Faefrost

It's a good game for an F2P model. Especially if they incorporate codes from new CMFs and manage to port it to tablet or mobile platforms.

Given that it seems to follow the basic Town Hall footprint, would it work using the TH's elevator instead of stairs?

It won't be much worse than it is now. Projects still pass through a basic screening that does eliminate the worst of the "non projects". That should not change.

Think of it this way. Picture all of the EU in your mind. All the books, all the comics, all the sourcebooks and games. Now crumple it all into an enormous ball... Now label it "Alderaan" ...

It depends on what you are expecting it to fit to. Does it fit continuity and tone wise with the normally depicted DCU? And could you easily move characters in and out of it? Hell yes. Does it for continuity and tone wise with Man of Steel or the Nolan bat films? Hell no! But that's kind of the root problem. Pretty much nothing in the DCU fits with MoS.

This isn't "trouble" to design a minifig. This is a few minutes work for an artist to sketch in a comic panel using a minifig style character for a little story. I don't think it technically even rises to the level of concept art in the overall scheme of things. Just as with the AIM beekeeper and Jimmy Olson, there are a lot more things involved to make an actual production figure. Lots of validations and testing. Lots of approvals.

There is a very small Ferris wheel in Glove World. There is also an older larger one. 4957, although that is not minifig scale.

I think it first showed up in the original novelization and the press and character information provided by the studio when Star Wars was released. It was part of the description of the character, and probably was mentioned in the info given to the actors. Thinking back on it, I can't remember when or where the term first shows up as a line in the movies? Is it ever actually spoken before The Phantom Menace? It's another one of those weird Lucas throwaway things that the fans went and built a whole mythology around. (See: Fett, Boba)

Metal Men could be interesting if they give it to somebody a bit more offbeat and quirky. In other words somebody who doesn't work for them. 100 Bullets could be great. Shazam? That will be hard to play on that line between camp, and cheesy. If done absolutely right it could be great. But the margin of error is so unbelievably narrow. One step the wrong way and they have Superman 3 or 60's Batman. It certainly could not work in the current dark moody and brutal DCU cinema universe. Fables is a great book. But at this point it cannot work on screen. The simple reason, Disney got there first and currently owns the teritory. Any attempts will simply be branded a "Once Upon A Time" ripoff. It doesn't matter what is true. Perception is everything, and you can't get past the basic core fact that anything Fables would attempt to do would elicit the response "been there seen that". It's Once Upon a Time + Wolverine. To attempt anything else would deviate too much from the source.

$1000 for a 2500 piece MOC seems a little steep. The MOC in my sig is just shy of $3000 pieces and cost me about $500. Mostly because it used some rare expensive pieces, and I budgeted badly and over ordered a lot. I really had not worked out how to efficiently use Bricklink. Unless you are buying some really unusual rare, long out of production, never publicly released etc, parts it should be possible to do most of what you want for 10-15 cents/part average.

Darth Revan is from the Bioware KotOR and SWTOR games. They are set thousands of years before SW, and are still a supported product with a live game. The TOR stuff is in a greyed area. It's more it's own thing not really touching SW or the EU.

A few Dwarves would not be bad. Thorin armored up as King Under the Mountain would be great. The others? Maybe armored Fili or Kili? The hair for all three would allow actual armor, not simply a new print. But yeah, not the whole company redone. What would be the point? You can barely see their Torso's through the beards, and the characters are defined by the unique beard/hair pieces. About the only ones that armored torsos might work with are Bofur and Ori. The rest, what would the point be?

I still doubt we will see a Bolg. I think his design changed too late in the process. We will either see a red bearded "Orc Captain" or at best they will do a recolor and some clever printing on Azog's head mold to reuse it.

It probably will have zero impact on Lego sets. Lego has never made a straight up EU set just for the sake of making one. What few EU things they do are almost always part of an overall marketing push by Lucasfilms to support some new product. Almost always something very densely graphical in nature, such as video games. They have never made a set based solely on the books or comics. They have all been multimedia tie ins with Lucasfilms, from games (Shadows of the Empire, Dark Forces, SWTOR, Force Uleashed, etc) or from Lego's own SW multimedia projects (Yoda Chronicles which were never exactly EU, and are still in production for Disney XD now.) Whenever Disney/Lucas needs another marketing push, now in partnership with EA, we may see a game based Lego set. (There's a new Star Wars Battlefront game under development from Battlefield creators Dice, which may yield some clones goodness.)

But that's exactly what we will get. We will get elements of the EU in Episode VII. We will get elements of the EU in Rebels. Just as for the past 20 years they have snuck elements of the EU into the PT, into the OT Special Editions and with extreme frequency, into TCW. This had to happen. As soon as they announced that there would be a 7th movie everything written had to burn. There was no way around it. The new movies and TV shows could not be constrained by the timelines, histories and stories of the books. Many of the characters and Ships and planets will be saved and reintroduced in the new stuff. It's happened before. Remember Coruscant was from the books before it was formalized, as written, in the movies. Many EU ships and characters were formalized with cameos. Their exact back stories and histories will change to match the new timelines, but they are not completely off the table. We may yet see Thrawn or Talon Carde or Mara Jade, etc. but if we see them it will be in a different story than what we have read. As far as we know right now there is really only one key EU event that is absolutely positively 100% undone with no real hope of returning, at least not in anything close to its EU manner. And it is generally the most hated moment from all of the books. The moment the EU jumped the shark and the majority of fans walked away and stopped reading. We know Peter Mayhew is on set for episode VII. Chewbaca Lives! Among the things that probably triggered this were the rather horrific arms race that went on between the EU writers. How each new story seemed to go for bigger and more absurd galaxy destroying super weapons. (Granted JJ Abrahms is involved and he does have some of his own issues along these lines. See: USS Vengeance). And let's not forget the Yuzhan Vong (or however you spell it) star War's answer to all of the really lousy Star Trek villain races introduced in Voyager. With a dash of Stargate Atlantis and Earth Final Conflict thrown in. At the end of the day the new movies have to look and feel like classic Star Wars to succeed. The EU had written itself to far away from that to be preserved as it was. Are you insane? Dark Horse has lost the license. The root IP is now outright owned by Marvel. Those comics will not be reprinted or republished in any form unless or until Marvel buys out Dark horse. Whatever you do, DO NOT THROW OUT THE COMICS!!!!!

Actually tying it into your Lego ID account is really rather brilliant in a modern quasi creepy marketing way. Just think about how much data this gives them on what their actual customers like. Now that data is also tied to another great pool of data. All your purchasing history, etc. they can tie together what you like, with what you buy, with what your budget is, with even what you build if you submit projects. Meta data and data mining is not always scary. Especially not when it allows much more exacting design focus for more niche shorter run D2C offerings such as CuuSoo, Creator Expert, Trains and smaller scale licensed stuff such as Simpsons. A mechanism like this is what would give them data they need to know there is a solid market niche out there for something like your long desired History themes, without having to first risk production.

The Grand Carousel was a truly massive set piece model. This strikes me more as an amped up take on the Winter Village Carnival. It goes well with and ads some animation to any town city or train layout. And the kids will be constantly packing up the fair, driving it away, setting it up again. The play value is amazing. Price point etc it comes in around the same place as the Horizon Express. The engineering and design behind it is brilliant. As far as why the Minifigs are mainly reused prints. It's a D2C set. The production run for it is in the 10's or 100's of thousands. Not the millions that retail sets get. They reuse parts where they can. Just look at the Winter Village sets to see the same.

I think the bottom one might be megabloks. Like you say it looks familiar. The one without the pin is an old style bulb cover for lighting effects. It is Lego just older.

As I said above. I know the store that Jason goes to. I tend to give them more then a bit of benefit of the doubt. In terms of store stock space they are one of the largest if not the largest in North America. Not just in retail shelf space, but in back room storage capacity. As such they are not very restricted in their stocking by space concerns. They have a nice deep pool and keep a solid stock of everything that is available. And the core staff is knowledgable enough and has enough connections to regional and above to have a very very clear idea of what is going on regarding specific product. If this store is running low on a product it is because it is becoming scarce in the channel and warehouses. The staff does not always know if or when Lego will go back and do another production run of a given set. But they have more than enough experience to make a well informed guesstimate of whether or not that is likely to happen for a given product. They sometimes get surprised (such as the unexpected Fire Brigade production run early last year) but typically they are right. They never provide or know hard retirement dates, unless an IP license is involved (such as Harry Potter) but they can well predict what is going away.

Jackson said he has not abandoned the "There and back again" name entirely. That will be the name for the full 3 movie extended edition release. Which sort of makes sense. TABA is the name of the full story.

It would not surprise me. I think at a minimum they will put the next batch of results out sooner rather than later to clear the decks as it were. That way this review period that's ending goes into review as Ideas, and these next announced results are the last specifically CuuSoo.

I think we were all hoping that that is what the new Creator Shops were going to be. Sadly they are way off from Modulars. Oh and my local Lego store confirmed today that the May VIP is a new Creator Expert set, but it is not a Modular.

It would be neat, but I think we have about 2 years before we would see a new MTT released. At least as a large full featured set similar to the previous. Just the normal goals of shelf differentiation should have them putting some space between it and the new Sandcrawler. Plus the pic looks a little too smooth. It's probably just a digital mock up for the Yoda Chronicles. We don't seem to get everything seen in the shows as a set. (Although I will admit that weird Jedi School Bus us growing on me. So please make it Lego!)

Honestly, It's because you have viewed CuuSoo more of a MOC and personal development platform, rather than a mechanism for presenting a product or project proposal. You put up a stream of similar but not the same prototypes rather than selecting a core project, refining it, and presenting it in a way that really makes it pop. You are showing the CuuSoo viewers the development process, not the final results. And it isn't a very good platform for that. Something like your auto dealership would really pop and could do well if polished up and matched with a well thought out presentation. You have 27 projects up there. All of them are small city style flat roofed white buildings. Most are depicting selling hardware. They are competing with each other for what little natural trickle of interested viewers they get just in the course of being up there. There is no backend push for any one. You (and many other people) use CuuSoo as a vanity tool to see how many people will vote for your MOC's. Which is all well and good. But it isn't the purpose for which it was designed or intended, and maintaining rules just to favor that style of use is clearly now at cross purposes for what the actual functionality of the crowd sourcing mechanism is supposed to be. They aren't disallowing that type of use. They are just giving it a fairly broad time limit. They are not there to permanently host your MOC's. They are there to give you a platform to pitch your ideas. Sell them to the masses. Take your Ford dealership and make it sizzle. Make it not just a City layout scene, but a strong playset. Cars, colorful characters, action and movement. Your wonderful signage. Your wonderful little detail builds. Put the audience or the child into your project and have them interacting with it. And limit yourself. Just a handful or active projects. Refine them first then publish them. Do not use the platform as a mechanism to refine the proposal (or at least limit the refinement to presentation refinements and minor tweaks. Response to feedback is always good.)

But are they a predictable or quantifiable group? and are there enough of them to justify product creation and a production run? The time to 10k along with a number of other data points does help act as a metric for that. I still think by far one of the biggest reasons for the new 1 year limit is to maintain and insure continuing interest and support from the project creator. Dorayaki mentions the Piano project sitting out there for 6 years. when was the last time the creator was heard from? Does CuuSoo have current info for them? Have they walked away from it or forgotten it? Are they even still involved? How many of the long term projects are still supported by their creators? The time limit is a good mechanism for keeping them engaged. Plus it encourages refinement and improving your presentation. It becomes more important to sell your project. Not simply show off your MOC. All of this is a good and necesary thing for this sort of endeavor. The fact that there has been no long term mechanism for housekeeping with CuuSoo has been one of its biggest flaws.