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Blondie-Wan

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Everything posted by Blondie-Wan

  1. Blondie-Wan
    Well, the movie will gleefully mix together minifigure characters from all eras of LEGO (well, all eras since the introduction of the minifigure, anyway), with apparently nary a thimbleful of concern for whether they have solid-dot eyes or "sparkling" eyes, varying levels of torso detail, or even fleshtoned vs. yellow skin - exactly the way many kids (and a few AFOLs, for that matter) do, and the only compatibility anyone cares about is that the pieces physically connect to one another. I wouldn't even be entirely surprised if there were a few of those mid-'70s "proto-minifigures" (the ones with essentially the same heads and hats/hair as today, but with the single-piece torsos with molded-in arms, and the single-piece legs) somewhere in the movie (wouldn't it be a cool, nostalgic treat if one of those were among the TLM CMFs?).
  2. Blondie-Wan
    That's a beautiful sight.
  3. Blondie-Wan
    Certainly, given the initial plans for Episode III for next year (as well as the fact there's a new Wookiee mold, which I don't quite think the 75043 AT-AP would warrant all by itself, suggesting more sets with Wookiee characters). That said, I most want to know about all things OT for next year (and beyond!).
  4. Blondie-Wan
    Well, aside from the Shinkai 6500 they're not "limited" in the usual sense of being limited to a specific number of copies; with the Minecraft set, at least, they've kept doing additional production runs since it keeps selling so well. It appears to me the Hayabusa set has also been kept in production (it's been out more than a year now, and is still available and hasn't been clearanced). Since this isn't being marketed specifically as a limited edition, I believe TLG will do additional production runs if it sells out everywhere as quickly as it appears it will. That said, it's probably worth noting that if TLG does indeed intend to do something about the error on the flux capacitor element, the initial production run might wind up being the only way to get it with the misspelling, for whatever that's worth (no guarantees, of course, but maybe). Speaking for myself, I will say that as I want multiple copies of the set anyway, I'm hoping to eventually get versions of that printed panel with both the error and the correction. I'm not yet even sure why, but I think I'd like to have them both as optional, alternate parts I might use in some funky MOCs.
  5. Blondie-Wan
    I was actually thinking a minute is rather conservative; there are plenty of figures that can be super-tough to determine, and the arrangement of parts in a certain bag can sometimes make a figure hard to figure even if it's one that's normally quite easy to pick out. Remember, I'm talking about trying to get at least two of each, not just the "army builders," and that includes figures who might have very few diagnostic elements, or even none at all (figures whose identity one might determine only by being able to ascertain that it's not anything else). There are definitely some figures who are obvious right off the bat, but unfortunately they're not the majority, at least for me.
  6. Blondie-Wan
    It would be a lot of money for a regular person like one of us, sure, but it'd still be a small percentage of the overall production cost of making those sets for a large corporation like TLG. While 1% of the set price would be more than 1% of TLG's production cost, it's still not going to be something so significant that they'd either opt against making a set they'd otherwise make because of it, or find some way to "cheat" their way around it and make the set (as designed by mb) without paying mb the commission, and risk tarnishing their image (which is much more valuable than the revenue they might get from any one single set, no matter how expensive). Actually, the cheapest option is to just not issue anything like that set at all. You sound as though you're really sure TLG is in fact going to issue a ginormous Western Town in a couple years, basing it on mb's design but not paying mb anything for it. While it could happen, I really doubt it. The fact of the matter is that a) they were prevented from doing this set because of their The Lone Ranger license, which is nobody's fault but just some unfortunate bad timing for the submission; and b) this model, as wonderful as it was, was never a guaranteed winner even if The Lone Ranger weren't an issue - it'd be a huge, expensive monster of a set from a theme that has a tiny fraction of the devotees that something like Star Wars does. TLG might well have declined it purely on business case grounds alone.
  7. Blondie-Wan
    I seriously doubt they'd actually resurrect mb's Western town design and turn it into a set without offering him anything. Mind you, they could go and do Western town sets (as they have in the past), and just make sure they're not really like mb's design beyond drawing upon the same archetypal Western images, and thus not pay him anything, but if they really did a huge set along the lines of what mb submitted to CUUSOO I seriously doubt they'd ignore the fact he'd done so.
  8. Blondie-Wan
    I may be wrong, but I strongly doubt this is what's meant by the "competing brands" part, actually; I think it refers more to brands competing with LEGO itself, i.e. other toy companies - the reason the official Toy Story sets didn't have Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, Barbie & Ken, Slinky Dog, etc., and why they don't do My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic sets. It could refer what you're saying it means, but the strongest evidence we have for that pertains not to Lucasfilm and Star Wars, but to Disney and The Lone Ranger. Of course, Disney now ultimately owns both, but still... __________________ On another note, who actually runs CUUSOO? Did this start as a private fan group in Japan, or is it an actual part of the LEGO company, or what? I've also wondered about this one. Does the fact that it was rejected once mean it can't be reevaluated later, when the contract with Disney is no longer an issue? It'd be most unfortunate if this were forever barred from being a set simply because of unfortunate timing when it initially garnered 10,000 supporters and entered the review stage.
  9. Blondie-Wan
    I do! It's been a long time since I watched the movie, but from what I can recall you certainly seem to have gotten it down. Your creation here is another one of those things that's similar to something I'd been planning to do for a long time, but hadn't gotten around to yet (in this case, building a black-and-white recreation of a scene from a black-and-white movie). I've long had this idea for something I'd like to see as official LEGO sets of the sort they'd sell to AFOLs through the direct channels, actually - a whole series of such scenes. The specific ones I was thinking of would include Frankenstein's laboratory from Frankenstein, Rick's Café Américain from Casablanca, and Klaatu's saucer landing from The Day the Earth Stood Still.
  10. Blondie-Wan
    Just to clarify, I don't mean fatigue in the sense of getting sick of them, I just mean that it's extremely taxing trying to keep up with them all, and get as many as I want of each figure. With about three series a year now, that means there are 48 new individual figures each year (not including things like Mr. Gold, the Toy Soldier from the Character Encyclopedia or the entire Team GB series), and each of them costs about three bucks here in the US. That means it gets pretty expensive trying to get at least two of each, never mind the considerably greater numbers I inevitably want of at least one or two figures per series. That's in addition to trying to afford all the other, "regular" LEGO sets I want each year, which is hard enough. On top of the expense, though, there's literal physical fatigue, since getting the figures I want means putting in actual physical effort and time (to feel the packets). Suppose it takes an average of a minute of packet-feeling to make a sure determination of which minifigure is inside. It then takes a full hour to go through all the packets in a freshly-opened, 60-minifigure display box in the store, assuming I go through every one (which is frequently the case, since I might want every one I can get of one or two "army builder" figures in a given series). In practice, since it can take longer than a minute of feeling to be sure of a certain figure, it often works out that I might spend well upwards of an hour (or even two or three) feeling every packet I can from a couple boxes of minifigures out on a store shelf. Just standing there in the store aisle for a couple hours is draining in and of itself - still fun, mind you, hunting all those minifigures, but it does take a toll after a while, for someone who's both a completist (wanting at least a little of everything) and an army builder (wanting a lot of certain things).
  11. Blondie-Wan
    Hayabusa certainly was - and still is - sold outside Japan; I'm happy to say I just got a copy myself earlier this month at the LEGO Store at Downtown Disney in Orlando. You can still order it, too (I don't know which country you're in, but that's the page for the set in the US version of Shop at Home). In fact, the only CUUSOO set that was actually released only in Japan was the very first, the Shinkai 6500. All the CUUSOO sets released since then have been available internationally. Would they go back to a Japan-only distribution for a set like this? I don't know. I think they'd certainly prefer to make sets that they can sell everywhere they do business, but the Shinkai 6500 and various other, non-CUUSOO sets over the years do show they're certainly willing and able to make sets solely for specific countries / regions. However, if they were to think of doing another CUUSOO set specifically for Japan, I think they'd want some assurance first that it got enough votes specifically from Japan to ensure it'd be worthwhile.
  12. Blondie-Wan
    Indeed; it's just the identifier for his position. "president and chief operating officer" - this is the actual position, or rather, two different positions held by the same person, hence all the words. You couldn't leave part of this out without losing part of what his role is within the company. "Turner's Animation" - this just tells us who he works for. It's a bit better than "some company," isn't it? "Young Adults & Kids Media Division" - the specific business unit within the company. Again, this is just basic info. Jargo's complaint doesn't make much sense. What would be preferable, "some guy working for some other guys"?
  13. Blondie-Wan
    Wow. I love these, as always. I must admit to getting a little CMF fatigue, though; it's just getting blasted difficult to keep up with them all and get as many as I'd like of each. But I'm going to keep trying! Once again I plan to get at least two apiece; I'll try to get slightly greater quantities (3 to 7, say) of the barbarian, diner waitress, tiki warrior, holiday elf, constable, scientist, jazz musician, evil mech, lady wind-up robot, and... well, shoot. Most of them, I guess. I wonder whether I'm the only one looking at that jazz musician and thinking of how it'll facilitate more Indiana Jones builds...
  14. Blondie-Wan
    I'm not sure; the whole CUUSOO thing is still new, and both the Hayabusa and the Minecraft sets are still available (with the latter in particular having been a huge success that have kept TLG doing additional production runs). The only one that isn't still available is the very first, the Shinkai 6500 submersible, and that was a limited edition of 10,000 copies to begin with (as well as being released only in Japan). Everything released after that is still available; we haven't yet seen a non-limited-edition CUUSOO set get discontinued yet, so there's not much to go on (aside from the fact LEGO sets in general can be available for widely and wildly varying periods of time anyway).
  15. Blondie-Wan
    Hooray! Thank you!
  16. Blondie-Wan
    Hi! I've been around for over four years now and have over a thousand posts, and I do love Star Wars and post in the Star Wars forums pretty frequently. Now, I do also love other LEGO themes and consequently the SW percentage of all my overall posts on EB isn't quite 25%, but at roughly 20% it's pretty close, and the current version of the requirements in the initial post in the thread do state that the 25% rule isn't a strict requirement any longer. May I have the tag? Pretty please?
  17. Blondie-Wan
    I know it's been a while since this question was posted, but since no one else seems to have answered it yet, I'll go ahead... The way you asked the question, it sounds like you're treating color as the primary way of distingushing between bricks, rather than shape / size. I would recommend you do it the other way around - sort by size (and shape) first, and then sort by color as well if you like. If you have a container of lots of different colors of the same shape & size of piece, it's much easier to find one of the color you want than it is to find a brick of a certain size in a container of differently-sized bricks of the same color.
  18. Blondie-Wan
    I'd like to try using the various eye-printed elements from this theme in some Patapon MOCs.
  19. Blondie-Wan
    These are lovely. My own purism won't allow me to use custom stickers on my own LEGO models, even if I think they'd look great, but I can't say I don't think about this sort of thing. Actually, I'd long hoped TLG itself would issue some alternative poster stickers for its theaters; I'd even hoped for a theater set (before Palace Cinema was announced) that might actually use some of the "LEGO-ized" poster images we've seen over the years promoting one licensed theme or another. There have been some wonderful ones, certainly.
  20. Blondie-Wan
    75006 Jedi Starfighter & Kamino. This is actually my first and so far only Planets set from Series 3 - I'm always behind! But I should be able to get the rest. I'm more concerned about some older and larger sets I'm going to have to scramble on...
  21. Blondie-Wan
    Well... why they don't do them as otherwise "regular" minifigures in transparent plastic, anyway. There are, of course, minifigure ghosts (made with glow-in-the-dark ghostly "shroud" elements that fit over an assembly of a regular minifigure head, torso and legs) and holograms (regular transparent bricks decorated with stickers of minifigure-style character art).
  22. Blondie-Wan
    I did mention that about the boxes, back on the first page. I don't think those are the actual packaging, just display pieces for Comic-Con.
  23. Blondie-Wan
    Well, huh. That's interesting. I understand they did something similar with 10210 Imperial Flagship. As I understand it, the intial runs had a wrong version of the dress print on a slope brick used for the governor's daughter minifigure included in the bags, and at the last minute TLG included a corrected version of the brick put in the box along with the bags.
  24. Blondie-Wan
    The ones of which I have the most, so far: S2 Spartan Warrior - 27 S5 Graduate - ~ 22 (estimate - I have some unopened ones, and I've lost count of exactly how many) S6 Roman Soldier - 19 (estimate again, see above) I'm actually more interested in amassing huge numbers of Graduates than any of the "warrior" figures; fortunately there's still one store near me that has a couple hundred S5 packets left, so I should be able to cherry-pick several more. I do wish I'd gotten more Roman Soldiers, though, but I guess I'm lucky to have the ones I do. The ones I most wish I could get a lot more of than I have: S7 Aztec Warrior - 5 S8 Lederhosen Guy - 1 That last one really stings. To begin with I always try to get at least two of each Minifigures minifigure, and I've succeeded with every one of them so far except for this one (and for some Series 10 ones, but that series is still readily available and I'm still picking it up). Moreover, I'd really wanted to get a bunch of the Lederhosen guys - maybe not as many as, say, Graduates, but at least a dozen or so. Somehow I just lost track of which ones I'd gotten multiples of and which I hadn't, and how long the series had been out, until by the time I realized I still needed to get a bunch more to get all the ones I wanted, it was too late to do so. I still hold out some hope of running across some more Series 8 somewhere, but my odds don't look good. I'd also love to army-build the Toy Soldier from the new DK book, but obviously that's not going to be easy. I wish they'd chosen some other character less suitable for army-building to be included with the book...
  25. Blondie-Wan
    Whoa! I see new, smaller-sized ball-and-socket elements in those figures on the site. Nifty! I wonder... are those boxes the packaging? Perhaps they're made specifically and solely for the SDCC display...
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