Faefrost

Both sets look like we will be seeing those new Star Wars stud shooter pistols over here in Agents... yay?

Yep. Although that is one weird looking tractor. It sort of reminds me of a really bad late 80's TV series that only had a few episodes. The Highwayman? It looks longer and narrower than the old one. But still really neat. But then I am a total sucker for any sort of Mobile Command Center. I collect them, with the Agents one and the Alien Conquest EDF HQ being my absolute favorites.

I thought some of the Archers that showed up at Helms Deep with Haldir were both hooded and helmed. Hoods drawn up over helms. Now I'll have to go back and look.

And he's been upgraded to Stormtrooper! So his ability to fly or shoot straight should be severely diminished.

Here is a preview of My latest bit of absurdity. The fictional address 177a Bleecker St. Greenwich Villiage, NYC. Home of this wolds Sorcerer Supreme The Sanctum Sanctorum of Dr Strange. It's still very preliminary. I've barely started on the inside. And am still working on the third floor roof. I'm trying to keep it a little bare and cartoon y to match the comics art that I am sort of working off. The roof is giving me fits.

I'm betting that if Thano's is the main Phase 3 villain that they will be building towards, then we may see Hela as the primary bad guy in Thor 3. Which would leave room for Enchantress as a secondary and for Executioners famous last stand on the bridge.

Well yeah. That's what the original Agents theme basically was. Somewhere halfway between City Police and Batman, with maybe an Agents of Shield undercurrent running through it. The smaller sets were always Agents foiling Inferno robberies, which led to th emedium priced sets which were seeking Inferno plans,a nd finally the larger ones foiling Inferno sinister evil plots of destruction.

But at least they would finally be able to put one of their ever present "Gimli Launchers" to good use. Place the flaming Denethor on the launcher and FLING!

Never forget. It's a Michael Bay movie... And Michael Bay hates your childhood like he hates nothing else.

It's Chima. It will be a Mammoth on wheels, with whirling helicopter blades and a rocket launcher.

The same can be said of Unexpected Gathering. Bag End. The set is meant to portray more than just the one scene. Yeah it has Bilbo and the Dwarves. It also has Bilbo's book, Sting on display, and Frodo's sealed letter with the ring. Among other details. Lego enjoys making sets that you can set in time as you will. So Erebor will probably have a place to put the Arkenstone above the throne, and the stone itself, so the small play oriented (45 year old) children that will be spending hours living out fantasy stories through it have the broadest possible options.

I honestly don't think we will see Bolg. I think his on screen design changed too late in the process. Unless they decide to use Azog's head re colored with some radical printing? After all the grief with Yazneg they would probably just give as an extra regular Orc instead. Maybe at best we might see a bearded "Orc Champion" if the old Bolg design made it through the process to becoming a new mold. As for the Dwarves? I think the only ones of Thorin's company that we will see in new armored prints will be Thorin and Fili and Kili. Maybe, just maybe Bofur. But not all 13. The problem is the new molds they all have. The beards. Those beards define the characters. They aren't going to do a whole round of expensive new tooling to armor up the company. And what would be the point of updated printing for most of them? The beards cover it for the most part. You could use Arwens torso on Bifur or Gloin and never know it. Whereas Thorin, Fili and Kili have printed beards and hairpieces that seem specifically designed for torso accessories. Bofur too if you give him a helmet instead of a hat. Plus if you think about it Thorin, and his nephews are the ones that stand out as the traditional warriors. The ones you expect to see in armor. Ori not so much. (We know Ori wasn't wearing any when he died.)

Brilliant! I wish I had the ability to look at colors you would never expect to see in a modular building, and make them work so well.

True. Although my gut instinct tells me that Jordan was probably more focused on the building itself. All of that wonderful texturing and layering on the exterior walls feels like his work. The underlying story of the "Premier at the Theater starring The child actress Minnie Figg", just feels more like Astrid's style. I could be wrong, and I am sure they both had a great deal of input in both structure and story. Oo! And as a bonus in trying to look up what production sets he has actually designed (as opposed to his wonderful MOCs) I notice Jordan has a Lego design book available for preorder at Amazon. That might be worth checking out.

New molds may appear first in a D2C set, If and only if their creation is justified, and on the production schedule for regular retail sets or CMF's. Case in point the new scooter. We first saw it in the Parisian Restaurant, but it was also planned and scheduled for Friends sets to allow for amortization. The fact that all the figures in the Simpson's House have new heads is an almost certain guarantee that each of those characters will appear in a variant form in the CMF's. (Also the Simpson's House might not actually be a limited run D2C? It might just be a very expensive regular retail set, and have a larger planned production run.) I think the only initial exception to this rule was the newer large train wheels, a long term use part, which a few of the designers had to pretty much sell their souls to get. As far as why the Pirate Ship and why no Gondor sets, at least as of yet? I know the LotR purists hate the Pirate Ship. It is not viewed as a core essential LotR subject. But it IS a superb Lego subject. Something that attracts cross theme purchasers, and a bit of upper end contrast for what would otherwise be a theme of astonishingly similar look alike (to the regular consumer) castle walls with soldiers fighting Orcs. Whereas Helm's Deep is pretty much a large grey wall, following it up with a set that by any reasonably priced measure would be a large white wall in the next wave, at the same price point or in the flagship spot, might not have been viewed as the best marketing move. See the reason for the Ship is quite simply, you can have the Ship and Helms Deep on store shelves at the same time. They carry enough product distinctiveness to make them downright synergistic. Whereas it is much harder to do a Siege of Gondor set until all traces of Helms Deep are pretty much clear of the channel. The decision process isn't "what do we still have left to do?", it's "What did we do last time? What is still in the channel? What can we do next that is decidedly different than that to even the casual consumer?" (Yeah OK Star Wars gets a bit of a free pass with this. But that's a whole other level of merchandising crack. Middle Earth ain't there yet by a long shot. ) I hope we get another wave. Or better yet the LotR stuff becomes more ongoing. I think more than anything the obvious and different sets that they skipped were the Balrog and the Fel Beast. It's obvious from pics we have seen that they gave some thought to a Balrog. So you never know.

AoS would be perfect if it consistently dwelled in Marvel's third tier. Heck some of Marvel's best books thrived there. That's what the old classic "Marvel Team Up" and "Marvel Two in One" books were. Take a known fixed character ie Spiderman and the Thing, and have them deal with the assorted C lister or below of the month. And they were wonderful for it. They gave the fans of the then major properties, Spider-Man and FF (this was right when "New X Men was happening, so they hadn't hit big yet) introductions to such a broad and wild range of other Marvel stuff. Horror, Werewolf by Night and Morpheus, space, the original Guardians of the Galaxy, Quasar, Thundra, even Spider Woman. And AoS would work amazingly well with that same sort of formula. I thought Thanos, Drax the Collector and possibly Gamora all fall under his editorial reign, which is what I believe the requirement was? Heck technically Groot and the Guardians of the Galaxy name certainly do? (I think Star Lord and Rocket Racoon were created when Shooter was in charge?)

For Agents of Shield they could easily do a small $20-$30 set. Coulson's flying car Lola, a classic red sports car Shield flying car. And maybe 3 figs? Coulson, Skye or May and a Centipede / Extremist soldier. (Or maybe Blizzard if we want to go comic book'ish?) Besides you have to figure AoS will have some sort of cameo in one of the upcoming movies? And evergreen just means that a theme has become a regular recurring theme with no scheduled or anticipated EOL for the core theme. Yes City and Star Wars are always on the shelf. But Castle and Pirates are also considered Evergreen. While I think Superheroes is closer to Star Wars than Castle in terms of production and scheduling, I don't think it means we will see a huge jump in the number of sets out at once. All it means is we don't need to be asking "is this theme done? Will we ever get more?" Like the poor inhabitants over in the LotR threads. We may see sub themes come and go. We may not see stuff every single wave. It may not always be Marvel or DC (Kinda curious how TMNT didn't get lumped in with SH?) but we will see more costumed super heroes for the forseable future.

That set has me in heaven. Besides the obvious Karai figure, I'm in the middle of MOC'ing a modular 177A Bleeker Street. I'm just drooling over that sign.

I love it! Was it built to be displayed in the store itself? also any chance of a pic of the entrance from outside?

In terms of how they lat out the stories and the scenes we really have only seen 2 designers work in the Modulars. Jamie's and Astrid's. Of the two Jamie tends to tell the story a bit more using the structure and the details. Telling more a story of place (with the possible exception being the new PR). Astrid's tends to focus more on the characters telling a story of the people. Her's tend to be a little more fig or personal or scripted story specific. As examples, GE is a Jamie building. It has lots of gorgeous little details which are the main focus, and the figs in it are mainly filling their roles and interacting with the setting. Each with a little mini task story. The guy cleaning the windows, the cashier, the guy trying on pants, etc. the story is the store. Contrast that with Astrid's Town Hall, which is a Wedding Scene. Most of the characters in it are interacting to stage a wedding in the setting that is the town hall. The wedding is the story there, the place is the town hall. You can also see a similar method of story telling in Astrid's Palace Cinema. It's not just a movie theater. It is a Shirley Temple type movie premier taking place at this theater. And this isn't saying that one approach is better than the other. These are just different ways of writing if you will. Different styles of storytelling. And we benefit from both styles. Heck I think Jamie even borrowed a few of Astrid's character focused storytelling tricks with the proposal scene in PR.

I tend to prefer using long standing MOC'ers who have their own well established web sites. The guys selling on E-bay always worry me as you can never tell if they are reselling somebody else's plans, etc. I've bought plans from a Brick City Depot and Kristel and I can't say enough good things about them.

These last 2 Ep 2 and Ep 3 waves are really the holding pattern. They were supposed to correspond to the 3d theatrical re release of the movies. But Disney cancelled those. The upcoming summer wave is the beginning of the Disney plan or "where we go from here". It's a mix of classic OT stuff as the starting point for the new movies plus about a third focused on the new Rebels TV show. Figure the next wave will be heavier Rebels and the the one after that will dive head first into Ep VII.

Dear Gods! Once seen it cannot be unseen!

I think they kind of have to, to drum up fan interest. AoS is in a weird place right now. It's ABC's top rated new show. But it's ratings have had a slow steady decline. Mainly from complaints along the line of "It's Marvel NCIS, just without the Marvel". The fans have been upset at the almost total lack of actual Marvel Universe connections, references and appearances. So they have to kind of throw it out there "see! see! we have been building up to real comic book good stuff!" Assuming they continue this build up, my purely speculative predictions regarding Skye (hey I guessed right with Deathlok, so you never know). I'll go out on a limb and float the theory that Skye's origin is in some way related to the Kree. Maybe by way of the InHumans? That would pull her away from being another Asgardian, while at the same time it would let them do some teasing using her story for GoG and Avengers Phase 3 after that.

Holy carp! I actually guessed one right?!? *huh* Still cool that they are turning him into an actual Marvel character. (And one I've always kinda like ever since I first encountered him back in the days of Benjamin J Grimm's Marvel Two in One tales) (PS for the Marvel Zombies, did anyone else realize that the facility that blew up and collapsed at the beginning of Avengers was Project Pegasus? They kind of reference it as such in an offhand way at the very start of AoS. Once you make the connection you realize that it was astonishingly accurate to the old comics, and that long curving tunnel that Colby Smothers was chasing Loki in makes sense.) Oh and the upcoming Sif episode of AoS. Not only do we get an actual marvel Hero from both comics and movies guest starring for once. We actually get a named comic book villain. Lorelei. (I didn't say A list villain, now did I. It's still AoS we be talkin' about here.)