MAB

They have also done it to different tiles. See the BL post.

While there are not volcanoes in the city, there ARE volcanoes in City. Similarly, City is near the sea, the jungle, swamps, etc. My kids have got multiple sets from different subthemes of City, including Arctic, deep sea diving and volcanoes, and have never been confused about it.

See here, a couple of posts down from the start.

I don't have the tattered wings, but do have the bird and dragon wings and the tattered ones as based on the latter: These are some of my favourite parts. I prefer them to LEGO's equivalent wings. The muscles do not bother me. LEGO arms don't have muscles as they choose to use the same plain arms for all characters or similar ones like the bat-wing types. However, the torsos often show highly detailed muscle patterns, so having it on the arms is not a problem for me. Another of my favourite parts are the molded capes. To me, being plastic, these are more LEGO-like than LEGO's own cloth ones. There is never any problem with them creasing, or shifting to the side, or fading, or getting dusty. I am surprised. I have always been impressed at how good the quality of both brickwarriors and brickforge parts is. I did once get a short-shot from brickforge, but other than that I have never had another molding problem and I find the colour consistency is good.

Usually very consistent. You have probably made a mistake feeling them, or have been sent a box that has been tampered with.

To answer that, you have to buy and then build them all. :-)

I agree Galidor was different to the rest of LEGO's production. Action figures with interchangeable arms and legs is, to me, a decent idea. After all, being able to take a minifigure, break it into parts and mix those parts up and being able to rebuild a completely new figure has made LEGO billions of dollars. Why not for action figures too? It had also been done in the past, for example, Kenner did it with The Six Million Dollar Man: With Kenner you could buy the individual sets of arms and legs, and Maskatron also had similar detachable limbs. LEGO may not have made action figures at the time, but they came up with a very good way of attaching limbs and body parts together. I think the production values were equally as good as those in Bionicle, for example. Why did it bomb? To me, it was not to do with the parts, it was the media. Taking a risk like that producing different style of toys compared to their normal portfolio had to be backed by a decent storyline. People were not going to buy them because they were LEGO branded, as they were not normal LEGO. There had to be a reason to buy them, and the reason was not very good. However, if they had used an external, well-known license such as Star Wars or Superheroes, they might well have taken off and introduced a whole new range of LEGO figures. For me, the toys (and parts) were decent in themselves. There was just no reason to buy them. Ninjago is now a huge success. Yet if that had not taken off after the first wave, it could have similarly been cut and seen as a useless experiment. The same with Chima and Nexo Knights. Of course, for these the parts are always useful since they are based on the normal LEGO system. If the storylines bombed, the parts were still parts. Galidor had neither the system nor the storyline, which is two risks at once. If it had paid off, people would look back with hindsight and say it was a genius move. If it didn't (and it didn't), people look back and say it was a dreadful mistake.

If 50% off, then yes for a parts pack. Otherwise no. I'm not sure who it is aimed at. As an AFOL, I'd prefer one decent modular than two of these. Whereas as a parent, there are many other sets my kids are interested in. But I guess there must be a market for them otherwise they wouldn't make them.

Another alternative is to buy some LIPO batteries for a remote control car / boat / plane. You can get various different physical sizes with different capacities. You can either get ones to hide inside an official battery box - and they are much easier to remove than AAs - or just build your own connector. The PF connections are well documented. The PF battery boxes are a nominal 9V but the motors work fine on 7.4V, the voltage of a 2-cell LIPO. You can get a 5000 mAh 7.4V battery for about £25 in the UK. If all you want are lights, then get a cheap small capacity single cell LIPO, they are fine for driving LEDs. As lots of RC people use them, they are not too expensive.

Discussions of his designs have come up many times now over the years and it is great to see how many of the original ones have been made, but so many great ones that never made it. His whole Mythology theme as well never materialised but gave us quite a few Romans and Greeks and Classical style Gods.

I don't buy their figures, but I have loads of brickforge and brickwarriors parts. They fill a gap that LEGO haven't filled.

Yeah, and of course there is the internal yellow-skin battle of classic smiley vs having an expression.

This one was the 2006 Batman one, not this one The second came along with Indy sets. Although I would imagine LEGO would use the second for a rocketeer type figure as it is still current. The same with a Star Trek style phaser. To many people, this would be fine for something of that genre. You can get more accurate ones for Star Trek at brickforge and brickarms.

You can do something like this (I've used -sticker -pattern to avoid any sticker sheets and decorated parts): https://www.bricklink.com/catalogList.asp?pg=8&q=-pattern&catLike=W&itemYear=2005&sortBy=N&sortAsc=A&sz=50&itemBrand=1000&searchName=Y&catType=P&v=1 It will tell you everything that came out in 2005. Or this will give you the full list, sorted by year (with a lot missing date info at the start): https://www.bricklink.com/catalogList.asp?v=1&pg=1&q=-pattern+-sticker&catLike=W&sortBy=Y&sortAsc=A&sz=200&itemBrand=1000&searchName=Y Or this is the yearly summary, you can see each year's releases separately. https://www.bricklink.com/catalogList.asp?v=5&pg=1&q=-pattern+-sticker&catLike=W&sortBy=Y&sortAsc=A&sz=200&itemBrand=1000&searchName=Y Perhaps more useful depending on what you want to do is clicking on category summary in the above links. You can then choose a category and just list parts in that category. For example, https://www.bricklink.com/catalogList.asp?catID=5&catXrefLevel=0&catType=P&q=-pattern+-sticker&catLike=W&sortBy=Y&sortAsc=A&sz=200&itemBrand=1000&searchName=Y will list all the bricks by their release date. With all of these there is often 'junk' at the start as they do not have dates for all parts. Note also the date information is by part type, not by the colour. They have only one date per part. If you need colour data via BL it is much harder. You can check by part type and colour and see the release date for sets with that part in. For example, if you wanted to know a 3001 in BL's light yellow, https://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemIn.asp?P=3001&in=S&colorID=33&ov=Y chances are it was first released in 2002.

I'd love to see some of your "behind the scenes" tricks. I remember trying to copy parts of your Hobbit figures and not being able to figure out how you do some things.

The yellow vs fleshie divide is always an interesting one. I had a fairly large collection of yellow skin LOTR MOC minifigures before they did the official sets, but thought nothing of selling off the main characters and upgrading* them to fleshies when the official ones came along. * I know some people will say I downgraded! Fortunately, the Series 3 elf had no yellow on his torso, so I kept all those and sold off the heads, hair and hands and replaced them with fleshie versions. Similarly the earlier dwarves and the CMF S5 one were easy to upgrade to fleshie. But both were "licensed" in terms of MOCs. I tend to replace all my yellow skins now, even if non-licensed. It is a pain when they have tiny bits of yellow on the torso - and no doubt vice-versa for others, when they have tiny bits of fleshie skin on the torso.

I use what is often referred to as "heavy duty upholstery thread for shoes" from ebay. What I have is slightly thinner than the official LEGO string, but very strong. It is also handy for stringing up flying models from the ceiling.

Year data is available at bricklink, although they do not necessarily distinguish between all variants. For example, these are all classed as standard 1x4 bricks (3010), with no differentiation:

Splitting by packaging / labelling is an interesting one, but a major problem is the sheer number of packaging types now. For example, the CMF era could be defined, when blind bags came along, running concurrently with the modern era. There have been huge developments in different areas of LEGO products at different times that don't necessarily feed into a generic timescale. For example, we are nearly a decade into the App era, after Life of George, Fusion, etc. after false starts and probably a bit of stagnation. We are well into the CMF era, and also into the IDEAS era. Developments in these occur at different times to developments in other products and so grouping them together misses the point. LEGO history is massively multi-threaded. There is no mention of the "girl era" when products primarily aimed at girls took off (having been tried in the past). I think it is is easy to look back and see when the company was doing badly financially and link it to products of the time and say they were crap and blame those products, easy to call out mistakes with hindsight even if at the time they were not viewed as mistakes. In the "crisis" era, there were loads of good sets, many of which are still sought after today. It is fashionable to knock themes like clik-its, Jack Stone and Galidor. I don't think it was the products as such that was a problem, it was management decisions across the entire range that lead to the crisis. Some people think they are the worst toys ever made, yet the Galidor competition on EB last year showed what could be done with those parts. There are some superb supposedly single-use parts in those sets that are not really that different to some parts of today that have single-use; Groot's head or Vader's Helmet. I doubt if LEGO would have been any better financially during the crisis if they had not done Jack Stone, clik-its and Galidor. Without taking risks to develop a product area, we would not have Modulars, or CMF, UCS or other large adult targetted sets. LEGO has made similar mistakes with Apps (Fusion was terrible), yet without trialling these ideas, would we have Boost? Without Jack Stone would we have Juniors? Without the ready made storylines of Knights Kingdom II and Exo-Force, would we have the ready made storylines of Ninjago, Chima, Nexo Knights? If there were no risks taken, we'd be building with basic bricks and have no minifigures.

^^ yes, they are eurobricks forum headings. That doesn't make Modular Buildings part of City, any more than Lord of The Rings is historical.

Their sales figures seem to indicate that the successful stuff is the stuff they have on the shelves right now. Why go back to possibly out-of-date themes like Pirates when they know what is selling well now? Their own recent Elves sets seem to have been well received.

Show me where I wrote that. I don't believe you can. I have said multiple times that you can use them how you like. They can be used with City, they can be used with Superheroes. They can be used however you like. However, that does not make them part of or an expansion pack for the City line.

If you want something to be accurate, then you need to base it on facts rather than your own biased opinion. If me saying Modulars are not part of City is like talking at a trial, then that is fine, I would prefer to base my views on fact than on a subjective opinion. A problem with a timeline presented like this is that it is highly skewed by personal preference as you have added pros and cons to each era which are highly subjective. You say you are a fan of Classic Pirates and so it is not surprising that you are very positive about Classic sets but not very positive about modern licensed sets. So for example - "The Licensed Era name holds somewhat pejorative meanings, classic themes have payed the price for this glory." That is based on your view that Classic sets are somehow better than the modern product. However, an alternative explanation is that it is not the licensed themes that keep the classic themes off the shelves, but instead that buyers have become bored of classic style sets and that licensed sets have (partly) replaced them. Neither extreme viewpoint is likely to be totally correct, with the likely reason somewhere between the two. If Classic style sets made more money for LEGO than licensed sets, then LEGO would be doing Classic style sets. That said, Classic style sets are still on the shelves in the form of City - one of LEGO's top sellers. City is an evolution of Town and I don't think Classic Town has ever gone away, it has just evolved. There are still many similarities (fire stations, vehicles, some shops, etc) although LEGO tends to cover subjects more of interest to kids of today - so arctic, jungle, space, etc rather than petrol stations and garages.

Not at all. You can use a LEGO set however you like and I have said so a number of times here. However, to call the Modular Buildings series an expansion series for City is plain wrong. They are aimed at different consumers. Modulars are very distinct from City. They have different build styles and techniques. None of that stops you from using City sets with Modulars, or Modulars with City. But then nothing stops you from using City sets with Batman either. You have also mixed up other themes. For example "Prince of Persia brought a Middle Eastern flavour to Castle fans. Sadly not a common step to be taken by Lego." Prince of Persia and Castle were very different themes. Of course, parts from PoP could be used with Castle MOCs. But then this is far from being not a common step, as LEGO brought us themes like The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, various Harry Potter series. All these licensed series brought new things to fans of Castle if there was overlap with their interests. But saying that, SW sets with all their grey have been a great source of parts for Castle builders. You might also want to revise your history. City as a theme did not appear until about 2004/5. Whereas you refer to it a number of times before that, meaning instead what many collectors and most fan sites would call Town, and depending on era, Classic Town. You also refer to Ninjago as the most popular non-licensed theme ever as it has been going 8 years. What is the basis for this? City is not licensed and has been running longer, has had more sets and is consistently reported by LEGO as being in the top selling lines.

No, they are not 100% City. They (at least the modern ones) are 100% Creator Expert. The clue is on the box. City sets are branded as City. The Modular Buildings series is branded as Creator Expert. The Modulars are just as much part of the DC/Marvel lines as they are City. Modulars can fit into a City set-up if you want. They can also fit into a Superheroes set-up if you want. But they are neither City nor Superheroes. You can use them as you like, but they are Creator Expert. Of course, anything before (I think it was) Palace Cinema didn't have the Creator Expert branding on the box at the time of release. Medieval Market Village was a Castle set. It says so on the box. The size has nothing to do with it. This is why the whole "best expansion line" is meaningless. Nearly all LEGO sets are an expansion of what has gone before, especially similar scaled and design models from within a theme. The best one will therefore be down to personal taste.