Blondie-Wan

Plus a head, torso, legs, and 3x4 tile with four studs, of course. ;)

I meant "stay here" not so much in the sense of "remaining open / active" as in "in Special Themes, as opposed to Licensed Themes".

This one? I don't see a contest there. Am I overlooking it somehow?

I was thinking that, except that I believe in order to fit the frame of the set, the maze layout (the part you actually drop into or lift out of the frame) has to be 24x24. The set does use a 32x32 baseplate, but some of that is taken up by the outer and inner frames, the mechanism, etc. Anyway. I'll confess I've also been hoping there'd be a Eurobricks contest for maze designs.

As others have noted, it seems not only possible but fairly likely that Disney itself refused to have any of its characters relegated to being mere accessories to other characters. If this is the case, it would preclude Sebastian, Flounder, Scuttle, Flotsam, Jetsam, Abu, the flying carpet, Pluto, or any other such characters from making it in. TLG may well not have been able to include them that way, whether it wanted to or not. They were fine with doing it with The Simpsons as well as their own non-licensed series, but each license is different. That said, it's true we don't know for sure that's the case. Maybe we'll see secondary figure accessory characters in Series 2? With previous Minifigures series, they've typically limited purchases to 16 per order. I'd expect them to either maintain that limit here, or expand it to 18 (to allow for at least a small possibility of getting all 18 at once). Whatever the limit, I do expect them to have one, and that it won't be anywhere close to 60, so that if you want to just buy a whole box, you'll probably need to go to some other retailer.

They've long had differences between the renders and the final parts for all the blind-bagged minifigures. Look at the Fisherman's fishing line and the Hula Girl's skirt from Series 3, for example. The actual shapes of any / all molded parts tend to be the same, but anything from paint / print details (especially on unusual new parts) to the finish (especially shiny vs. matte) on certain molded parts to the texture, thickness, drape and cut of soft goods are subject to noticeable variation. It's possible the renders are done before they have final production samples of the actual physical figures. As long as the latter don't actually look bad, I wouldn't worry too much about them deviating from the renders, but that's just me.

True - but some LEGO sets are Universal! :D

I've updated my signature for the benefit of newcomers to the thread. I encourage others to do the same!

Hmmm. So many posts with pix of these, reports of acquisitions, evfn full-blown reviews, and they're also on LEGO Shop at Home. Call me crazy, but I'm beginning to suspect these just might not actually be an April Fool's Day prank after all.

While I, on the other hand, would much rather have these than a whole series dedicated to sports, of all things, so... there we go. Different strokes, and all that. I don't know that it's truly a matter of "good" or "bad" so much as it is a matter of personal taste. _______________________________________ I voted for Stitch. It was a tough choice, though; I think most of these are terrific, and I fully intend to get all of them.

So is this thread going to just stay here?

Why? I kind of expect one for every LEGO-derived theatrical feature, now.

I can understand that, I really can, but I personally would be disinclined to look at it that way for a number of reasons: - LEGO has a certain reputation for quality, above and beyond what one might expect from other toy vendors. They promote that reputation and use it as a selling point. It's only fair to hold them to it. - They seem to promise a level of customer service they aren't delivering. Note that when they first started these things, way back with Minifigures Series 1 in May of 2010, they didn't have all the same customer service notices on them that they do now. They added the customer service info to the little fold-out sheets several series ago, when the first few series didn't have it. Someone who collected these from the beginning might reasonably interpret that to mean that they will now offer a level of customer service for the blind-bagged Minifigures that they originally didn't. The fact they now offer so-called "CMF" parts in Build-a-Minifigure kiosks in LEGO Stores only reinforces this perception. - Even a small amount of money is a lot to some people. There are surely some buyers out there for whom $4 is all they can justify spending on a toy, and they may very well opt to spend it on one of these figures that they just love, and have to have, and want more than any other single thing they could get with that measly $4. If such a person chooses to spend that money on one of these and it's defective, that will really suck. - The blind-bagged Minifigures have shorter production runs and availability windows than other LEGO sets. It's entirely possible someone could buy the figure(s) they want while they're available, then encounter an issue after these have disappeared from stores. Even if the total availability hasn't quite ended yet, if it's far enough along then all the copies of one particular figure might have disappeared from shelves, which sucks if that happens to be the particular figure you need a replacement for. - We invest a lot more in these than just money. Since they're blind-bagged, we practice all sorts of strategies to get the ones we want. Some of us (such as myself) stand in stores feeling packets, sometimes for hours at a time, in order to get all the ones we want; sometimes when I'm nearing the end of a particular series, I might spend an hour or more feeling packets trying to get just one single figure. Others try those bump marks on the packets. Still others buy blindly, and then trade their dupes and unwanted ones for the ones they want, like everyone who ever collected trading cards as a kid did (which is presumably the idea behind the whole so-called "CMF" line). And still others resign themselves to just buying and buying, possibly amassing large numbers of dupes they don't necessarily want, until they finally have all the ones they need. If one goes through a series of minifigures over a period of weeks or months, spending hours at a time on acquisition, possibly investing a huge amount of time to collect that one particular desired figure, and then it turns out to have a problem, that has to be pretty deeply frustrating.

I hate the idea of my LEGO touching the floor at all.

Every license is different. There are probably other movies and series that LEGO has licensed that have similar terms as their Lucasfilm Star Wars license, but it surely wouldn't apply to all of them, as not all currently have action figures being made, for example.

I have yet to experience any such horror stories myself, but the recent plethora of such poor quality reports in this thread and others has been most disheartening. :/

Except that other factors come into play. For one, we can certainly assume the fact it is a Disney castle will make it possible to sell it to a much larger prospective audience than they could ever effectively market a huge, expensive set of a generic castle to, thus amortizing the set's production costs over a larger production run than a generic castle of comparable size would get. Contrary to popular opinion, licensed sets aren't always priced more than comparably-sized non-licensed sets (or rather, since sets of both types are designed to hit specific price points, it may be better said that licensed sets of a given price don't always necessarily contain less than non-licensed sets at the same price point). Consider the Minifigures line accompanying this very set - the Disney Minifigures sport an MSRP of $3.99 each, the same price as not only the two Simpsons series but also Series 12, 13, 14, and 15 of the "regular", non-licensed line.

I'd say this thread also belongs in Licensed, anyway.

I don't think we can really know what effect the licensing will have on the price.

That's such a minute "misprint" I'm disinclined to really consider it one.

Indeed she is, though the minifigure doesn't portray her after her transformation. Also technically, the molded heads are still minifigure heads, and all minifigure heads are molded.

It wouldn't be the first time they mixed licensed minifigures in fleshtones and non-specific or LEGO-owned character minifigures in classic yellow in the same set. The 2009 LEGO Racers set 8168 Ferrari Victory features fleshtoned minifigures of real-life professional race car drivers Kimi Raikkonen and Rubens Barrichello alongside a generic yellow-"skinned" race official. And the 2014 The LEGO Movie set 70815 Super Secret Police Dropship features a fleshtoned Batman along with yellow-skinned Emmet, Johnny Thunder and Lloyd Garmadon. It might sound a little weird, but I could see them doing a set of Cinderella's Castle or some other Disney Parks institution and populating it with a mix of licensed Disney characters in the appropriate flesh tones and park visitors in traditional minifigure yellow.

Genie, Ariel, Ursula, Buzz, etc. all have essentially human forms (at least from the waist up), and therefore are treated here as human even though they're not, while all the characters with decidedly nonhuman heads (Mickey, Stitch, etc.) get specially molded heads. There's a consistent internal logic in this series which dictates which characters get regular heads and which characters get special ones. I think it's throwing some of us off because it's consistent only internally, within this one minifigure series, and not consistent either with the "rules" for what characters get regular vs. special LEGO heads in minifigure form outside this series, or with what characters get to use their human performers' actual faces vs. specially designed masks when portrayed at Disney parks, etc. I think it may have been done to emphasize that these are LEGO Minifigures of these classic Disney characters; hence they're as "LEGO-y" as possible, down to using the standard LEGO minifigure head for anyone human, or at least having a humanlike head. I think different logic would apply for some of these same characters in regular sets outside this series, as we've already seen with Buzz - I suspect any new Toy Story sets we get when the fourth movie comes out will go back to the specially-molded Buzz head element, even while probably using another new print scheme that differs from the printing on both this minifigure and the 2010 ones. Similarly, in the unlikely event they make some new minifigure-based sets from Peter Pan or Aladdin, I expect they'll go with new full head molds for Captain Hook or the Genie.

I'd count Shaggy as both Kasem and Lillard.

That model would probably cost upwards of a thousand dollars if sold as a set. I expect this Cinderella castle to be big, but not that big, and I hope other fans don't get their hopes up based on that picture.