MAB

We have quite a few from the CMF - the circus ringmaster, the various clowns, the daredevil (makes a good human cannonball), the strong man. The ice-skater or other leotard type figures are OK for an acrobat.

I have also done it with washing-up liquid - I used a plant spray type bottle filled with water plus a squirt of washing-up liquid. Works fine.

No. I think it is more to do with set sales and making the characters appear to girls (as well as boys) than any direct historical reference. There were other female warriors of a similar era but before Joan of Arc ... eg. Matilda of Tuscany, Isabel of Conches, Joanna of Flanders, etc. Joan of Arc just happens to be better known.

I wouldn't want to see re-releases of Emerald Night, Imperial Flagship, etc. However, I would like to see a similar large steam train, maybe in dark blue or dark red. Also a new large ship, using modern techniques, but not just a re-release of an old design. It appears to be. Whereas they appear to have spent some design time on updating the MF. And it looks better for it.

If someone cannot afford something for the two years or so that many sets are available at retail, then resellers are not their enemy. They either (i) will never get it if lego retires the set and there are no resellers or (ii) get the chance to buy it, just at a higher cost, if resellers do exist. Although if they cannot afford it during the lifetime, then they probably will not be able to afford it on the secondary market. In fact, I'd go as far to say they should either prioritise their lego spending during the two years (don't buy lots of smaller sets if they really want a bigger one) or forget what has past and buy what they want from the current retail line. Maybe you use a different definition of a scalper. In my view, scalpers have nothing to worry about due to re-released sets, as a scalper is someone that is into short time trading not playing the long time game. Scalping in the lego market concerns buying up high demand current retail sets and selling them at peak times (eg. Christmas) when LEGO gets short stocked. In my view, by affecting the long term investments, LEGO will be encouraging the longer term investors to change how they operate and actually end up fuelling this short term scalping instead. This (my bold) is one definition of a collector. If they get pleasure from owning something, even if they do not build it, then they are a collector (if they do it for multiple sets). You do not have to open sets to be a collector. Where has that statement been made?

So how many people that missed out on buying the original Taj Mahal actually missed out on it due to resellers? I reckon a very, very tiny number. It was for sale for over two years. Anyone that wanted it could easily have bought it and had a long time to buy it. Then LEGO retired it. I reckon most people that wanted the Taj Mahal since 2010 were not into LEGO prior to that. The only place people could buy one was from resellers on the secondary market. LEGO didn't care about the "real fans" that wanted the set after 2010. They made their sets, they sold them, they moved on to other things. The only way "real fans" could buy the set was due to the foresight of the resellers that invested in it. They provided a service to the people that didn't buy it in the window when LEGO sold it. Of course, they profit from it, there is no doubting that - nobody would do this as an altruistic gesture. But that was the only way people could get hold of a new, sealed, genuine LEGO Taj Mahal. Not from LEGO, but from resellers. It wasn't that long ago that LEGO customer service used to refer people to look at bricklink to get hold of sets when they wrote to LEGO asking why they cannot buy such and such a set any more. I don't have any bad conscience when selling something to someone that wants to buy it at the price offered. I have never forced someone to buy something, they can always buy from somebody else or go without. If someone waits until a set either goes to clearance or goes to retiring soon, and then misses out, they are at fault as they had ample opportunity to purchase during the retail lifetime. It is not the fault of the person that bought the last remaining stock.

It's funny, you look at other people's orders and think, hey that's almost exactly what I ordered too!

If you had a set that cost you $300 and someone was willing to pay $2000 for it, would you sell it to them (or anyone else) for let's say $450? That would be a 50% markup and not too greedy. I've sold things for 4-5x RRP before. I wasn't intending to. I bought them on clearance not sure whether I would use the parts for MOCs or sell them on, and I stored them for a few years before deciding to sell them (during which time they were selling for maybe 1.5-2x RRP). When I got round to selling them, the price was 4x RRP. I then have the choice - sell them for the market rate, what buyers are willing to pay, or sell them at 1.5 or 2x RRP, well under market rate. What would most people do here? Is it greedy to sell at market rate? I could, of course, sell them to someone for 1.5-2x the RRP, but they would probably just sell them on at more than double what they paid to someone willing to pay market value. Whereas I think that LEGO should care about all their customers. Whatever they do with the sets. And as before, this won't stop scalping, it will stop long term investing. It will enhance the amount of scalping, that is the quick flipping of in demand current sets, if long term reselling is no longer an option.

Did you ever ask why they wanted it? It used to be (i) valuable and (ii) the biggest lego set. Now it is neither, so I wonder what the demand will be. If anything, this will just increase scalping (that is, turning a fast profit) on lego sets. If the long term secondary market is lost due to the possibility of remakes, resellers will invest in other areas. One way is scalping - so buying up popular sets in October / November, making sure they are out of stock in December and turning a profit on them from parents that want current but OOS sets for Christmas presents. If that person didn't buy during the years the set was out, then chances are they still wouldn't have bought them when the set was no longer being produced and "retiring soon". If resellers hadn't bought them, then other builders would have bought them, especially if they went to clearance. Those sets would have been opened and removed from the market. The buyer who was saving up would then never get the opportunity to buy the set if LEGO don't sell it any more or the secondary market doesn't exist. The secondary market actually helps the late buyer get hold of the set (at a premium) rather than it going to someone else who would use it. The alternative is that LEGO doesn't retire sets for much longer and so keeps a stock of maybe 7000 sets in inventory at once (10 years worth of different sets at 700 sets per year) - highly unlikely.

The exact wording is this: We’re really sorry, but we aren’t able to sell the minifigures or specialty bricks from “licensed” themes, or NEXO KNIGHTS™ and NINJAGO®. Our licensing agreements with the original creators specify that we can’t sell these “licensed” parts individually but only as part of a set. They say licensed themes, or NEXO KNIGHTS and NINJAGO. So NEXO KNIGHTS and NINJAGO are not licensed themes. They choose not to sell the parts (although in many cases it is not true) but they are not licensed themes.

£300 UK. We won't be adopting the Euro any time soon! :-)

I think it is likely that they have lost the case, or at least not won it or likely to win it, based on them re-releasing Taj Mahal. It sends a sign to buyers not to buy knock-offs, as they will re-release the sought after sets at some stage.

It is probably more aimed at Lepin than resellers. How many will buy the Lepin one now (even if it is 50-60% of the RRP) if they can get a genuine Lego one? They probably know they are not going to win the court case, so have taken action this way. I doubt it is that simple. They are probably going to lose sales of bigger sets to resellers. That is not necessarily a good thing for "real fans". It could well be that LEGO doesn't make as many sets as they would if resellers were actively buying. If the sets don't exist it is harder for "real fans" to get hold of them than if resellers are selling them (albeit at a marked up price). If all the produced sets go into the hands of collectors / builders / "real fans", then future "real fans" have no chance of getting hold of them once they are retired from retail.

It won't really affect collectors but will obviously affect investors. They have just lost $2000+ that they could have got last week. I feel sorry for the buyers that have got one shipping to them right now - or maybe for the sellers when the buyers refuse it and want a refund. I doubt many people would buy a secondary market Eiffel Tower now. It looks like the money will now be in licensed sets where the license is likely to lapse - so things like LOTR where they are unlikely to want the license again just to re-release old sets.

What a fun little idea. Although they are probably not as fast as Rey's speeder!

Earlier series (at least in the UK) were fairly plentiful back in the day as well though. And the market was also saturated. I bought loads of Elves from S3, Roman Soldiers from S6, etc on eBay for little more than RRP during their retail shelf life. Also, I don't recall the prices jumping immediately once a new series was released. For many of the figures, there was only a very slow rise. Ones in huge supply with low demand (and there were many in the first few series) didn't go up immediately. A lot of the higher supply older ones didn't really increase in value until probably about series 10 or 11 came out, when new collectors came in and wanted to go back and collect what they had missed. Ones like the traffic cop from S2, I bought 80 or so packets of him in 2014 for about 60p each (30% of / 70% off RRP). Even now, some of them are not worth much more than RRP.

Yeah, she overtook the zombie about 3-4 years ago.

The downside of something like that is taking probably 10 years before it is complete. If people know that, it is a huge barrier to buying into it. And during that time people move on from LEGO, new people may come in but realise they will never get the old bits and so don't buy new sets, minifigure detail will change and so those in later sets will look better than older sets. And the big one - there is nothing to say that LEGO would ever complete it. Imagine spending the best part of $1000 on sets over 5 years getting half way there and then they decide to scrap the project. Just like they did with LOTR, never producing anything Gondor related.

I was fairly pleased with the way they handled the figures in both Disney and Simpsons (aside from missing the more adult characters). I hope HP is done similar.

Fantastic! Feedback: make it bigger :-)

I think LEGO are slowly killing the CMF line now anyway. Price increases and the long wait between the numbered series have put me off collecting them all. Now I just decide which ones I want and I think will be popular and buy them on BL when the series is current. For the rest of the ones I want, I wait until they go on clearance sale. I sold off a lot of my earlier ones. If I am not collecting them all, there is no point having them especially given the prices they sell for. I kept the ones I like and sold off probably 60% of my collection to people that were late to collecting them. If they have to do multiple Batman suits and so on, I'd prefer them to do packs of maybe 3 figures (like the old style minifigure packs they did for halloween, beach, music) or the packs of 3-5 figures they did for castle, Chima, etc. In fact, they did one for the Gotham pack too. That way, people can buy the figures they want seeing them in the pack, and the CMF series are not used up on providing these.

TLBM series 2 seems a bit late as there is now no tie in with the movie or with the DVD release. In a way, I hope it bombs so that future movies get just one series to coincide with the movie. Classic Disney (so Disney series 2) would probably be a much better seller worldwide than Scooby Doo, even without any current movie tie-ins. Plus they've done enough monsters recently - through the S14 CMFs and Scooby Doo sets, it is time for something else. I'm not including Monster Fighters as that is now 5 years old.

You are right. For some reason I was remembering the RI at £25 GBP and $30 USD - must have been the secondary market price I was remembering! RI seems pretty cheap now considering the NASA price.

CMF can be useful too. Sumo wrestler, various samurai, kendo. I guess it depends what you mean by Asian, as there is also the snake charmer from the CMF - although he is obviously more South Asian than East Asian. And of course the Central / Western Asian Hun.

The used to do light flesh / fleshie ones as I bought 100 pairs in Jan 2016. I knew at the time I should have ordered more.