this wave. Just as Bag End was a few years back. It's also something they can mainly show off without spoiling anything. Everyone knows what Erebor looks like in the movies at this point. Just as they knew more or less what the movie Bag End would be and showing us Lake Town didn't exactly spoil stuff. (Oh look snow?). We knew more or less from the books what Laketown is and what it looks like.

I think they actually gave us more info regarding why we do and don't see leg printing this week than we ever would have expected. Mark Stafford was discussing designing the new Ideas Exo Suit in a Redit thread. And he talked a bit about how every set and theme has a "change" budget. With changes being things that have to be done in the factory. So a part in a new color is a change. A new print is a change. Back printing is a change. Basically everything that requires a specific setup of a factory machine is a change. So they will carefully use and horde the changes they are allotted for a set. I take it as It's not just that the leg printing has to make the figure look better. Doing so also has to be worth it for the entire set to be using up one of those precious change points. Can the point be better spent elsewhere in the set? Is leg printing the best overall use for it? Also some themes have higher change budgets than others. (One assumes SW or anything with a direct current movie tie in tops the list). Whereas digital stuff from the games? The only budget constraint Tt games has for leg printing is the cost of pouring three more cups of coffee into the graphic artist in order to keep him functioning. (4 cups and a cold shower if he is doing a Wonder Woman fig)

They did. It was called the Legends line. It ran from 2001-2004. While everyone says they want it. The truth is it sold rather horribly. So it is not likely to be revisited anytime soon. (Sadly for some reason they did not revisit CS when they made it. But some highlights included remakes of the Black Seas Barracuda, Black Falcons Fortress and the Metro liner.

I don't think that prototype is even UCS. That's smaller than the Rogue Shadow and only a fraction of the UCS Darth Vader Tie. That has to be a regular minifig scale prototype.

3. I cannot answer on the grounds that if I did my wife would kill me.

Merlin is the amusement park company that TLG sold the parks to back in 2003 or so. They operate a large number of parks worldwide including California's Knotts Berry Farms. Lego has nothing to do with the direct operation of the parks or their pricing. I think at best they retained some small minority stake?

If you read through that Redit thread Mark Stafford goes into great detail regarding the classic helmets. In summary (and I am sure I am paraphrasing some. Apologies if I don't get it perfectly right) - the classic space helmets were a flawed part prone to breaking and are considered unacceptable and a safety hazard by today's standards. - they were replaced with the new style helmets 30 years ago. (Seriously those old helmets predate the dates of birth for a good chunk of the Lego design team that's how long gone they are.) - the new style helmets have been made in every classic space color so at this point for those who demand consistency between new and old it is actually easier to retrofit the old. - even if they were to entertain the idea, they would need to re engineer the part so it did not break. So it still would not match the classic helmets. - just doing Benny's helmet in green would almost be worse. It's made to look broken.

It's not just that it wasn't well received. It's that it has literally become the poster child for why Lego nearly went bankrupt in '03. Every business report or lecture throws up a picture of it when they start talking about Lego's expensive over diversification with no market. Galidor and Jack Stone are literally the two textbook examples of "stupid things Lego should never do again" that are taught in classes. It may or may not be true, and yeah they were not the specific problem, merely a symptom of it, but damn, that's the sort of rep that a product line will never recover from or be resurrected after.

Just to help slay one myth. There is often a difference between a business seeking to go cheap or cut costs. And a business innovating for efficiency. The change from pre colored pellets to the color injection system a few years back was not Lego seeking to reduce costs. At least not entirely and not on the front end. It was actually a massive capital expense. Like many production innovations it has some trade offs. Many many benefits, and a few negatives to weight against. Yes with the new dye injection system color consistency between batches is not quite the 100% it used to be. There may be a hair more variation, most typically under really bright or specific lighting conditions. Yes this will bother some classic AFOLs who demand 100% perfect color matching. But for the rest of us, well guess what, the new system has had a huge impact on us, in a good way. By streamlining the supply chain and giving themselves direct color control on the factory floor it means that color changes are much much easier in production. No longer do they have to fully redo a factory line to change color. No longer are their color options limited to the finite storage capacity of what colored pellets they have on hand. This means they can easily run smaller batches of more colors as needed. Look at classic sets and themes. Especially space. Notice how fairly rigid color pallets were within the theme? Part colors were produced in bulk and then used across the theme. Now contrast that with some modern themes. Look at Galaxy Squad or Chima. Notice how they no longer have the same color limitations. Color is used for identification, art direction and story, but you can have a much broader application. Instead of classic good = blue! grey trans yellow! bad = black! yellow trans hello or similar! each character or clan or faction can now be carrying their own distinct color pallet within the same theme! during the same production and release cycle! The new system also means that Lego does not need to stockpile parts as deep as they used to. They can now move to a more as needed production model. This actually benefits us in a number of ways. It keeps costs to us down, broadens the number and types of sets we see yearly. It allows stuff we never would have dreamed of in 1987. It allows more colors in a given set. This is all a good thing for us. A little bit of the margin of color quality was decreased in order to permit a much more flexible system with strong benefits for everyone from Legos owners to the kids happily playing with the bricks, but no Quality Must be slipping, because someone can see a minuscule difference between 2 yellow bricks under a bright light. It's a trade off. It's a deliberate trade off to our benefit. It's just like photography. Classic Kodak Kodachrome has a much better color saturation then any digital camera or image. Yet digital still overtook and displaced it because the overall benefits to the photographer were so much better than that one single data point or observer impression. /e wanders off to go beat his head against the wall some more

I hope Dr. Who makes it as a set. I am not getting overly optimistic though. I know I babble a bit around here about some of the hidden gotchas that are not always apparent to we the fan base, but would rear their ugly head at review time. Dr. Who has a few rather noticeable ones. Not enough to guarantee its failure by any means. But more than enough to guarantee that its success is far from a given. Here are just a few that can cause problems in spite of deep fan interest. 1. The BBC - ugh! How to put this. The BBC is a notoriously difficult licensing partner. On almost every level. The root of the problem is the BBC is not really a business, and is in many or most ways a government operated monopoly. What this often means is their staff, including those who deal with licenses are often a bit removed from many forces and concerns that naturally occur in the true private sector. They are notoriously bad at gauging value of their IP's. Often grossly over inflating them or arbitrarily assigning value with little actual data or experience. They are not real good at picking or supporting larger licensing partners preferring to go with smaller local ones. They have a pretty broad history of driving partners nuts. Have you ever wondered why DVD sets of your favorite BBC shows are so expensive? Especially when compared to anything else? Or why you cannot get full season sets of the pre Ecclesten Doctors and instead must hunt them down story by story? It's because actual market forces do not apply to the BBC. At least not in as direct a way as in the real world. So what does this mean regarding a Dr. Who Lego set? Short answer, there is a remarkably good chance that the BBC will price the license beyond what TLG is willing to pay. Fan enthusiasm and interest from Ideas will only increase their expectations on value. Whereas Lego will be basing their willingness to pay on actual outside market data. Things like the success or failure of Character Builders line. Dr. Who's overall and international viewership numbers, etc. these two sides may not come to agreement. 2. Character Builders take on the license just went away - Lego is going to look as hard as they can at the success or failure of Character Builders recent take on the license. At least as far as they can from public information. They may not like what they see. Especially considering that the heart of CB's line was a set very similar to what is being proposed by both 10k projects. The question will be in part "is the simple fact that it is "Lego" enough to boost sales of a similar product beyond CB's?" As I said, neither guarantees a review failure. But they do offer a possible and not unlikely clear logical path for a review failure to happen. And oh boy what nerd rage would it be.

Individual actors can and should be held responsible for specific misdeeds. But "Oil or Energy Production" is not in and of itself a misdeed. Unfortunately that is not and has never been the view or approach taken by Greenpeace.