MAB

It's medium blue, as used in the carousel.

Dragon is good, the rest not so interesting for me. Probably the worst series ever. Even worse than Simpsons 2. At least in that year, we got a non-licensed series so while Simpsons 2 wasn't great, it didn't stop a normal series.

For those interested, these are the 1x4 and 1x3 bricks and the 1x2 tile.

> And most importantly, what are your opinions on third party pieces like brickarms, brickforge, They are both very good quality molding and parts, on par with LEGO. I haven't used the other brands. I've made parts (for minifigures) in the past with sculpy, but they are only as good as your craft skills and you take as long as you take.

I hope not. If anything, it would be better to integrate it into their own PAB online.

Yes, I know they don't look like them, but I meant successor in the sense of "What do I buy if my kids wants to play with small lego cars?". The target markets for both Tiny Turbos and Mighty Micros will overlap significantly, and so probably wouldn't be out together. Whereas Mighty Micros and Speed Champions are significantly different (SC being more adult / teen aimed) and can coexist more readily.

Yes, nothing new at all. In the late 1970s we started to have hand-held electronic games (simple compared to now, but still new and exciting just like tablets now). We had Atari and Intellivision, like consoles and computers now. We also had Slime (by Mattel) back then too, just like Slime now. We had Mexican jumping beans, pet rocks. We had Wizzers (essentially beyblades) - in fact, these were old fashioned by the late 1970s. Early 1980s we had Rubik's cube, followed by many different Rubik's products, like fidget spinners (and Rubik's cubes coming back again), etc now. Not only isn't the tendency to hop on the lastest craze not new, but the majority of the crazes aren't really new either, just extensions of what has gone before. There is one situation where a regular brick line can cause a reduction like LEGO reported. That is where lines sell incredibly well for one or two years. And then that sales pattern does not continue, due to the line finishing (TLM), or changing and underperforming, or over-saturation. Loads of people got into LEGO due to TLM and that expansion didn't continue. While 2017 may have been disappointing for LEGO, they still made profit of a few billion dollars, which compared to 2015 and 16 was less than expected, but compared to 2011-14 would have been seen as growth.

Looks like a Village People rip-off. :-) They look great. If they were done as Friends / Elves style, the only problem with those is the playability (inside, not just swooshing). The girl-aimed sets tend to have more situation based play features inside, rather than just pushing / swooshing.

Speed Champions isn't exclusive to the US, it is sold worldwide. And it is not a TRU exclusive in the UK, for example. It wasn't made specifically for TRU(US), so there is no reason to cancel it. I think their current successor is the SH Mighty Micros. Fun little wacky cars made to race and bash into each other. Yes, something else gone licensed.

Yeah, I was thinking along the lines of these too ... Something fairly smooth (cylinder type panels, so looking a bit like the LEGO planes) without studs, quite roundish with a decent bit of playing room inside too.

In the UK, a lot of the TRU exclusives were just regular retail sets which presumably will no longer be exclusives, or LEGO might try to do a deal with other stores to carry them as exclusives. John Lewis also does it already (for example, Winter Village Station and loads of the current NK sets are JL exclusives). As to the other made for TRU type exclusives, I guess they just disappear unless another store really wants to do that type of thing. But then, I doubt there was any reason the other stores couldn't have done that type of exclusive set when TRU was around - Hamley's are doing their soldier exclusive set, for example - so they will probably just disappear.

Plus the current high (2016) is way higher than way back then. They have admitted it is disappointing but that is based on them expecting to continue the massive growth of recent years. There was always going to be a correction to that rapid growth at some stage. The fan base now is bigger than it was prior to the almost collapse of around 2003.

Yes, with a vibe similar to that of Elves. This could be to Space what Elves is to Castle. Yes, white with minor detailing in those colours, or dark azure and so on would be great. I think a classic sci-fi rocket or spaceship design would be perfect. Something along the lines of Tintin rocket or Futurama spaceship. So fairly rounded rather than realistic.

There will always be some stores like that, but presumably other sellers have the items in stock at prices closer to the B+P price. Remember most stock on BL comes from parted out sets and any new parts will start off at a high price and gradually decline as the market finds the right price. Then if it is released via B+P at a lower price, the price will eventually fall as sellers buy stock on B+P to sell on BL. However, people that already listed it might take years to reduce their prices. B+P is still relatively new and some people on BL still don't know of it. But many do. It used to be possible to purchase some new parts very cheap on B+P compared to BL and it was profitable to buy 200 at a time to resell. Now more people know of B+P, that becomes much harder. For example, it was possible to purchase heads for 19p and resell at £1 on BL. Any that hadn't been sold after six months could be sold to another seller at a cut price, still above what you paid at B+P. Now many buyers know about it, they shop on B+P. Now other sellers know of it, they also buy stock on B+P pushing BL prices down. Yes, I'm sure everyone has come across that store at least once!

I guess everyone sees different things in a line. For me in NK: The good: the red and some of the purple villians, great for fantasy minifigures; Moltor, good for any fire-y villian, inc Sauron, some stone ones are good for old statue parts. The bad: bricksters, I'm still undecided on the mecha type figures (vanbyter, etc) some parts might be useful.

If they didn't do Jurassic Walls stuff, or Powerpuff Girls or Unikitty, what would they be selling in their place? I expect an in-house dino theme could replace JWFW, although it is likely then that another brick brand would pick up the license and have their licensed competing brand on the shelves next to LEGO's own dino series, making LEGO look like a knock-off of the "real thing" when the movies are out. It's not clear to me what would replace Powerpuff Girls or Unikitty though. If they didn't have PG, then they probably wouldn't be selling much else to the demographic that buys those. And Unikitty is an in-house theme, just with a cartoon. In that sense, no different to Ninjago - something deveoped in-house that is popular enough to warrant a cartoon, which in turn builds sales that might not otherwise occur.

Agree. Coat tails on the front that don't wrap around look bad, when they can use the double molded legs to extend the colour. I wonder if it is because of the print design not being perfectly horizontal (in which case, it may be better to make it horizontal). At least the new dress piece appears to be coming in a decent number of colours.

So if I say something is better now and you say something is worse than at any time, then I act like everything I say is fact, whereas you don't? I agree print could be thicker, especially for white print on dark parts. But that is not new, it has been going on for years now. It is just that we see it more because of the increased number of colours they use in the detail prints. And yes, the print on knock-offs is normally fine, although some can be terrible. Which suggests it is a secondary market cost issue rather than a quality issue. If you can get a good enough fake for $1 instead of $200 then go for it, if you don't mind fakes. You can apply the same logic to a $50 secondary market figure, it is better to save $49 and get the fake. Same with a $2 figure, get the $1 fake instead. Yes, I had heard some community staff were going - I guess this is because LEGO feel they have enough community interaction with the staff they have left and also that they need to focus less in this area these days - they are essentially preaching to the converted here. Similarly, I have heard of some retail staff going, but then when you see what some of the shop floor staff are doing in stores, it is understandable. Often there is a meet and greet type person, but occassionally three or four are standing around in the doorway not doing much, even when tills are short staffed and there are queues to pay or shelves to replenish. Probably the local manager's fault more than anything, but it shows excess staff or wrongly assigned staff.

It wasn't that large a percentage of their staff that they have dropped (roughly 8% on roughly 5% downturn). Of course, it is terrible for those that have been let go though. But consider that they expanded staff numbers very rapidly in 2015-16 on their expected growth, and their staff numbers now are still larger than they were two years ago. I don't know which departments the staff are being cut from (probably multiple), but I imagine many of them wouldn't have been working there that long. There are loads of excellent sets still, ranging from well designed sets with no minifigures through to ones that are mainly about the minifigures. The buyer has huge choice. Figure printing (detail) is way better now than at any time I can remember, plus we have two colour molded arms and legs. If you are a knock-off fan, then that's fine, buy knock-offs.

It is questionable whether it is nostalgia that is driving the sales of the Saturn V, at least lego nostalgia. For me, Saturn V is a piece of history, an absolute classic, the first to get men to the moon. It is not sentiment or any form of remembering great times that nostalgia suggests. If they did a The Rocket or a Wright Flyer, I'd probably buy them if they were well executed, not out of nostalgia though. That is different to Benny's spaceship, where it probably is partly nostalgia from people that used to build similar ships in their childhood that drove some of the sales, although they'd have to be careful if assuming it was solely down to nostalgia as it also likely that many sales were for/to kids that liked the movie.

I don't think they were saying they are. They said they had considered making a castle (amongst other things) in Creator Expert. And that castle fans like (some) modulars as they contain good castle parts, which again is true: brick bank, town hall, fire brigade are all good castle packs. I don't think they are relating them to castles, just that (some) castle fans, the ones that MOC, find them useful. Of course, if they considered it an chose not to do anything about it is not a good sign. It says there is no business case for it, at least right now. If they are researching whether nostalgia will drive sales then it may be better in the future, depending on what their research finds. I imagine their recent experiments with those small anniversary sets show that nostalgia driven sets sell well, so long as they are highly limited. But then all highly limited sets sell well.

The stems in black look good too. Although overall I prefer the stage coach from The Lone Ranger.

This comment is actually interesting concerning what has happened with modulars. It used to be thought that modulars would never include play features and be primarily display focussed rather than play focussed. Yet things like Brick Bank changed that perception, when the whole idea of the laundromat is to include a joke on laundering money and a play route to get into the bank. And lego would never include anything but the classic smiley heads in modulars - again, now changed. Things do change sometimes, even when there is an apparent tradition in place.

I wonder why they have decided to flip the leaflet around, from portrait to landscape. For anyone that displays these, there is now an inconsistency.

Well, at least until 2013! Obviously LOTR and The Hobbit got in the way a bit, then NK came along. Although NK would fit into that type of plan, it is castle in one extreme just not historical castle. Quite a few of the LOTR and especially Hobbit sets were like this, decent parts packs, due to the colour pallette used across the theme. From the little Beorn set, Mirkwood Elves, even the big Dol Guldur one. Exactly. Smallish, affordable sets that will appeal mainly to kids but also to minifigure collectors (particularly if licensed theme) and still remain good parts packs for adults that MOC. Everyone's idea of what a big castle should look like is very different, and why a very large afol aimed castle set probably wouldn't work so well. This is different to the large sets that work well in licensed themes. Everyone knows what a large Millennium Falcon should look like, or what the Helicarrier, GB firehouse, Disney Castle, Simpsons House, etc should look like.