Blondie-Wan

With the MCU, the movies are much higher profile than the TV shows, and a bigger priority for LEGO to do sets from them. And with there now being three MCU movies a year, LEGO is hard-pressed to even fully cover the movies, never mind all the shows.

I’m a much bigger fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 than I am of The Flintstones, and as such I’d much rather see the former project approved as a set, but I acknowledge MST3K is more of a niche-appeal franchise than the mass-appeal Flintstones. I also think that while The Flintstones could benefit from special new molds à la The Simpsons, Andrew Clark’s beautiful project elegantly demonstrates how well the characters can work with conventional minifigures for the humans and a brick build for Dino. The MST3K project’s creator has done about as outstanding a job of representing the characters in LEGO using extant parts as I suspect is possible, but the limitations of non-custom parts mean Crow (and to a lesser extent, Tom, but mostly Crow) is just really, really tough to nail with any detail at minifigure scale - either he’s going to be so simplified as to be tough to recognize, or he’s going to be wildly oversized compared to the other characters. But LEGO does have some extraordinarily talented builders who could hopefully prove me wrong on that. Even if not, and the set wound up with a much-oversized Crow, I’d still love it if it looked as good as this still does. But I just don’t think it’ll happen. The Flintstones is more likely, and while I’m not as crazy about the franchise, I do think the creator has done a sterling job of recreating the show in brick, and deserves all the recognition. I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing that project approved.

Well, keep in mind the decision isn’t entirely in LEGO’s hands when it comes to a licensed project.

The immensely talented JKBrickworks, the same builder who gave us the Maze, whose Pop-Up Book collaboration with Grant_Davis is currently in review, and who previously had the Particle Accelerator considered, actually submitted a lovely da Vinci Flying Machine a while back. It would have made a marvelous set, but shockingly expired with only 785 supporters. I think too few people noticed it, or perhaps didn’t realize from the thumbnail it was more than a static sculpture; it really must be seen in action in the video to be fully appreciated. I hope he resubmits it.

Yeah, I noticed that (and apologies for the late reply!). I’ll try to get that taken care of. Photobucket used to be really useful for me, but obviously isn’t any longer. Granted, that’s because I’m not a paying user, but I can’t help it - I need all my money for LEGO!!! Anyway, I’ll try to fix that in the near future. I need to set up accounts on those other services anyway...

I’m inclined to agree.

The success of the Female Minifigure Set / Research Institute and Women of NASA might bode well for Earhart, but I think the core of the actual build, a minifigure-scale biplane, might suffer from its similarity to the recently-released, current stunt biplane in the Creator line. But you never know. The SR-71 has a strong military association, which hurts its chances with LEGO, but as this project’s creator takes care to note, it also has a research association with NASA duty, and that gives it a chance. LEGO Ideas has a strong record with sets involving scientific exploration and research, particularly aerospace stuff; it’s the second most common general subject matter for Ideas sets after pop-culture entertainment properties. I think the other plane, while not a biplane, is probably too similar to the aforementioned Creator plane as well, but again, you never know. Certainly it’s an attractive, appealing build, with obvious play value. And hey, look! Seven projects that aren’t planes! Why, they might even pick one of them! I’d be happy with any, honestly - only doing none of them would be a total disappointment - but I think my personal favorites are Stitch, the arcade, and the Mystery Science Theater 3000 project. The last one has probably the lowest chance of anything here - even the Acclamator-class Assault Ship is likelier - but I’d be so tickled.

Hmmm... three planes in this batch. There are lots of great projects here.

I finally bought the U-Wing at my local LEGO Store, and ordered Krennic’s Shuttle from the online one, giving me two more of the Rogue One sets, plus what should be two copies of the BB-8 promo. Hooray!

I’m glad to see we’ll get it here in the US, as revealed by the LEGO Store calendar for June. It’s neat that we can add Hans Christian Andersen to the list of real people officially portrayed in LEGO sets. Does he actually have unique printed elements, though, or is he wholly made up of re-uses? Also, is that tile with his name printed or stickered? Also also, there are now quite a few sets based on this gentleman and his writings. Between the five sets of the HCA subtheme of Belville back in 2005, ten (!) products based on Disney’s adaptation of The Little Mermaid (two minifigures in the Disney Minifigures Series, two DUPLO sets, and six minidoll sets), and now this, that’s a full sixteen LEGO releases based on HCA and his works (not counting any TLM references in the Disney Castle). Are there any more I’ve overlooked?

To clarify, May 7th is the cutoff date for the current batch (when it closes and a new batch begins). The next review results will probably be some weeks after that.

Does that mean we’ll see a brick suit torso in black at some point?

And now it’s hit 10k. Congrats! That makes a full ten projects for the batch coming together, with what appear (at least to me) to be plenty of viable options and strong contenders. The results of this one should be exciting (when they’re announced, five or six or seven months from now...).

Agreed. ________________ I rather like the idea of sticking with a single numbered series per year in the main line until at least 2020, when we can have Series 20 in the line's tenth anniversary year, but after that I'd be fine with either the mainline or the separate themed series getting either two slots or one per year. From the perspective of wanting enough figures of each sort each year to satisfy everyone, having four series a year (two and two) sounds great, but speaking as someone who tries to get all of them but has a hard time keeping up, I'm not sure I want that at all. I will just add that for 2020, in addition to the proposed / hoped-for special commemorative anniversary Series 20, I'd dearly love for there to be an Indiana Jones series. I'd be fine with that any year, actually, but 2020 (the scheduled release year for the next movie) seems like the best time to do a series for that particular franchise.

That's just it. Don't you think it's fair for a project that was in compliance with all the rules when submitted to be allowed to remain? The thing about the rule is, there may be one or more active licenses for which an Ideas set could happen, and unfortunately, we outside LEGO have no way of knowing for sure unless and until a set is approved. Commenters in this thread (myself included), and the CUUSOO one before it, have long assumed various things about what they will and won't produce. Time and time again we've been proven wrong about what they won't do, while at the same time, LEGO itself has resphaped the rules as it's gotten experience with this thing and learned what sorts of user-submitted creations are feasible. Remember how back in the early days of CUUSOO, they actually let people propose new elements? That never worked out, of course, and now they no longer accept such proposals. At the same time, we've yielded such erroneous predictions as these: • they would approve a single project in any given review, and/or from a single batch, no more or fewer (they've now approved multiple projects at once on five occasions, and approved none on two; they've also had a single batch that yielded three approved projects, two in the initial review and one more after it was held over for further consideration) • they would only ever release small-to-medium sets through Ideas, or never approve something above, say, a thousand pieces or a hundred dollars (last year they released two Ideas sets back-to-back, the NASA Apollo Saturn V and the Old Fishing Store, that are both well over a thousand pieces and priced accordingly) • they likely wouldn't release a set based on The Big Bang Theory because of the show's adult content, or on Doctor Who because the BBC is a difficult licensing partner, or on Adventure Time because they declined a previous Adventure Time project in an earlier review, or on The Beatles' Yellow Submarine because of the band's history of drug use and/or Mega Bloks having made a set of it not long before, or on the Female Minifigure Set or Women of NASA projects because they'd "invite controversy" or some such malarkey and/or the projects were too small (all those sets happened, of course) • conversely, they surely would produce the Gingerbread House, or X other given project that seemed like a shoo-in (and of course didn't happen) • IIRC, I think someone suggested (correct me if I'm wrong) they'd never do anything else with a licensed themed obtained for an Ideas set, and it would remain a single-set theme forever (Minecraft blossomed into a full-blown theme, followed by Ghostbusters, and now Back to the Future is getting its fourth LEGO product) And as I've noted in the past, almost every single CUUSOO / Ideas set has represented some notable first for the program; they're constantly pushing out and doing new things they haven't done before, even while the boundaries of what's possible or feasible are becoming more defined. With regard to approving projects based on existing (publicly known) themes, note that while it hasn't happened yet, they've actually come close a couple times - on more than one occasion, they approved an Ideas project from a licensed theme that hadn't had a LEGO product yet at the time it was approved, but did by the time the Ideas set was released. When the Doctor Who project was approved in early 2015, LEGO and its partners were working on the LEGO Dimensions toys-to-life video game; we didn't learn about the game until a couple months after the announcement, or about Doctor Who's inclusion until shortly after that, but the game was obviously well under way to be ready for a September 2015 launch. They were clearly already working on the Doctor Who stuff (which included not just virtual LEGO elements in the game, but two add-on Doctor Who packs using real, physical LEGO bricks) at the time they announced they had approved the Ideas project; by the time the Doctor Who Ideas set was actually released, the first Doctor Who pack for LEGO Dimensions was already out. Remember how there had been two Doctor Who projects in that one batch -the same one that also had the Birds and The Big Bang Theory projects - and both the DW projects were held over for further consideration while those other two were approved? That was at the same time the game was in development, at a time when the property's inclusion has to have already been planned though it hadn't been announced yet. I'm guessing part of the reason for the delay in the DW Ideas announcement is because they were already doing something with the license, though we didn't yet know about it. And as noted, the Doctor Who Level Pack for the game was actually released before the Ideas set. The Doctor Who Ideas set can be considered the first Ideas set based on an existing licensed theme. And something similar happened the following year with Adventure Time. At the time that Ideas set was announced, they hadn't yet revealed the theme's inclusion in LEGO Dimensions, but it has to have been in the works already given development times. The Adventure Time packs for LEGO Dimensions had already been not only announced but actually released by the time the Ideas set for that franchise came out, just as with Doctor Who the year before. That's twice, then, that they've approved an Ideas project from a new license they were obviously already working with, and from which they already had other products on store shelves by the time the Ideas set came out. If that can happen not once but twice, then maybe it's possible some of their other preexisting licenses, ones that have already had sets even before Ideas projects get to review, could still have Ideas sets as well. Obviously it's difficult and unlikely, which is why they instituted the rule to prevent people from even submitting such sets, but it may yet still be possible. It might not be possible with every single property; maybe their licenses for, say, Star Wars and Marvel just plain flat-out prohibit them from releasing Ideas sets for those properties. But LEGO has an awful lot of different licenses in its output these days, all with their own terms.

Ah, you mean "submitting" as opposed to "posting". Gotcha. That's possible. Those submissions wouldn't get anywhere, of course. In something like fourteen months (or less), all remaining Star Wars (and Marvel and DC) projects on Ideas will stop gathering support, either by getting fully supported or by expiring. The total body of active projects will look a bit different then...

Well, it wouldn't now, since they no longer accept them; unless and until they change the rule back to how it was before, the only Star Wars projects that might ever happen are ones that were already active when that change was instituted. I do agree with everything else you've said here, as well as with BrickHat's assessment this particular project isn't likely to be The One they finally accept. Before the rule was put in place, I thought the SW projects with the best possible chances of being approved would come from stuff not in the released movies - deleted scenes and old EU / Legends material chief among them, and I was planning on submitting projects in both categories. Granted that I probably wouldn't have been any more successful than the many others who tried before me, but unfortunately my procrastination cost me the opportunity to even try. Oh, well...

I was misremembering the exactitude of the statement, but the first couple paragraphs of this blog post still strongly suggest it to me. I personally doubt it, partly because the bad press wasn't really all that bad or extensive, and partly because that particular risk is a) always present anyway with any theme that they do accept (someone can still submit a new Ninjago temple tomorrow that conflicts with something they're planning for 2019, for example), and b) the policy has a fairly negligible impact on that particular risk, while having a much more dramatic impact elsewhere. But perhaps. Thats certainly possible, though this is the first time I can remember seeing that particular hypothesis. But it seems to me that if that's the case, they could get around it by just holding an approved project from an IP until past whatever cycle is the last one for which an agreed-upon number of sets has been set. That's the strongest argument I can think of for the rationale being something else; I don't really have a counter for it, and did point out some alternate possibilities myself. Still, though, we can't be sure, and indeed the wording in the blog post I've linked does seem to leave the possibility open.

The next review results are being announced in "summer" of 2018, which encompasses a wide swath of dates from June to August, and there are only seven projects in that review, meaning that even if they space the interviews a week apart (something they don't always do), they need just seven weeks' worth of interviews before the announcement. If the announcement were coming as early as Friday, June 1st, and they wanted to space the interviews out a full week apart with the last one a week before the announcement, they'd still just need to put up the first interview... tomorrow. And again, they don't always space them out that far apart, and they also could be planning to announce the results later - possibly months later - than June 1st. I therefore wouldn't expect the interviews to start showing up for at least a couple more weeks... though you never know; maybe we'll be surprised with Interview #1 tomorrow morning. We do know from the last review (linked above) that they already approved one project from the batch months ago, and there might be more than one. Perhaps that additional decision is delaying the announcement. If you mean the cutoff date for the batch currently being filled, the deadline for the previous batch was January 8th, so I think it's somewhere around May 8th, give or take a few days.

The policy (about no longer accepting new projects based on currently active licenses) was instituted because the past several years' of experience had taught them most - but, presumably, not all - licensed themes had legal issues in their license terms that prevented them from having user-submitted projects approved as sets. While we can't be sure, it seems possible to me they allowed already-submitted projects to remain because at least one licensed theme actually did allow for the possibility in its licensing terms, even if it was unlikely, but they didn't want to confirm it because that would be publicly announcing something about the confidential terms of one of their licensing agreements. It's not out of the question that they wanted to preserve the small chance that a project based on an existing license actually could become a set. I will say that of all the many, many Star Wars projects that have Achieved Support over the years, this isn't The One I'd consider either likeliest or most deserving to be approved, but what do I know? We can be sure that many of the previous projects that got this far had some other issue (besides being based on an active license already) that kept them from being approved - way too large, minifigures-only, conflicting with a set already under development, using magnet elements discontinued for safety reasons, etc.; perhaps all of them did, and Star Wars does actually offer a slight chance for a fan to come up with an idea that LEGO can do. Or maybe some other license does, and they simply can't say it. Or perhaps they really can't do any sets based on existing licenses; that's possible, though if it's truly the case, it took them a lot longer to realize it than one would think. Whatever. By the time the policy about accepting projects based on currently-active licenses was instituted, there were already thousands of active projects gathering support, and the Ideas Team is apparently not all that large; perhaps they simply didn't have the manpower to go through and cull them all, or decided not unreasonably that it wasn't the best use of their time when the march of time would eventually remove all those existing projects anyway. I can see that. At any rate, I don't see how "dropping" (in review) the tiny handful of existing projects that would make it all the way to 10,000 would "look bad" in a way that was somehow worse than shutting down thousands of projects that were still gathering support; surely the latter would look much worse, and this avoids that.

It's conceivable it'll come back. Something similar happened with the Disney series, IIRC (though granted, they did also have the Castle coming out later, which gave TLG more of an incentive to have those Minifigures out later and longer). That said, elements from the Minifigures line often wind up showing up in the Build-a-Minifigure kiosks in the LEGO Stores. It's peculiar to think of brick suits showing up in the torso bins, but you never know...

Wait - wasn't it originally supposed to be in November of next year? I was under that impression, and if that's the case, the movie is more like 19 months away, at least (that's assuming it's not pushed back farther). Or am I in error? It certainly wouldn't be the first time...

Wasn't The Billion Brick Race originally going to be released late in the year anyway, though (like, November, say)? Whatever else happens with TBBR, I don't think its makers have any concerns about competition from anything coming out in summer.

The advent calendar (LEGO or otherwise) may be rooted in religious tradition, but it can take a totally secular expression, and of course that's how LEGO rolls with it. Lots of holidays that get LEGO treatment in official sets have both religious components (frequently but not always Christian) and secular ones, and naturally LEGO will avoid overtly religious elements, but embrace all sorts of secular traditions. I don't see anything hypocritical about that. ____________________________________ Re: future Minifigures series, I think we can safely assume each new movie in the "LCU" will have at least one corresponding Minifigures series, released in whichever of the three release slots most closely coincides with the movie's release date. The big question for me about The Billion Brick Race is when (or perhaps even if) the movie will come out; whenever it does, I think we'll get a series for it. I kind of expect The LEGO Batman Movie to be the only one that gets a second series, though, unless the series for The LEGO Movie Sequel does really well. I also think that now that they've caught up the Series numbers of the main line to the last two digits of the year (S16 in 2016, S17 in 2017, and S18 in 2018), they'll keep doing it that way - one numbered series in the "main" line plus two separate themed series (whether LCU, Harry Potter, Disney, whatever) for global distribution each year until at least 2020, so that they can celebrate both the twentieth ("main") series and the tenth anniversary simultaneously. How they'll do it, I don't know - another costume party (like the current S18), another rare "chase" figure (like either S10's Mr. Gold or S18's Classic Policeman), another series of more than 16 figures (like S10, S18, Disney, TLBM S1, TLNM, and TLBM S2), some combination thereof, and/or something else, I don't know, but I expect something. After S20 in 2020, I wouldn't necessarily expect them to stick to that; they might go back to having multiple series in the main line each year, or alternately go even longer between them (having an entire year or more with nothing but themed series outside the main line). But I don't expect numbered mainline series to go away completely indefinitely, and I do expect one per year until S20 in 2020. Other predictions? I think we'll see the brick suits again - probably yellow and/or green in future Minifigures series, and possibly those, red and/or blue, and/or other colors in promo offerings like the Iconic X series. I also expect to see the new ballon elements turn up again, possibly in regular boxed retail sets. And having said all that, I now want to acknowledge I've been wrong in my LEGO predictions numerous times. But for now, those things are what I think will happen.

Indeed! ____________________ It's going to be neat to see how people use the brick suits. I wonder whether they'll turn up elsewhere?