MAB

Raising the price a little won't help. It is still significantly lower than the set price and the BL part out price so buyers will still want them. $10 would stop resellers but then it would stop most buyers too.

When you build this in real life, how do you ensure every angle is exactly the same? You are creating a flexible part with fixed ends. It is not just angles, there are distances to consider too. I think you have a 20 stud long quarter circumference, which must equal 0.5 pi r, and so r is not a whole number of studs, and your radius will not be equal for every section. Hence the angles cannot be the same.

Cartoon Network, Netflix, amazon prime and probably other streaming services. Kids TV doesn't really work like that. I don't think kids feel they are having to invest their time in watching cartoons. Time watching something fun is not worthless if you enjoy it. They are a pleasure, not a chore. Storylines move very slowly throughout a series and most episodes are a fairly well contained story on their own, in that you can watch one in isolation. I haven't seen Ninjago for a long time, but I have seen Chima and NK with my kids and they follow that sort of pattern. In most episodes something happens and then it is resolved while progressing the bigger story only a small amount. You could easily miss an episode and still know what is happening.

To illustrate the point, here is Kai from 2011, 2016, 2020 and even in Minecraft .. It doesn't really matter which episodes of Ninjago a kid has watched, or whether they have old or new sets, they will instantly recognise their heroes.

I don't think kids care too much about army builders. When my kids play, it doesn't really matter what theme the figures came from, they all get included. If they had to choose in a store though, I imagine they would go for the more dynamic looking action based one. I don't think that matters. They still know Ninjago and they know the main characters. Any current Ninjago sets are still recognizable as Ninjago and will have an advantage over something they do not know.

My answer of yes was to the last question about have things changed much in toy world. I think toys, especially lego, have changed significantly in the past 15 years. As have kids. Tablets, apps and tech are now integrated into many higher end toys, kids think nothing of getting their media from youtube/Internet rather than broadcast TV and paper catalogues and especially after TLM, a lot of advertising is now through tie-in media rather than traditional advertising. The cartoons are 20 minutes or so of advertising. Why do 30 secs of advertising when the show can be the advertising. Any theme without media has to go up against such themes with media. That is why I think it s likely to lose the shelf space battle. The problem with the Fantasy Era male peasants is that they are all very similar torsos, which has probably held their value back. Whereas Kingdoms ones introduced a bit more variation. Although all have been selling very well recently. Kingdoms soldiers in particular have done well for me recently.

I thought these ones from 2013/14 were fairly decent. The crowns on the blue faction were a bit too prominent for me, but I don't think kids were put off by that. It is not just castle-centric licensed themes that compete with Castle. All the other in-house themes also compete against Castle. As you say, kids want everything. I find with my kids, often they don't really care what theme it is, they will want and play with it if it looks good on the box. Hence brightly coloured action based themes selling well. I think the simple answer is yes. Since the massive growth in LEGO after The LEGO Movie, so much of the output for kids is now backed up by other media/cartoons and that has become the new format for themes. Castle may have sold OK more than a decade ago, when it was not competing against media driven advertising for the other in-house themes. That is no longer the situation though. Put Castle with no media up against Ninjago and Monkie Kid, and I doubt it will do very well in sales to kids.

Neither are a lot of the figures that get sold off stolen. You only had to look at Kevin Hinkle's ebay sales when he left LEGO to see the 100s of minifigures of himself, other LEGO workers, and all the multiple copies of comic con figures that he had. Presumably all legit.

Yes, and that would mean going back to mainly unnamed characters in the theme - and presumably no character driven media support - which is a very different model to most modern themes such as Monkie Kid, Ninjago, Chima, Nexo Knights, and so on. Chima had 9 or 10 Lavals, NK had a similar number of Aarons, and so on. It doesn't matter that they are an external IP like SW or HP, or an internal theme. Named characters (which would be necessary if there was going to be a media drive to promote it) mean repeated characters at the expense of unnamed generic army building type characters.

I cannot see how they are prototypes. What are they even prototyping? The parts have been in production for a number of years. The colours are well established. They don't need to make entire figures to prototype a part. If they are genuine, in the sense that they are made in a lego factory, they are probably being made for the black market. Whether a shift manager knows or not, they are probably made to supplement incomes paid by lego. We've seen employees leave before, and have literally 1000s of valuable minifigs that get sold off. Same with their in house gift sets, loads appear for sale at Xmas. No doubt all staff know there is money to be made from black market sales.

It depends what you do with the figures. Sell them, and licensed ones tend to get better return value making the price per part of the building parts cheaper. It depends what you do with them. I have three complete sets of The Fellowship from LOTR. I display multiple vignettes at once, so having multiples is good. But you can say the same thing about unlicensed sets. If you have a dozen identifiable characters such as kings or queens, they are also less useful than generic characters.

I also have a complaint with them about a problem order, now 17 days and no reply to the email. Maybe take yours to twitter and make it very public, as lego CS don't seem to care about the safety issue.

I find HP and SW sets are often better value as parts packs than a lot of in-house themes, despite their apparently higher prices. I have had a number of HP sets, but I'm not really a fan of it. I know what it is, I just don't care too much about it. But often the parts are very useful as they are castle type parts, in often monochromatic or muted colours. And I know the figures typically sell for a substantial part of the set cost price - some people only collect them as they are HP not because they are lego. Compare that to in-house themes, where parts tend to be a bit brighter and the non-licensed characters are not of interest to buyers. They either have the sets and have the figures, or are not into the theme. So yeah, there are sales of license sets to people that aren't into the theme.

I did. A good little tree and a great giant spider (ideal for LOTR/Hobbit fans). And the licensed minifigures sell easily to recoup some of the money for the set. You might as well ask how many people are buying Sandy's Speedboat if they are not invested in LEGO's in-house Monkie Kid theme. To me, the licensed vs non-licensed aspect doesn't really make any difference. I'm not into any of the characters, they are all way too specific except for the spider witch to be useful to me, and the other parts of the set are a not so great tree/cave and a not so great spider and some brightly coloured vehicles, and even their parts don't look too useful to me. The licensed HP set to me is way better than the unlicensed MK set. I agree here, this would be good for AFOLs. But would it sell to kids without marketing? And would it sell as well as the theme next to it on the shelves where there is a media tie-in. Probably not.

I cannot see LEGO having both a TV cartoon based Castle theme at the same time as having sets aimed at AFOLs in the same theme. The two don't link together. What one group tends to want, the other doesn't. Of course, there are always some AFOLs that like particular kids' themes, which is fine. However, what most kids and most adults would want for a specific theme are quite different. They did produce some online comic style videos for KK2, for example, some are here: (1) Lego Knights' Kingdom Comic 1: The Missing King - YouTube AFOLs hated the theme. Even though it had reasonably good castle sets in it like this one ... there was a lot of criticism over the theme and the use of "Jellybean knights" and big parts / LURPS and BURPS.

Hint: don't watch the TV shows. Then you can use your own imagination to play however you like. LEGO don't force you to watch them before you can purchase the sets.

They are some of the least popular Castle figs. So you want an entire theme aimed at adults, not at kids. With a media tie in? Who would the media be aimed at if the sets are for adults?

Yes, but they often introduced a little bit of storyline. But think what would happen with Castle if they did a media tie in. That would mean a small group of named characters, probably with specific torso prints or colours, being repeated again and again in sets. They did that with Ninjago, Chima, Nexo Knights, Friends, Elves, Monkie Kid, even City to some extent. It's a model that works.

Definitely texture (studs on sides, textured bricks, non-flat walls. I also like sparse use of accent colours, I find most of the dark colours work well with black - dark blue, dark green, dark tan, dark red, dark BG. As it is for skeletons, you might also want to build some parts by embedding bones into the structure too. You could even use white as the accent colour if you are doing this.

There was some storyline to Castle and Pirates, plus TV adverts and the odd comic or book. And that was at a time that media tie-ins were not really done at all. It is a different environment now compared to 20 or 40 years ago. Could Castle or Pirates have a TV tie-in now? Of course. Will it be as popular as Ninjago (or City or Friends of Chima or Nexo Knights) - maybe, maybe not. However, AFOLs would probably complain if there was one that having a cartoon media tie-in has made any sets too kid focused.

The point is that they don't really care about how well old themes sell. They care about how well current themes sell. It doesn't matter to LEGO whether current themes are based on an old themes or completely new ideas, all that matters is that they sell. If they think something new is going to do better than reviving an old theme, then they will do the new thing. What am I buying? Mainly parts. I buy SW when cheap enough, as the figures sell off easily and they provide cheap grey and other muted colour parts reasonably cheaply. This is often the problem though - especially with figures - making them attractive to both adults and kids. Many of the recent (as in past 15 years) torsos have been criticized for being too cartoony or simplistic, similarly complaints of too many soldiers and not enough civilians. Aiming for both child toys and AFOLs at the same time is not always as easy as it looks.

They are already touching on it through ideas. There are also a lot of other AFOL interest themes and LEGO has to get careful not to do too much 18+ sets at once. They don't need classic themes to be popular again, they need modern themes to be popular. Whether that is modern themes based on their old stuff, or new modern themes. Blacksmith is not a kids' set, without the small sets castle will never become a kids' theme again. And if they do small sets, people will complain about them being aimed too young again. Plus if they do a TV show, again people will complain about forced storyline, too cartoon focussed and so on.

They don't have to do slave Leia with Jabba. That's a lot of characters gone forever if they can't do Jabba.

These once great clubs that are no longer the best in their own domestic leagues are still popular in Asia. I guess they hope to sell to the worldwide fanbase that grew when those clubs were running high, rather than going for current top of the league clubs.

That looks great. Someone else has been on a 2c parts buying spree!