MAB

I think it is a fairly random thing, when they spot an opportunity to make money from an old design rather than a planned programme of releases.

Yeah, which would suggest that an Imperial Flagship is more likely to happen than a pre-2000 ship. Although personally, I'd prefer something similar in design, size and style but different to the original.

We've had Disney 2!

There are of course ways around this. Do a slightly different face print or a slightly different torso print and the original one remains original and retains value for those that really want it. Stick the monocle on the other eye, and it is a different figure. I cannot remember now, did LEGO ever claim the figure would be exclusive to S10 only? They have done this before with LOTR comic con figures - the figures became common, but the packaging for them was rare. Personally, I think it has been long enough since the original that a repeat is fine. They have done it with valuable sets, so why not minifigures? There have been a few different store employees already, so I don't think that would be such a draw to buy the book (just for the minifigure).

Ah, I hadn't seen that, just the instagram grainy front of the sheet. I thought as much. They'll do yellow for yellow spacemen, but not for nude figures.

I wish they did this more often, on the human figures too. So for example, the pizza one, why do we need to be told a gender here? Why not bios like "The Pizza Seller loves eating pizza all day long, but eats so much that they have trouble fitting through doorways" instead of "The Pizza Seller loves eating pizza all day long, but eats so much that he has trouble fitting through doorways". That way, everyone can be happy with what they get. Is it a man, is it a woman? Who cares? Same with the Care Bear and fox suit. Ones that are obviously male or obviously female are fine but even better if they can be switched. So looking at the list again: Gamer - male but easy to make female. Showerman - clearly male from the torso and so not really changeable. Unlikely that LEGO would ever do a topless female (especially a human female). It will be interesting to see what is under the towel. White hips or yellow? Knight - either. Monkey - either. And non-human anyway. Programmer -female. I cannot tell, but I hope the torso is useful for male and female. Shame about the yellow skin on the torso. Mummy - looks like it is a female torso and head only. Johnny Thunder look-a-like - obviously male, but could possibly be used for a female body. Firewoman - obviously female, but torso looks like it could be made male. Not very interesting anyway given how many are in City. Pooper scooper - female, but looks easy to change to male. Pizza - could be either. Blacktron - could be either - not human anyway. Gardener - female, and fine as it is. Rugby - male, but could be made female. Fox - either. Bear - either. Biker - clearly female, and cannot be made male. I'd have preferred a more general neutral top for something like this, but fine if most others are more neutral. If the gamer had a female or neutral head and I was told it was female in the bio but it was otherwise presented in exactly the same way, and also told the knight was female, monkey was female, programmer was female, pooper scooper was female, pizza was female, blacktron was female, gardener was female, rugby was female, fox and bear were female, etc. it would be fine for me. There could possibly be 14 females, with 2 males (shower guy, Johnny Thunder). I would be perfectly happy with that. Clearly it is very skewed and not ideal for public complaints, but If the only thing identifying gender was a head or hairstyle, or better still just the bio, it means the figures are much more flexible. But by doing it that way, not only is gender occurence likely to be more balanced, if someone wants more males or more females, then a simple head or hair switch is possible with what we have been given. Rather than 8 male plus 8 female, let's say 4 male and 4 female plus 8 that could be either. That balance is much more attractive to me than obviously male only characters and obviously female only characters. Of course there will still be things to argue about. Why don't the yellow ducks on the towel match the green one? Why does he have a brush when he doesn't have any hair? Why is he / isn't he naked under the towel?

So instead you should continue to push stereotypes onto them to say that all adult females should have lipstick and curly eyelashes? And if someone doesn't have that look then they default to being a man. That is why I think the opposite to you. Having female characters that are not wearing lipstick may help to change opinions that someone has to have lipstick to be an adult female otherwise they default to being male. If not, you are just perpetuating the idea that women must wear make-up to look like a woman as if they default to male. It is interesting to note that most if not all children's heads and torsos are gender neutral. Minifigure girls tend not have lipstick or curly eyelashes (or curvy waists and cleavage), whereas the women do. So having gender neutral parts it is not a problem for representing girls as minifigures. Yet put longer legs on those girl minifigures, and they look more male? To bring it back to the CMF, take the Care Bear style character. If we are told it is male, then people complain it is male and there are too many males in the series when it should be closer to 50:50. Whereas if we become used to some female characters not wearing lipstick, then that character already could be female. We wouldn't know unless we read the backstory. But even if the backstory says it is male, does it matter? In this case, it is what you want it to be. There is nothing in the figure to say it must be a male. There is nothing to say it must be a female. Why does that then have to default to being male, with the result that there must be another minifigure in the series that is stereotypically female or people will complain about gender balance? I find the same with robots and mechs. Even back in Series 1, people complained about gender balance. Is this minifigure really male? Most robots have no gender. Same with Series 6: Is it really male? I guess the answer is yes, because we all know females must be pink, they must have lipstick and eyelashes and rosy cheeks. They must have girly hearts on them. They must have cleavage. Even the robots! For me that figure is gender stereotyping at its worst. Every part of it except the key and the neck bracket. This robot, is it male or female. Or maybe it is just genderless. Would it need to be pink or have eyelashes drawn on it to make it female? If it was in a CMF series, would it count as a male and need balancing by an obviously female character?

This looks great. But even better is the implementation of that water reflection picture. What a great way to show the build and also the original building at the same time.

You really have to do the tests and apply the decals to lego parts to see what the colours look like when placed. What looks right on a light part can look bad on a darker one. What looks good on white can look bad on yellow, and so on. But then LEGO has this problem too when printing directly onto parts: As above, they cannot get white right when printing onto coloured parts. I suggest applying decals to bricks (maybe 1x8 bricks or similar if you have them) rather than to minifigure parts to test - they are cheaper and have larger flat surface areas so easier to compare for example 8 different colour block tests in one go under the same lighting conditions.

I was pleasantly surprised at the contents of the recent fun fair minifigure pack. Take a look at these figures ... All of the torsos work well for both male and female, except for the pink top and the leather jacket. I think this sort of distribution is perfect (along with infrequent male-only torsos when necessary). Does the face painter or ice cream seller lose anything by not having the traditional stereotypical female minifigure indicators on the torso? To me, they look fine. You want the rocker to be a female, or the ice cream seller to be a male, it's easy. Swap the heads and hair around in the set. You want the purple "mall walker" to be male and the red one a younger female? Easy, swap heads and hair. A female stilt walker or a female in the blue jacket? Easy. Of course, not all torsos should be like this - ones like the pink ones should definitely exist, as should ones in dresses and so on, as this adds variety. But where it is possible I prefer the gender neutral ones. It would be even better if not all the adult females had lipstick or curly eyelashes. For example, the man in the blue jacket. Remove his hair and is the face male or female? Is it definitely a man as there is no lipstick or curly eyelashes? Or just maybe it could be either, with an appropriate hairstyle if required. Of course, we should have definitely male (beards, etc) faces and definitely female (make-up, etc) faces, but having some that can be either should not be a problem. Same with hair and hats - in this case it does happen, as there are hair pieces that are used for both male and female, with context often given by other parts of the minifigure.

I also don't think it is a genuine LEGO one. Unfortunately BL doesn't have the keyword belt for all torsos with a belt (such as for some of the original forestmen) but also nothing comes up under other keywords such as purse. It is a strange combination, the black marks at the edges makes the figure look quite busty with hips, typically done for female characters. It is also a fleshie skin one, as can be seen near the neckline.

There are two sticker sheets. You can see the inventory at Bricklink: https://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemInv.asp?S=70620-1

A direct copy of Mr Gold would cause quite a stir. And sell a lot of books at RRP.

The bear could easily be female too. It wouldn't surprise me if more little girls like that one than little boys. Plus the Monkey - why is this necessarily male? It seems that the default is always to assign male if there is no lipstick or curves, yet this could also be female if you ignore the original folklore. Same with the pizza mascot. Are all women in LEGO world forced to wear make-up? If someone chooses this to be a woman, this is fine too. It is easy to stick a female (as in lipstick, eyelashes) head on the gamer to make it stereotypically into a her. The opposite is not true when sticking a male head on the biker.

There was also the Aztec and the conquistadors that can sort of fit in to a pirate like setting, even if a few years out. Also the wrong era, but the hula girl has some good parts for female islanders.

Female zombie toy soldier. On a skateboard.

If you don't like them, then don't get either. There will be more in the future.

I still can't quite work it out - is the dog person male or female? The lips look a bit red but the face is kind of squashed, maybe turning the nose up at the smell. But the torso doesn't have the usual hips/curves, so could be usable for a man too. We have already had the zoo keeper, the vet, the animal controller - all female. Do we have any male animal workers through CMF? I guess there was the dog show winner, although that is a bit off theme. I'd like to see more male workers there, and female workers in jobs such as plumber and mechanic. I guess a female mechanic will be off the menu for a while due to Corner Garage.

It did already happen with Series 14. There were a couple that could just about fit into City builds - the trick or treat skeleton boy and the cat costume girl. The gargoyle body was also useful for old style buildings. Other than that, they were pretty much useless as complete figures outside of the horror/scary theme as presumably intended. But there were some nice parts for other themes - I used the fly ones as aliens for example. I think past series have had a better balance of figures. Pick almost any other series and there are at least 1 or 2 historical, 1 or 2 fantasy, 1 or 2 space / aliens, 3-4 modern day, and often more than this. I quite liked the previous job type civilians - painter, plumber, carpenter, mechanics, animal control, waiter, janitor, diner waitress, librarian, etc. as more often than not these have a uniform or something similar to define the role and were not just "a random person". There are plenty of torsos available through City sets and packs that can be made into random people with no specific role, which is why I'm not a fan of receiving too many bland ones in the CMF. Even though I think I've owned every regular CMF ever produced (just not all at the same time), I'm glad I gave up collecting them all for the sake of collecting a long time ago, somewhere between series 10 and 13.

It'll be interesting to see how many version of Mickey and Minnie they can make, they'll probably be in every series ... which will be first, Mickey dressed as Batman or Batman dressed as Mickey?

Yeah, it is nice as it makes the boxes complete all around, with no tubes showing. Of course they could have had normal tiles with print and a plain inverted underneath for the same effect.

The strange thing here is how many new pieces debuted in the CMF series but then have not been used again or have only been used in non-retail productions. I'd love the Roman shield to be reused. The Batman TRU set showed they still had the mold and led to some hope that we may get a new more common one, but nothing yet. Another big one is the CMF Queen's lower body / dress part. Three years now and not reused. But then there was also the ruff piece, it has appeared three times but only in the CMF and not regular sets. I wonder if some of this has to do with the location of the molds. For example, the caveman's club has appeared in 6 CMF sets and the "iconic" cave people set but not in a regular set. Presumably this means the mold is in China and they don't have the same mold in Europe or Mexico. There haven't been many clubs made outside of CMF recently, but this one from 2017 went back to the old carrot style club - all other uses of this club part since 2010 have been as orange carrots, not clubs:

They are from Friends sets https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=11203pb027

Thanks, that's good to know. I just looked them up. The space sets don't really interest me which is probably why I hadn't noticed it, but at least this means it should be widely available and probably on bricks and pieces too, whereas many CMF parts are not. It is also good it is in white, as that means it can be dyed to almost any colour.

Softer parts tend not to take up RIT dye anywhere near as well as the regular ABS parts. I tried dying handcuffs and some of the leaves that way, and the dye rubbed off. Hands are similar - they don't take up dye as well as other parts. Presumably there is a different composition to make them less breakable. I would instead go with an alcohol based marker.