MAB

Unlikely. They do make mistakes but multiple such errors in one image is unlikely.

There is clearly leg printing on Snape, showing the robes. This is done like most SW and similar characters.

Posting them on youtube is sharing them. If youtube users want to search for them and watch them they can. But posting a new thread here or to other lego fan sites each time you open a collectable minifigure is going to get very tedious very quickly, especially if they are out of date. One video per figure seems complete overkill as it is, but then updating everyone each time you do one is going too far in my view. Personally, I don't see what they add to the existing pictorial reviews already published here (or elsewhere), or the many video reviews of the complete series already published on youtube. I certainly wouldn't sit through 16 lots of 2 1/2 minute videos per series, when much of it is repetition or irrelevant, considering others managed to review the whole series in about 15 minutes and do it a month ago. Spreading it out over a month or more having to go back for the next installment each time, forget it. With other video reviews I can watch the whole series review in one go. Looking at what you have published, you managed to do only 11 from series 17, so you are not even completist. If anyone was interested they would still have to use someone else's review anyway, so might as well just do that in the first place. Opening a CMF is not a rare event. If you want to video it and share it on youtube, that's fine. But just like all the LEGO shop haul videos, or unboxing videos, or opening my bricklink order videos and so on, they aren't really newsworthy and updates about it don't really belong here.

That is assuming an equal division of course. They could equally well make a couple of figures (such as Harry Potter) more common. They could do 2 x6's, 4 x4's then 16 x2's, for example. As to price, £3 per figure is not too bad for licensed. Four figures are then £12, so about the same as a SW battle pack containing four figures, you are then just out of the parts for the small build that comes with the battle pack. That said, if they are £3 each, they will be available at £2 at some stage when taking into account 3 for 2 type deals. The licensed ones tend to hang about a bit if there are no army builders or special ones that increase massively in value due to demand.

I agree with the above, I wasn't sure about the face, it could just be the angle of the shot, but they do appear t be off vertically. Combine that with the one vs two side print, it is suspicious. That gets you looking deeper and the light lines around the lantern are also off. Then there is the missing backing card, again highly suspicious. The print on the back does seem to be raised significantly compared to normal lego print. One of those things in isolation may be feasible, but there are so many things that are not quite right.

What can it do that two stacked 1x1 plates cannot? I'm guessing the interior is a little deeper, so you'd be able to push it a little further onto a minifigure neck or similar, but I cannot think of much else.

That is a luxury they have this time around. Remember that the movies were still being edited the first time LEGO designed the sets.

They would still have to negotiate multiple licenses for a single CMF series that will be sold for about three to six months. Whereas currently, it is a single license per series (so less than that, if the CMF series are negotiated at the same time as the general retail set licenses). I cannot see any licensed CMF series going outside of the normal retail set offerings, as the CMFs help sell the sets. Simpsons had retail sets, Disney had retail sets, The Lego Movie, Ninjago Movie, Batman Movie, Harry Potter, etc all the same. They have only gone outside of this for highly limited series - Team GB and the DFB series. I think any licensed series will follow that. I cannot see why they would go to the time / expense of picking up a new license (or worse, multiple licenses) just for a CMF series. I imagine they are also saturated with ideas for some time with their planned CMF and retail set tie-ins. Doctor Who would have been an obvious choice for another CMF series, with so many Doctors and companions, let alone enemies, and licensing was already in place for the ideas set and Dimensions. The groundwork was also done, as there has already been a similar line from Character Building, which appears to have sold reasonably well and there were no issues with specific actors. I cannot believe it wouldn't have been popular so I assume it was down to internal / shelf-space competition issues rather than anything else. Even though I prefer fleshies, I would also hope anything like that would be a non-licensed (yellowskins) series. Just like the Swashbuckler was essentially a Douglas Fairbanks / Errol Flynn type character and the Detective was essentially Sherlock Holmes, I would imagine Zorro could be done in a very similar way, so no to Zorro but yes to the Swordsman. No to Captain Nemo but yes to the Submarine Captain, no to Long John Silver but yes to the Castaway, etc. They are all generic enough that they don't need to be accurate to any particular movie (which can cause licensing problems even if the character is public domain).

That's good, as long as they aren't all Harry Potter :-) * new print, but obviously many will be rehashes of the old characters. 40 or so for that many sets (and their price points) is probably about right, plus the CMF line that no doubt will duplicate many key characters in different outfits.

Remember that by their very nature leaks are not necessarily the official figures. Often the leaker just puts the right looking parts together and can get it wrong. From a parts point of view, I hope they are white and I hope they are short, as those have only appeared in the Gremlins Dimensions set before.

I think if you are going to do them, they have to be good. Just about every site does an April Fools joke and they become obvious and lame. This year, they did announce the Galidor competition on April Fools Day. I thought it might have been better not to have written that it wasn't an April Fools joke on it. People would have assumed it was an April Fools joke, just to find out it wasn't. So by not being an April Fools joke, it would turn out to be an April Fools joke. That would have been a bit more thought provoking than the usual stuff about Disney or Megabloks and so on. They would probably have fooled a lot more people than usual.

That is part of the problem here. Only people that want things back as they were are "true castle fans", implying that others have a lesser standing.

So you are expecting them to tell a company that their IP is small and not very popular, but at the same time you'd like to use it alongside other companies' small and less popular IPs. I doubt that many companies would ever allow their IPs to appear alongside other rival companies' IPs - even less so in blind bagged sets where the buyer may not get their IP, even though it is advertised on the packet.

If you don't want to solder, do that ^^. If you want it a little more permanent, use some heat shrink tube over the top. As to USB vs battery, what is the application? Still or moving? You can use a simple phone charger power bank (essentially a rechargeable battery with a USB socket) and get many hours of LED time from it, whereas you'd need a 5V -> 9V booster to run a train from it and it wouldn't last too long.

Is it any different to using the handle modified plate that would normally be used to make this type of connection?

That really is lovely, I particularly like the tiled floor. It looks great at this scale. It also really highlights how we need a masonry profile brick that goes around corners properly. That is the only bit I don't like.

Try to do a deal with someone local to you / in your country. I have a couple of trading buddies, where I can swap most of my generic yellow heads and hands for their generic fleshie heads and hands (I prefer fleshies, they like yellow skins).

It is funny in a way that non-licensed sets supposedly allow more imaginative play, yet that imagination cannot be used to convert other sets (such as the Aquaman/Atlantis one) into castle. For me, that has been the best "Castle" set since the end of The Hobbit. Perfect building parts minus a few transparent ones and parts from 3 out of 4 figures (the fourth is useless, sell it) for Castle builds. It may not be Castle, but imagination makes it Castle. Of course, sets like that are relatively rare and some (probably many) licensed minifigures are just too distinctive to be useful. I think enough modern sets do give us the parts* (whether by buying sets and selling off the "junk" or buying just the bits we want on BL), but the main issue is the lack of new historical minifigures. If Castle does come back, I really hope they come up with updated factions, not just crowns and lions, etc. I bought loads of those parts last time. The CMF had provided us with decent figures / parts but seems to be in a bit of a low point this year. I can understand why, with the 40th celebration, but the lack of decent Castle figures this year is noticeable. *Obviously this applies only for those that MOC. Those that don't are still screwed when it comes to sets. I wouldn't even mind castle in a modern day setting, give us a ruined castle with a small museum attached, I'd probably buy it. Give us a history room in a museum with dummies in historical dress, I'd probably buy it for that.

I would love to see a generic castle theme again. I agree with that part of the sentence ... ... but I don't agree with that. There is no doubt that there are more licensed themes than in the past and less in-house ones. But are they taking the slots that were occupied by the non-licensed themes or are they taking new ones, with the old ones just canned? The end result is, of course, the same but the implication is that Harry Potter (and/or other licenses) stops Castle (and other non-licenses) by taking their slots which I don't think is necessarily true. And unless LEGO ever came out and said that (highly unlikely), we will never know. It may just be that LEGO don't want to do Castle and Space as they don't make enough money from them. They managed to do some Castle when LOTR/Hobbit was active and production capacity has supposedly gone up, so I would speculate they could do a few or more Castle sets like they did in 2012-13 if they wanted to. There is less of a clash of Castle with HP compared to Castle with LOTR. So if they don't, I would expect it is because they (still) don't want to bring back Castle (yet) rather than the evil licensed Harry Potter stealing the slot. I see it as disappointing rather than tragic. While I would like the theme back again, I understand why they might not want to. And using imagination there are numerous and reasonable scraps that we can take for Castle type builds, be it grey and natural coloured bricks, figures or parts of figures from the CMFs or licensed sets - the recent Aquaman set was great for sand green parts and for anyone building elf armies, for example (especially as it was heavily discounted here!). I don't feel constrained by the SH license and some of those outfits are very much like Hobbit elf armour and the heads are generic enough to be used for fleshie Castle characters (unlike the ones wearing masks, for example). When I see the head, I don't see Aquaman, I see a bearded soldier. Of course, it would be nice to get more Castle sets especially for those that do not MOC, but the health of the historical forum compared to some of the others does show that it is still alive even if LEGO don't do strictly relevant sets. That is mainly the reason I don't see it as tragic.

The definition of production piece is important. For me, it would mean appearing in a retail set but even then, in the OP they mention few to no sets so they seem to go against that definition (with the no). Of course, that leads to a whole different discussion, as there are thousands of parts that appear in one set only and cost / demand / desirability is down to what they are. Some single appearance parts can be quite cheap but highly desireable and sell quite quickly to just a few people. Whereas others can be expensive and rarely sell.

There is only more room for imagination for the non-licensed set if you choose to play within the constraints of what happens in the stories of the license. Plus there are many constraints on the fully "self-created" world as in reality it won't be self-created. It will be based on stories you already know. Can a spaceship visit the medieval castle? If not, why not? Because it is historically inaccurate. But if it can, then it can equally well visit Harry Potter. Just because it didn't happen in the official stories doesn't mean it cannot in your imagination. If two knights have a battle, how do you decide who wins? You think about what skills the knights might have and go from there. What if Harry Potter fights Batman? You do the same thing. They haven't fought in fiction, yet a google search shows many people have thought about what might happen if they did. And what if someone decides that Harry has some super powers not mentioned in the books, are they wrong or just using imagination? They are just as free as if the characters were completely self-created. Someone else may disagree with them, but that need not constrain their imagination. The castle can be rebuilt into any medieval building. But then so can Hogwarts or any of the HP buildings. If the final construction didn't appear in the films or books, is it wrong as there should be limits as to what you can build from it? To me, it is using the imagination to play out other self-created scenarios or locations. Also - and this is probably very important for LEGO sales - knowing something about the subject can actually be helpful in playing with it and expressing imagination. Offer a child two action figures, one of a character with a well known back story and one that is completely unknown. Which do they go for? Probably the known one. They know how the character behaves and what he does, this can help imagine new scenarios as the knowledge helps guide play. Even though the unknown one apparently has much more room for imagination, with infinite possibilities as nothing is known to be wrong, it is hard to imagine what he does when you know nothing about him and what is right. And I believe that is a big part behind why licenses sell. Kids know the characters and want to act out not just what happens in the known stories, but also what they think the characters might do based on what they know. If they know very little about the characters, then even though there are endless possibilities, thinking of them is not so easy.

The Derfel Cadarn thread is still there, if that is the one you mean and the images are all fine. There is also another more recent similar one with smaller tutorials, although the downside is that it is hosted off EB.

So link to the press statement where they have stated this. In all the press statements I have seen for it, they have used words like "fans" and have not been gender specific. Why would they? It would cut the potential audience in half.

I agree that it is a term but ... I don't believe it is so specific. It means different things to different people. For example, to me, junior-ized means using both simple building techniques and larger parts together to make a set very simple so that younger kids (either new to lego or transitioning from duplo) can put them together easily. To others, it can mean the use of any larger part in a set (even a detailed one) when smaller parts could be used. There are still people that complain about juniorization of any set containing BURPs or larger bricks like 1x2x5 high when 5 1x2s could have been stacked (but tend not to complain when 1x4 or 1x8 bricks are used when multiple 1x2s could have been used). Some still complain about one piece boat hulls, etc. There are people that complain that molded animals are junior-ized. Then there are people that complain about too many play features or lack of realism, and call this junior-ization too (such as this thread). So here, sure the lack of doors is not realistic, but then having a train that can carry 5-6 passengers is also unrealistic. Should a train carriage be able to contain 80 passengers before it is considered non-junior-ized?

It isn't, it is a children's theme. Look at the characters: Unikitty (f), Puppycorn (m), Hawkodile (m), Dr Fox (f), Master Frown (m), Richard (m), Brock (m). More males than females in the cast. Both genders like bright colours. The storylines are equally applicable to both female and male viewers. It is no more definitely aimed only at girls than The Hunger Games is aimed only at girls or Harry Potter aimed only at boys.