Blondie-Wan

Outstanding! Congratulations, Bricked1980! That’s an amazing bit of publicity, and a nice article, to boot.

Indeed, that’s one of multiple things that jumped out at me from the figure lineups - the Ugnaughts aren’t with the Empire, or serving them as Boba Fett does. I also think as long as you’re grouping Lando with the other Cloud City people, it makes more sense to just label them as Cloud City folk rather than “neutral” (as in, between heroes and villains), as Lando eventually emerges as one of the saga’s heroes (in fact, I’d personally be inclined to group him with the other main heroes, though grouping him with other Cloud City people does make sense). Finally, you have Artoo and Threepio identified as one another.

Some of you may remember reading that the LEGO House in Billund is going to have a special Ideas exhibit soon, featuring many projects from over the years that had accrued full support and made it to review but were not selected for production as sets. The latest blog post offers a little preview of the exhibit, as they receive models from Ideas submitters, while also assembling physical versions of other projects that were previously LDD-only. It’s a fun post.

Thanks for the distinction; I clearly needed three additional words for 100% accuracy. My point stands, though. Re: the implications of your final paragraph, while I see what you’re getting at, I think there’s a clear difference between putting out a general offer to reward supports (votes) with some form of compensation, and a shared effort among Ideas submitters to help one another out, especially if there’s an underlying agreement among this small group of project creators that they all have projects that deserve support. You should bear in mind that many folks here and on Ideas aren’t intent on keeping one another down; they want to help others succeed. I haven’t submitted a single project yet of my own, despite longstanding plans to do so, but I’ve supported 2,600 different projects (or product ideas, as we call them now) since the CUUSOO days. People offer one another feedback and advice on how to garner more votes. Lots of Ideas users seem to want to treat it as a community, and regard it as a victory for the whole community whenever some user-submitted idea makes it through to become a set, even regardless of whether or not that particular idea targets our own specific personal interests.

Every project on the site is a “deliberate organised ploy” (gasp!) to garner votes. Shocking, I know. And submitters are expected to actively try to raise support for their projects. A mutually supportive group of submitters trying to raise one another up is to be celebrated, not frowned upon. There are strategies that are off-limits - for example, one isn’t permitted to run contests pertaining to Ideas projects - but a mutual support group isn’t that. (Frankly, I think it’s also somewhat unkind of you to haughtily dismiss fellow EBers’ efforts as “garbage”. I don’t think the people setting this up think their projects are garbage - but hey, since they’re right here, you can ask them yourself. And the merits of projects are in the eye of the beholder.)

What for? It’s not a rules violation. There’s an expectation that people will find creative ways to promote their projects to garner votes. If something like this helps with some portion of the total support count for a project (a portion you yourself observe will likely be relatively minute), what’s wrong with that? ___________________ Meanwhile, the latest 10K Club interview is up, featuring the creators of I Am Amelia Earhart.

My next question is, is poseability needed, or can these be static sculptures?

It’s always been tough. As of this moment, there are 26,387 projects showing up on the site - stuff submitted anytime from when LEGO CUUSOO began way back in 2008 all the way up to a day or so ago, gathering support, expired, in review, approved, not approved, everything (minus perhaps a few dozen that were archived for one reason or another and don’t show up in site searches, but which can still be found via Google). Of those, 159 have gotten fully supported and made it as far as the review stage or later (including all the projects that have been approved and become sets and all those that were declined, as well as the twenty projects that have achieved support and/or are currently in review). (Note that includes two projects from the very early days of CUUSOO, when it was limited to Japan and projects needed only 1000 votes to be evaluated, so only 157 of those 159 actually went all the way to 10,000, though that also omits one or two projects which got to 10,000 but were then archived before formally entering review.) In other words, only about 1 project out of every 166 gets fully supported and enters review - and then most projects are declined in review, too. So far, just 23 projects have been approved from those 26,387; that’s about one out of every 1,147, though that ignores the fact there are two batches of ten projects each currently in review. If we assume one project from each batch will be approved, the average improves slightly to about 1 out of every 1,055. Granted, the total number of submissions there also includes 1,748 that are currently gathering support, and we can reasonably expect some of them to eventually make it, but by the time they do there will undoubtedly be many more submissions. As far as I’ve been able to tell, for a few years now the average chance of any given submission going all the way and becoming a set has held steady at around one in a thousand, or slightly worse. It’s hard, but not impossible.

I forgot to mention it earlier, but the 10K Club interview is up for Astronaut Avila, the creator of the Modular Arcade.

The Second 2018 LEGO Ideas Review batch has now closed, with ten projects - err, product ideas, once again (just like the batch before it).

This one we can pin down a bit more precisely. :) They announce the results for a review sometime shortly after they put up the last 10k Club interview for that batch, and they do one 10k Club interview each Monday in the run-up to the review results announcement. There’s one interview for each builder (or builder team) in the batch (so if one submitter has multiple projects in a batch, like RobenAnne last time, they have a single interview for all their projects that batch). This time around, there are ten projects, all by different submitters, so there’ll be ten interviews. They posted the first on August 6, and just counting Mondays on the calendar from there shows us the last interview should appear Monday, October 8. The review results should appear shortly after that (a few days or so), so likely sometime the second week in October. :)

The review will begin as soon as the deadline for sets to enter this batch passes (so, in just days now). And the reviews typically last a few weeks longer than the simultaneous batch is open (meaning there’s a period when two batches are under review at the same time, with one nearly done and one just beginning). I’d guess around early February, give or take a couple weeks.

That brings the count for this batch up to a full ten! That’s never a guarantee - after all, batches with as many as 13 projects have had none approved, while one with a mere 6 projects ultimately yielded 3 sets - but I think it’s likely we’ll get at least one set from these ten.

I guessed as much from my brief internet research after your post, but it would be kind of unusual for LEGO to do a license based solely on print media. They do have a couple major comics licenses, of course, but they’re both built principally around the various movies and shows based on those comics franchises, and not so much around the comics themselves. I think the only times they’ve done themes based solely on stories specifically in their print versions have been the handful of sets based on Hans Christian Andersen (the recent promo, plus a mid-2000s Belville subtheme). I might be wrong, though; are there any others? They have held the rights to a franchise in a particular medium at the same time a competitor had the same franchise in a different medium at least once before, with Spider-Man sets in the early-to-mid-2000s, but that time things were the other way around - LEGO was doing sets based on the first couple movies in the Raimi / Maguire live-action Spidey Movie trilogy, while Mega Bloks did sets based on the actual classic comics. I feel like if LEGO were going to split another franchise with a competitor the same way again, they’d be willing only if once again they got the higher-profile iteration (i.e., a movie over either TV or print, and TV over print). I’m not sure they’d do a book series with another company doing a show based on the book. But goodness knows I’ve been wrong a lot about what they will and won’t do...

Huh; I actually did not know that. Thanks for the info! But my guess is that means LEGO won’t be touching that franchise again (at least, unless and until Mattel sells off HiT, the production company through which it owns Thomas). But there’s really no telling; these things can get quite complicated. And IANAL.

In some cases, it’s easy enough - if somebody is already making some sort of construction toy based on a particular property, it’s safe to assume the rights aren’t available. I guess if that’s not the case, then I guess one could contact the owner of the IP to inquire whether construction toy licenses are available. ____________________ The latest 10k Club Interview is up, featuring the creator of the Stitch project currently in review.

I like it! I certainly think it could use a few more minifigures and such, but it’s good. Amazing that as long as LEGO Star Wars has been around, there have been so few Bespin-related sets, with half or so of them all being the Slave I. This goes a long way to filling in gaps.

A week ago yesterday they posted the 10k Club interview with the creator of SR-71A The Final Flight, and yesterday that with the creator of the Treehouse. Between the two they also posted a notice about minor revisions to the Data Privacy portion of the Terms of Service.

It varies widely, including by region. In the US, the Curiosity Rover was barely available - sold only via phone and online orders (not in stores), and even then it sold out in a couple days; it became briefly available again several months later, but sold out again about as quickly as before. I think its total availability was less than a week, split into two periods of two or three days a few months apart. However, it was sold in stores (not even just LEGO Stores, but ordinary stores) overseas, and was available for months. On the other hand, the Ghostbusters Ectomobile was around for roughly two years (with a few stores keeping it available a while after LEGO itself ran out). It came out in June 2014 (just in time for the movie’s 30th anniversary) and remained available long enough for its availability to overlap a few months with that of the firehouse headquarters, released early 2016. I don’t have lots of hard data, but I will say it appears to me the Ideas sets based on licensed pop-culture entertainment properties tend to stick around longer than the other ones, which bodes well for the TRON set, I’m happy to say (since I want it but haven’t gotten it yet myself). But I wouldn’t count on it remaining a full year - IIRC, the Doctor Who, WALL•E, and The Big Bang Theory sets all were discontinued a little less than a year after release, though one could still get them at other stores for a while longer - so it’d probably be good to pick up the TRON set before too much longer.

They already began doing this, years ago, and beyond the important environmental considerations, they themselves have reason to want smaller packages (since it means more stock can fit in a shipping container or on a store shelf, and it saves on packaging costs). I don’t profess to be an expert, but I suspect the main impediment to going even smaller is that the automated production / packing processes require the boxes for a certain set to be a certain size, in order to ensure the bags of parts all go in where they’re supposed to.

Supporter #7. Nicely done, and best of luck!

I think I’d email them. :) __________________________________ We didn’t note it here at the time, but on Monday of this week they published the first 10K Club interview for the upcoming fall review results. This one features the accomplished Alexander Paschoaletto, creator of the Embraer A-29 Super Tocano (Smoke Squadron) product idea. The next announcement should now be about nine or ten weeks away.

Heh! I wasn’t sure anyone saw my post before I edited it; I made this big long thing about the rules as I understand them, and decided to remove it because it came across to me as obnoxious and trying to make myself out to be some sort of authority, when I’m actually far from it. That said, though... the answer to your question is yes. The other stuff I talked about was my interpretation of things, but here the rules are quite clear - they will accept no more projects based on licenses they’ve already used for CUUSOO / Ideas sets. So, no more projects will be accepted that are based on the Shinkai 6500 submersible, the Hayabusa probe, Junichiro Kawaguchi, Minecraft, Back to the Future, the Curiosity rover, Ghostbusters, The Big Bang Theory, WALL•E, Doctor Who, Caterham automobiles, the Beatles / Yellow Submarine, Adventure Time, the Apollo mission Saturn V rockets, Margaret Hamilton, Mae Jemison, Sally Ride, Nancy Grace Roman, TRON, or Voltron. Some of those had multiple submissions already, and any projects that were already there when they instituted the new rule back in April of last year were left alone rather than being archived, and if any of them are still actively gathering votes now and make their vote goals, they’ll be evaluated in review like anything else (though their chances of being approved are lower than most projects’). But no new product ideas based on those licenses will be accepted.

Edit: never mind.

With the recent Ideas site redesign I’m no longer sure how to get image URLs from there on a phone, but this project MJC’s Traditional Cuisine, a modular-style restaurant, is a worth a look - a LEGO building that’s only more compelling on the inside. It currently has 8713 supports as I write this, but it also has just 19 days remaining, so it may very well not achieve the 10k support goal, which would be a shame after getting this far.