Blondie-Wan

Huh, that’s very strange. I have to assume that it’s a packing error, rather than an intentional alternate distribution. Mr. Gold from Series 10 is the only figure they’ve ever done before that came in only some of the boxes; all others have always been at least one per box.

I did! I do! Will see it again!

I’m sitting in a theater now, 18 minutes from showtime for the early screening. I can’t wait!

Hey, cool! Congratulations!

I bought six of the Cyberman pack myself a while back, but wound up giving one to a couple of friends who are big Doctor Who fans, so I’m down to five. I had found six more marked down to less than three dollars (!) at Target, but I wasn’t able to get them right away, and when I returned the very next day they were all gone, of course. I’m currently mulling over some Ghostbusters (2016) Story Packs that are marked down quite a bit at another store near me; at the current price, I think it would be worth it just for parts. I hope to get my PS4 before too much longer so I can finally actually play the game again!

It wouldn’t be the first time an Ideas product idea had its part count drastically reduced when being adapted into a set. But it might be possible to recreate much of the look and size of the original with far fewer pieces, depending in particular upon how the trunk is built. Or perhaps it is indeed an error, and there’s a missing digit at the beginning.

Wait, there’s a new stormtrooper helmet mold?! Gahhhh... I am tired of this. :/ Oh, well. That said, today I picked up 75205 Mos Eisley Cantina and a second copy of 75198 Tatooine Battle Pack.

We should be less than four weeks from the next announcement. They’ve posted the creator interviews for seven of the projects from the Second 2018 Review Batch now, and have only three left to go. We also saw in the last review that they sort of sped through the interviews near the end so they could announce a little earlier, so it might be only two or three weeks. The first seven interviews are at these links for the creators of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy, the International Space Station, SpaceX - The Ultimate Collection, Steamboat Willie, the M & M’s Chocolate Candy Dispenser, the Peugeot 205 Turbo 16 LEGO Speed Champions, and the Fiat 500 F. The new batch after it looks good, though I’m not sure how many of them are likely to be approved. With just five projects, this new batch is also the smallest batch in over five years - the last time they had one this small or smaller was back when it was still LEGO CUUSOO. I can’t help but wonder whether some of the site updates over the last year or so had put people off and slowed activity, resulting in fewer projects making it to review, and if so, whether the most recent update is aimed at fixing that. While there’s never been a batch with just five projects since the change from CUUSOO to Ideas, there have been a couple with just six. The first of those batches actually wound up having half its projects approved, yielding three sets; the other one had no approvals. We’ve also had multiple batches with two approvals, including the last one, while we’ve had batches with as many as thirteen projects have none approved. Clearly the size of a batch, by itself, is by no means an indication of how many sets it will bring us. But I do think this batch will have one approval. I’m a little worried and irked at myself, since the project I think is likeliest to be approved is also kind of slightly similar in concept to yet another project I’ve had in mind for a couple years but haven’t gotten around to submitting. If I do finally get it together and submit it and it gets to review and gets declined for being too much like an approved project from this batch, it would be the third idea that someone else beat me to (as I previously intended to submit a pop-up book and a Beatles Yellow Submarine). I really need to get busy working on my Ideas, but real-life stuff just keeps getting in the way. :/ At least my idea this time is different enough that it could still have a chance, though, so I’m still planning on going ahead with it. Yes (i.e., this year, since it was last year when you asked that). The Treehouse and The Flintstones should both come out in 2019, and I imagine one or two more will as well. They’ve ramped up production of Ideas sets since the early CUUSOO days, and every year from 2014 to 2018 has had four Ideas sets except for 2017, which had three (and two of them were very large sets of around 2000 pieces each, the NASA Apollo Saturn V and the Old Fishing Store, released back-to-back). I do think the Treehouse will be another large one, and it’s conceivable a project from the batch currently finalizing review could leapfrog it and be released before it, but I don’t think it’ll take until 2020 for them to release a set announced in 2018. The Flintstones and the Treehouse should both be out this year.

Yeesh, darn passage of time. I can’t believe it’s been nine years (well, almost)... Anyway, I’m looking forward to these. I managed to get most of the line the first time around (everything except a couple polybags, a couple Duplo sets, and the extended line stuff), as well as the Buzz and Pizza Planet Alien Minifigures from the Disney Series, and I'm sure I’ll want these, too.

February 1st. I want this so much.

Huh. Really? It’s at Walmart and Target and such, even with a selling point being that it connects to the previous one? Either way, the retail classification isn’t really the point so much as it being a particularly large, expensive, super-detailed set along the same lines as Ninjago City, Joker Manor, and MetalBeard’s Sea Cow. I was just noting that it shows they have indeed been willing to do more than one such set from a given LEGO movie. That the second set might be sold more broadly than the first doesn’t contradict that.

Not Ninjago City and Ninjago City Docks?

In my case, I lived in a tiny apartment for many years and didn’t have enough room to open, assemble, and properly display everything, or organize my bricks, etc. At the same time, I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss out on sets I knew I’d want later, so I just acquired sets whenever I could and stored them away. Eventually I built up a backlog. I did open and build some sets, just not as many as I bought. I’m now married, and my wife and I just bought a new home that has a room we’ve designated as the LEGO room, so once it’s set up, I’ll finally be able to open up all these sets at last. I’m looking forward to clearing out the backlog over the next year or so. Perhaps I’ll do some reviews of older sets for EB.

I have perhaps a couple hundred unopened sets, from the early 2000s to this year, and I fully intend to open and assemble them all.

I’d say that’s a great price for a fine set. The MSRP is $39.99, and the set is no longer widely available new; if anything, I’d expect to have to pay above MSRP to get it now. Being able to get it for below MSRP is an excellent opportunity.

Thanks for this. Speaking as some who has only very limited experience with any sort of motorized LEGO but has long wanted to fully explore this area, this whole post looks immensely useful to me.

to all of this. I’m very much looking forward to the whole The LEGO Movie 2 line in particular; I just hope I can afford it all. I will miss seeing Elves sets on the shelves, I must say. I should try to pick up a few more while I still can. But I’m excited about what’s to come.

I love them, and I think more often than not they’re my wife’s favorites from a given series. She doesn’t collect entire series as I do, but usually wants / gets the costumes (though she doesn’t do whole series, and this didn’t get all of S18).

I don’t think it’s lack of interest so much as lack of funds. Most of us have a harder time affording $200 sets than $20 ones.

Agreed, but have they always used the stricter definition of “minifigure”? Was there a time when they were a little looser with the term - counting skeletons, battle droids, etc. as “minifigures”?

By that logic, they wouldn’t have released the Disney Castle, the Simpsons’ House, or the Kwik-E-Mart, since most of the characters who got minifigures in each of those sets were released elsewhere. Heck, for that matter, the same could be said of the Death Star(s). That obviously doesn’t remotely mean some sort of Wizard of Oz D2C is anything close to being particularly likely, much less a sure thing, but I certainly think it’s possible.

Well, there certainly aren’t enough sales of the sets yet, since no such sets have been offered. Whether there’s sufficient interest to warrant them remains yet to be determined. FWIW, there’s at least enough interest in LEGO Oz to have propelled a CUUSOO project to review, back when LEGO Ideas was still LEGO CUUSOO.

Well, “minifigure” is just a word invented to refer to a miniature figure. It isn’t even LEGO-specific; Hasbro uses it to refer to their small PVC My Little Pony figures.

It looks like things might be changing a bit here, now...

Well, now we know. It’s bizarre that we’re getting stuff from this particular licensed theme, but only as part of not one, not two, but at least three other themes (!), without really getting anything from it just as its own dedicated The Wizard of Oz line (yet, anyway).