MAB

The Lady Liberty print on white would be fantastic.

It's also the battle that is rumoured to be the source of why English use a two fingered gesture as an insult. The French threatened to cut of archers' fingers and hence these are waved in the air.

I thought the boar head design for the CMF evil knight was excellent.

Look up just about any word in a dictionary or thesaurus (even if not changing language) and you get similar words, do the same for one of them and repeat. You soon end up with a word of different meaning.Google translate doesn't have a great deal of context, it is mainly word for word translation. Change the order of words, you can get a different translation. Bear in mind that the French words would have already been translated once, translating them again can lose sense.They will be right ball park, but not exact.

Do American kids play cowboys and Indians still? It's not very common in the UK these days. I used to in the 1970s back when the Milky Bar Kid was popular, but rarely see kids playing it these days. I don't know if that is due to the more modern views about Native Americans / American Indians. Whereas kids here do play knights, I've taken mine to quite a few knights and princess parties over the years.

I hope they don't do a Thorin. We have enough versions of him already.

They will probably copy brickwarriors crutches, with the cut out in the top of the crutch to make it look like they are under arms.

What would be wrong with a male dancer? After all, Disco Dude was around long before the Diva.

The big downside for me is not fitting through doors, unless they go sideways. Hard Lego doesn't give like soft dresses.

Yet some people prefer the versatility of being able to mod them. For example, making a Santa Homer or Hazmat Homer, using the standard style head with other Lego parts. Hopefully that will happen with Disney, especially if they do the first fleshie CMF series.

None of the examples include CMF series either. The point is, we simply do not know what the thinking is behind their choices. Do they see CMFs as a series to be displayed together? Do they see them as a way to supplement existing sets and characters? Do they give the license owner the right to choose style and contents? The point of Lego is to sell and make money. There aren't many companies that make Lego mini figures to display on a shelf, or be compatible with Lego MOCs. The number of molded heads is tiny compared to the number of regular heads. They are just giving people that want more accurate molded heads what they want. Just like using minidolls gives part of the population that doesn't like minifigs what they want.

I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the various le and la, at least at this stage. There are not many la's there as yet. I'm not so sure lego would give us an animal killer, especially not in a series aimed at kids. There would probably be an animal rights backlash. We have seen enough dodgy translations in the past. The translation could equally well mean something like an animal trainer or keeper, they don't always come out with the normally used foreign words. It then even fits with figures like the ringmaster, if taken to be lion tamer or something else circus related, or zoo keeper if zoo related. Or possibly vet (have been popping up in Friends).

Although more recent modulars have had more play features in them than the older ones used to. So for example the bank has the robber coming down the chute into the bank, and the ability to launder money through a washing machine into the bank. So the lines are being blurred between city (as play sets) and modulars (as display sets). A large castle with a few built in play features would probably sell well to older kids but still be interesting enough to adults (which pretty much describes what the creator / modular sets are becoming). Ewok Village in SW is again similar, interesting enough for adults, even though it is really a large play set, with its built in play features.

Is there anyone that wouldn't recognize this as the Simpsons? Yet that is not what we got. Despite it being more lego-like, despite it even being in the LEGO TV episode. Someone (whether LEGO or FOX) chose to go down the route of detailed molded heads, even though minifig heads would have worked and even fit in with the tie-in episode. Just because something works and just because the hard core fans want a purist route doesn't mean that is what the company decide to do.

That's probably more down to the subject matter than because they have molded heads though. Many parents wouldn't buy Simpsons stuff for 5-10 year olds. Disney on the other hand ...

It would be good to get a male zoo keeper. We have a female one already.

No, I don't want. But I understand why they might. Minifigures have changed massively over the past few years, more than in the 30 years before that. Lego has shown that it is willing to do complete series of sculpted heads (two of them in fact) where plain heads would have done for many of the buyers. CMFs (at least licensed ones) are not made to give us parts, they are made to sell complete characters. It won't matter to Disney if people want to use the heads as parts, probably not to Lego either. They will want good representations of their characters. They may decide regular heads are enough for this series, maybe not. As to the cost of molds, yes they are expensive but do-able for CMFs. Proof is in The Simpsons lines. New head molds aplenty there. Hardly any of those molds are ever going to be reused, yet there was a financial case to make them. Disney presumably already have 3D computer models too, so part of the sculpting process could possibly be avoided. I don't know how lego works with licensing partners when it comes to reproducing well known characters. As to the wouldn't look as good - I disagree. A molded head would look more like Captain Hook than a lego one. It wouldn't look anywhere near as lego-like, but it would look more like a normal toy of him. Hard-core lego fans may not like it (like many seem not to like the Simpsons) but I doubt that matters too much to Lego. These will be aimed at kids and parents, and so they will do what they think will sell. I really hope they are regular heads, it will hopefully give us a whole range of decent fleshie parts to use. But I can understand if they are not. And that is exactly the problem. If they use one based on Robin Williams (more human than cartoon style) then it might not look like a Disney character. Hook was a TriStar / Columbia / Sony movie.

I'd love some more fleshie legs too, preferably with a armour like skirt, but any reasonable skirt will do. I want to start converting Romans and Spartans to fleshie and it is the legs that are a problem.

They may look fine but it is whether or not they look distinctive. Obviously, we don't know who is in this series. But as it is a Disney series, Disney will probably want it looking Disney-ish. If they do Pan and Hook, would Disney want them looking like any Pan and Hook, or Disney's Pan and Hook. This is where there is the problem between human characters played by humans and human characters that are cartoons. In some cases like Scooby Doo the minifig heads are fine. There is enough about the character that makes it distinctive. I'm just wondering whether Disney would want their characters to appear detailed like Disney characters or fairly generic, especially since they know Lego is willing to do detailed non-lego like heads for entire CMF series. They know Lego is willing to do doll like heads on minifigs to make them look accurate to the original source. Remember many people said Simpsons were fine with just regular minifig heads too - like in the Lego episode. There are of course Disney minifigs in purist Lego form, then also ones in minidoll form where they (Lego and Disney) decided to go for a closer match to the cartoons (or just chose the "girl Lego" style) and then molded heads for Buzz and Woody (that could have been done in an acceptable way using real minifig heads). I guess it depends how much input Disney has, whether they want the Simpsons style for their characters, and of course what characters they decide to produce, whether cartoon or human.

So Peter Pan vs Hook. Does Hook end up without his distinctive Disney nose? So looking like any pirate captain.

^ Let's hope LEGO don't act on the initial comments made by many fans when this was first leaked.

That is different. CMFs have often had one piece heads for aliens, etc. Imagine if they did for example, a Mowgli and a Baloo. If Baloo had a detailed molded head and he was stood next to Mowgli with a plain regular minifigure head, I don't think they would go that well next to each other. Similarly, characters like Captain Hook are pretty distinctive. remove their noses by using regular minifigure heads and they will not look as good as if they did molded heads. They will also look strange next to characters where this type of detailing is present. They would end up looking like this: in the same series as this: Lots of head detail in some of the figures, with minimal in the others. They would look poorly made.

If any are molded, I'd prefer that they are all molded. That is also sensible, since then the whole series looks like a whole series. Not half a series with minifig heads and hair that looks like a regular minifig series, then another half a series with different Simpsons-style molded heads. Not really. Star Wars is an almost 40 year old film franchise that has had world wide coverage over decades. Gravity Falls has been shown on TV in some countries, if you happen to get and watch the Disney Channel.

I think Europe only had one run too and was never really out of stock in the three months it was available. It just wasn't as popular here for "the common man" compared to in the US. I guess that is down to it being a NASA / US focussed set. I know I helped out quite a few people in the US buying them here and shipping them over for them throughout February and March. I never had any problem getting them until they were gone for good.

For weapons and so on you can just about get away with dissolving ABS in minimal acetone (and I mean minimal, allow it to slowly dissolve adding a drop at a time) and casting with that. For bricks it doesn't really work as the castings will shrink a little as the acetone evaporates plus they can deform as well if one part dries quicker than another. And they tend to be rather flexible afterwards too, much more than normal lego. Warnings similar to above about ventilation apply.