MAB

To some people, maybe. But to others, the recent inclusivity sets they have produced look like LEGO are doing something positive towards the LGBT community. Their actions towards LGBT staff are also much more inclusive than some other companies. If someone wants to boycott buying HP sets, or boycott LEGO completely because they profit from sets based on movies based on books written by someone that has opposing views to you, or boycott any Warner Brothers productions, or boycott any stores or supermarkets that sell HP media or toys, then go for it. It is personal choice. If you believe the Everyone is Awesome set is just a quick commercial gain under the pretense that they support LGBT issues when really they don't, then don't buy the set and boycott the company's products.

I wonder what will happen if you try to place an order. And also what happens to prices if the order goes through as they usually charge current prices and not what it says in the order. I used to do the same for the winter close down period, it was possible to open lots of private browser tabs with independent occurrences of B+P in each one, and it was possible to still place orders. But then, the pricing wasn't changed like now.

True, but that is because lego has changed to survive. I am sure some people would be happy if lego only produced parts in colours availability in 1975, or maybe 1985 for early minifig fans. But if they only produced the same range that was available decades ago, I don't think they'd still be around to produce them. In the late 70s I had a bucket of mainly 2x4, 2x2 bricks, 8x16 bricks for bases, roof slopes, plus windows and old style wheels with studs. When I look at photos of what I built and what my kids built at the same age, my kids' models are much better due to the range of parts and colours available. While lego don't sell monochromatic boxes of parts, for anyone that has heard of Bricklink, it is easy to get them.

I can fully understand people not wanting a minifigure honouring her. That would be a step too far for LEGO especially given how few real people have been made into minifigures, making it look like they support her. I don't think it is just Gen Z. People of all ages call for cancellations of things they don't like or agree with these days. Even though lots of old TV shows get edited or pulled from streaming services, they can't edit old DVDs. The joy of physical media!

I think the opposite. Harry Potter is just as popular as ever with kids and therefore a key theme. You only need to see the queues of people waiting to have their photo taken at Platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross station, or the hoards of tourists queuing at shops in The Shambles in York to see the continued popularity. And yet none of them are shouting anti-trans slogans. Most people either don't know or don't care about her views or they can distance her views from the movie series that the LEGO bases the sets on. If they start pulling out the HP license because of JK Rowling's views, then I doubt there are many movie based franchises that they could use without being hypocritical, given that most franchises will be associated somehow with at least one person that has different but perfectly legal viewpoints to someone else. People can always take a personal stance, if you hate JK Rowling and her views to such an extreme, then don't buy LEGO sets based on the movies that based on the books written by her. My opinion (I don't know whether it is unpopular or not, and I couldn't really care): there is no need to keep bringing it up and it does not need to be mentioned every time new HP set comes out.

I don't really see what the issue is. When I look on lego.com under themes > classic, there are 23 items, 17 of which are "Classic Boxes". That is plenty of sets in different sizes and styles to get basic bricks. And that is not including the Creator series of sets. The number of object sets like the typewriter is still small. Personally I don't like the typewriter, but I don't mind that it exists for the people that like that sort of thing. Are they really that different to Star Wars ships, or Classic Space ships, or Castle sets? How often do AFOLs actually swoosh their 1980s sets around? My castle sets are on display and I might change the poses of minifigures every so often, but rarely break the sets down and even if I do, I tend to rebuild them exactly as they were. They are just display sets to unless you play with them. I also disagree with the instant gratification side is a problem. So what if someone has the money and can buy $500 or $1000 worth at once. What difference does it make to me? Jealousy maybe an issue here, that they can buy all they want in one go, whereas someone else might have to take years to build a collection. 18+ sets are not really toys like the sets of old, they are designed and sold for the adult collector market. So there is no wonder that adult collectors buy them. I think a major problem is social media, both those that use it AND those that watch it and then complain about it. I'm not a fan of haul videos where someone buys load and just shows the boxes. If I want to see boxes, I can view images in seconds without sitting through 20 minutes of "action" sitting in the car in the car park, walking to the store, entering the store, taking the sets from the shelves, buying the sets, walking back to the car, then taking them out of the bag in the car. But then I don't watch those videos. If you don't like seeing people doing hauls, or showing their sealed in box collections, or their videos of sets build according to the instructions, then don't watch them. Some people do like watching them, just like some people like building fairly static display objects out of LEGO. Anything can be a showpiece if it attracts people to look at it. Unless you define a showpiece as something that attracts attention because it is big and expensive, then they are all big and expensive. There are plenty of other display quality pieces at much lower prices. Brickheadz, Speed Champions, even down to Collectable Minifigures - all cheap. There are so many good quality small sets, that none of them are showpiece in the sense that they are all just normal. To get people to look at something in a LEGO store window it typically has to be big and therefore expensive. Otherwise it is just a normal set. Whereas if you take it home and display on a smaller shelf, whatever you enjoy enough to display is a showpiece set.

They chose to put it in the poll. They also didn't say how big the set would be, or that it would contain traditional Bionicle parts.

They could do anything they want. They could do the three classic themes, they could do 20 different Bionicle reproduction sets, they could celebrate the anniversary date for the next ten years, etc. That they don't makes it seem like either they don't wantvto or that they don't think there us money in it (more than what it would replace.) They could easily celebrate a meaningful type anniversary every year if they wanted to. As this is an anniversary of the company and not the product (they recently did the 60th), I would have preferred something from the early days built out of their modern product. But that isn't going to happen.

It would be nice if they do a few factions (even if only one of each) and the parts are sold on the online PAB. Plus a few peasants too.

It was a fairly typical lego survey. They seemed to do it without thinking about what they were going to do with the data. But then I imaginevmany people answered it without thinking too much too. How many people voting for Classic Castle really wanted a yellow castle, or did they vote believing they were voting for combinations of other options in the poll.

Kenny has a chest tattoo and wears a flesh coloured helmet and airtanks but is otherwise fully nude.

What else happened that year? AFOLs trashed the Castle line, complaining it was lazy, too similar to past sets, too cartoony, etc. Presumably it was about then that LEGO started to reinvent and modernise Castle and came up with Nexo Knights. Which AFOLs went on to complain about, not castle, too different to past sets, ... Whereas I'd go with a new Elves like theme instead of no castle. Especially if they did more male characters such as soldiers in minidoll form, I think younger boys would soon become fans of minidolls as well as minifigs. If they aren't going to do old style castle anyway, I do not see the harm of having a fantasy based theme that is not Castle.

Elves wasn't an epic failure, yet that had fantasy castles, fantasy creatures, dragons, and of course elves. Similar to some castle themes. I don't think there are any repercussions in the castle community now because of Elves. And I don't think any similar minidoll based theme would have repercussions on the castle community. If the builds were exactly the same, I doubt that many kids would care either way if the figures were minidolls or minifigures. If there was a choice between no castle at all, and castle done with minidolls, I'd go with the minidolls. We have never had a licensed castle theme and I doubt we ever will. If it is a license, the theme will be the license and not castle. Of course, there are licensed themes with castle like builds or actual castles in them (LOTR, HP, Disney) but these are not Castle, and don't see to have an effect on whether we get castles in in-house themes. We already saw in 2013 we had LOTR+Hobbit coexisting with Castle. And again here, I'd prefer to see a licensed theme with castle type builds in it, than no castle like builds at all.

The sense of it is really quite simple. Their production capacity is low compared to demand, partly because of the huge range of sets they make these days and partly due to the massive increase in the number of adults buying LEGO. It is better for them to sell the sets direct to customers at the start as that means all those full RRP purchases are direct from LEGO rather than another store. It also means they have full sales statistics (speed of sales, best locations, number of sales without a promo compared to number of sales when done with a GWP, etc). Some people want sets as early as they can possibly get them. Those people will end up paying full price for them (or higher if they buy from a reseller) and they will get them from the first batches produced. LEGO continue to make the sets so supply increases and as people buy them, the demand lowers. When supply and demand are more balanced, it makes sense for them to be sold through more outlets.

Yes and no. It seems LEGO doesn't want both realistic and fantasy space on the shelves at the same time - at least, if you restrict it to in-house themes. Of course, there are other ways to supplement current sets, such as using aliens or Classic Space prints from the CMFs or other recent sets if you want aliens or Classic Space minifigures and, of course, creating MOCs instead of sticking to just sets. And then there is buying pre-owned LEGO sets or parts from the past 50 years. And of course different people can decide what they want from a particular theme. But if they don't like what is in a theme, it doesn't mean that LEGO does not do that theme. It just means that they cannot find anything in it that they enjoy. Remember that some of the people that were very anti-Mr Gold were people that wanted him and couldn't find him. If they had found one, they would probably have had a different opinion. If anything is rarer than other similar items, prices will soar because some people MUST have everything and "be complete". Whether it is LEGO, pokemon cards, Star Wars figures, etc. I know a family where the kid randomly opened a Mr Gold. They didn't realise the rarity or value and the kid played with it a bit. He didn't really like it as it didn't fit with the other figures he played with. I let them know the value and they sold it on and the kid got a few large LEGO sets with the proceeds. He was a happy finder, even if he didn't know at the time. LEGO now know how to deal with it though, just stick series where there are chase figures into boxes like in Vidiyo.

You do realise that there is a really simple solution to that. Don't buy early, and instead just wait a few months.

Eurobricks doesn't store the images on their server anyway. As it is, a contributor has the right to remove any previous images they want to by deleting the images that are linked to. Plus archiving every page of a forum manually is going to be quite a job.

That is the issue. It may not work for you, but it does for others. Sci-fi does have a lot of realism in these days. The sci bits are often more close to reality than they were decades ago and so sets like these work.

Whether it is real life or not is not really an issue. War, terrorism, violence, abuse, pornography, etc is real life too. It is whether it is appropriate for a child's toy. Is teaching a kid that alcohol and the operation of machinery go well together a good idea? To me, not.

Is Barracuda Bay a theme now? I thought it was a one-off adult aimed set. What ships and what land based vehicles though, as we currently have ships and land-based vehicles on the shelves. Yes, look at the recently past and new range of space sets. There are bases, ships, land based vehicles. Are kids playing with these today really any different to kids playing with Classic Space three or four decades ago? The colours are different, the torsos are different but the play-time will be very similar. This is the Classic Space of the 2020s. In the past, Classic Space fans have complained about Alien Conquest and Galaxy Squad being too alien combat focused and that instead what is needed is research and exploration. That is what LEGO are providing now. This is why Classic Space is a historic theme (aside from Easter Eggs here and there), because we already have a much more modern take on it. The colours and figures are different, the sci-fi is more towards realism (like many space sci-fi movies today) and but the play is the same. To me, this sort of set looks similar to sci-fi movies like The Martian, Moon, Gravity, Ad Astra, ...

It is the situation, not the beer. Someone having a whole crate of beer while operating machinery doesn't send out a good message.

If they did a castle like theme in minidolls, I'd hope it would be fantasy based. Some of the Elves sets were pretty much there. Interesting shaped and more fantasy colour schemes for castles and towers, fantasy creatures, and so on. For kids, and especially younger girls, they are more interesting than square grey castles. The organic looking spiky castles of Elves were fantastic. But it may be an issue with how many Disney Princess castles and towers there are these days. All the princesses seem to have some sort of castle in LEGO at the moment and the key audience for both Disney and "new Elves" could well overlap.

That is the problem Classic Space has. It is history. A old view of sci-fi space from the past. LEGO has done other sci-fi space sets such as Alien Conquest and Galaxy Squad but AFOLs trashed those as they weren't the same as ones from 30 years before. Sci-fi space is a very wide subject compared to castles and pirates. Ask a kid to describe what should be in a castle playset and you'll probably get medieval castle or fantasy (dragons, trolls, etc). Ask to describe what should be in a pirates theme and you'll get a ship and an island with buried treasure. Ask to describe what should be in a sci-fi based space set and I reckon you'll get a huge range of views, much wider than for a castle set or pirates. The stereotypical view of what constitutes knights and pirates hasn't changed much in the past decades, whereas sci-fi has and was already significantly wider four decades ago. While the anniversary set should link back to LEGO history, I doubt that is an objective for modern themes. The odd Easter Egg type links, sure. But themes picking up where the 1980s left them, unlikely.

Playmobil also did a construction worker with a cement mixer set that came with a crate of beer.

When I look at a lot of my daughter's dolls, they have hip articulation and can move legs independently but aside from that, they don't have much articulation at the knee. Of course minidolls don't have independent moving legs but aside from that they are quite similar to dolls x10 the size in terms of posability. Plus they stand up a lot easier than some dolls.