naf

Any retired set that can be had at retail is a good deal. I'm a big fan of the Kingdoms line, and 7188 is a really nice set. If you have Kingdom's Joust or Medieval Market Village it goes nicely with them.

Kind of knew this would happen when the movie came out. Glad I stocked up on extra 80's style spacemen well before it came out (not to sell mind you, I wanted more for my classic space layout). I've also noticed that any CMFs that showed up in the movie are flying out of my bricklink store. They've been sitting there untouched for over a year, and this week I've sold 10 of them.

I just don't understand what the big deal is. Women have breasts, and they have hips. These are normal parts of the female body, so it makes sense to include them on female Lego characters since Lego is moving more towards a more detailed and accurate printing style on their minifigs. I mean, we're not talking about Barbie dolls here with unrealistic proportions. To say that the printing of a few lines to give the impression of breasts and hips is sexualizing the minifig is completely ridiculous. I am a big time feminist, and I'm male. I support complete equality for both sexes, pay, job opportunities, how each are portrayed in the media, etc. I just fail to see what the big deal is with printing minifig torsos to be anatomically correct.

When I got back into Lego, I wasn't quite sure how I felt about the female torsos with the printed hips. I liked the old days where you could simply change the hair to create however many male or female characters you wanted. However, minfigs today have a greater amount of detail on the printing than they did in the past. Therefore, it's only natural that female torsos would have hips and boobs. These are natural parts of the female body, and we shouldn't be teaching our kids to be ashamed about the female body. It's not like there's anything incredibly indecent going on here. Also, Lego has been doing this since at least 1989 with some of the minifigs, so the females with hips and boobs are nothing new here. This is the only minifig I have from the old days that has the printed hips, and I totally forgot she was printed like that.

Environmental and sustainability issues aside, this is a good business move for Lego. Oil is just going to keep going up in the future, to the point where it's going to be cost prohibitive for them to use petroleum based plastics. Researching new types of plastics now means that there will still be a Lego company in the future. While I'm sure there will be complaining about it, new plastic is inevitable. Looking on the bright side, it could be that the new plastic is better than ABS. You never know.

Nice job. I really like these smaller vignette style builds. That silver part on top of the trans green brick, is that a real part or custom painted?

licensing restrictions, I think this is it more than anything. Lego has made battle packs before, in themes like Kingdoms. Either they believed that they wouldn't sell, or more realistically the license forbade it. It is interesting that every set has a named character in it, maybe that is indeed part of the license. Perhaps that's why Gandalf is in every set :P I think sets like Uruk Hai Army and MEA are the closest things we're going to get to battle packs in this theme.

Exactly. It's unrealistic to expect a mass produced product to be perfect 100% of the time. Errors get through QC, it happens. What separates the good companies from the bad is how they handle customer complaints. Lego will always send free replacements for missing or defective pieces, no questions asked. Other companies are not that service oriented.

Thanks for the replies everyone. I just pulled all of my boxes out of the closet last night. First though: man I spent a bunch of money on toys the last couple of years! Right now, I'm going to put them all in big plastic garbage bags and store them up in the attic. If they start taking up a ridiculous amount of space, I'll probably just keep the special ones, like the Imperial Flagship, and recycle the rest. Even though the boxes aren't as nice as the ones in the past with alternative models and what not, the art is still pretty neat on some of them. I still have most of my boxes for my childhood sets. My mom is a packrat and kept everything. I'm glad she did now, I'll be keeping those forever!

So, since coming out of my dark ages I've acquired a sizable collection of new Lego sets. So far I've kept every box. I was also keeping the boxes of the sets I buy for the kids, but my wife ended up throwing them all out in the recycling since the kid's Lego are in a storage bin. I have mine stashed in a closet, broken down, safe and sound. Do any of you keep the boxes for your sets? The old sets used to have alternate models on the back and inside flap so there was more incentive to keep those, the new boxes don't have anything like that.

While clearance shopping for bday and christmas presents, I noticed that two sets featured female minifigs: 60004 Fire Station - female firefighter 4429 Helicopter Rescue - female paramedic Nice to see these in the City line.

Seriously, nice collection. Looks like part personal use, part resale? I thought I had a lot of Lego. You, sir, have a lot of Lego awesome.

This x1000. Peer pressure sucks. With the current trend of boys into things like My Little Pony, I'm hoping that kids are becoming more open minded.

I know that even when I was little I always wanted to have both boys and girls in my Lego town. My son was most excited about the Wyldstyle figure when he got his Lego Movie set. Granted, if Lego started making all of their toys pink you'd probably see a drop in male interest, but I don't think adding female figures would matter that much to boys. I remember when I got my Black Seas Barracuda I thought it was very cool that they included the female pirate. I appreciated having a bit of diversity with my minifigs, and I was 9 years old. If this was a set in the City theme with a male news anchor, there wouldn't be a vanity in the news van but I get your point. The criticism is probably being a bit overblown. Even though I don't personally like the Friends theme, it's not as bad as other toys aimed towards girls. I just think it makes for an interesting discussion.

Honestly, Lego produces billions of pieces each year. It doesn't matter how good your quality control is, on that scale there will some defects that get missed and get into the wild. Unfortunately some people are less lucky than others. I've been playing with or buying Lego off and on since 1984, and I've never had a single missing or defective piece. I think the difference is that in the Internet age people can report these issues to places like Eurobricks which makes it seem like it's a bigger problem than it is.

Minifigure arms are not supposed to be removable by design. I've found that it will loosen the arm over time, and can cause the torso to crack. If I need an odd arm/torso combo, I usually bricklink some random used torsos that I wont care about if they break.

Saw it over the weekend, it was indeed awesome awesome awesome! Took my 6 year old, he loved it. I just wish the trailer didn't spoil so many of the jokes. Hilarious pre-movie moment: Our movie theater played a 3 minute long Kreo ad before the movie started. The whole theater erupted in "Booo!! Fake Lego!!" :)

I don't think the filmmakers made a mistake. All of my blue 80's spacement have the same helmet he has in the movie. I've never known any other helmet except when Futuron came out with visored helmets. It's a shame that people are trying to take advantage of the movie to sell minifigs for highly inflated prices. Hopefully no one falls for it.

I love that captain's cabin? Globe piece?? Has that been made before? I'm not really into the ship as a whole, but the individual pieces are very nice.

It really is all about this. I took my kids to see The Lego Movie this weekend (awesome movie, btw). I had a little treat for them when we got home - I got them the melting chamber and cloud cuckoo sets. I have a son and daughter, and I let them choose what they wanted to play with. My son went for cloud cuckoo immediately, and my daughter went for the melting chamber. They built the models and then immediately took them apart to start free building. I was surprised because they never really did that before, they mostly play with the minifigs. It was fun to watch.

Thanks for the review. I found a good deal on this set and built it last night. I really enjoyed the build on the batmobile, and it's a nice solid vehicle once finished. I'm not sure why they used gray brackets on the SNOT used for the side panels instead of black. I think it makes the finished model look messy, so my first mod is to change this. I'm glad they used a majority of the bricks on the batmobile and made the dragster simple. Minifigs are great. I'm not a comic geek, do the Flash and Batman ever work together? I love the Flash minifig, but it seems strange that he's included in this set.

Lego has produced several different types of train track in the past, and different powered trains (4.5v, 9v, 12v, etc). I don't think people complain that these are redundant and useless, and you have fans in each of these categories. Monorail is just another type of track. It is more compact, it can change elevation, it's small enough to wind up and down around and through buildings. Plus, you can't do this with traditional Lego trains:

A generation of counter-stereotypical gender socialisation? I find this to hardly be the case. I'd argue that gender segregation is stronger than ever. It's the kids that are starting to break these molds. My Little Pony is a great example. It's a toy most definitely targeted towards girls, yet there is a large male following. See my Ninjago example above, my step-daughter loves them. And she's been exposed to Lego Friend's, she played with them but never asked to have any of them for her own. She asked for the Samurai Mech for her birthday this year. I don't think there's any biological reason for children to fall along stereotypical gender lines. I would be interested to see your mounting evidence, because I haven't seen anything that suggests this. I don't want to be misrepresented as thinking it's wrong for girls to like pink, or Lego Friend's, or anything that is traditionally girly. I think there's a place for it all. My criticism is that Lego has created this one "female friendly" line, while seemingly ignoring the fact that there are plenty of girls out there who would prefer the other themes, and would probably enjoy seeing some stronger female roles in those sets.

Yup, I've built every one of my old sets I had as a kid, it's part of what took me out of my dark age. I was actually surprised by how well the old sets stand up to the newer ones. But then again, I'm looking at them through biased eyes since I have so many fond memories with them. The first run of Lego pirate ships still look good today. I think the biggest difference is that modern sets use more SNOT techniques, achieving a more rounded shape in some models, and the use of technic pieces in system sets to either strengthen a model or to add movement.

Just came to mind since I recently built them with my family... the Winter Village series is a great example of a successful gender neutral theme. Males and females are represented pretty equally, both my son and daughter enjoy playing with them, and enjoyed building them.