Blondie-Wan

Oooh, that's a new price point for Ideas sets! Bit by bit, they continue to push the program boundaries a little further.

Maybe he does, but not in the overwhelming majority of his appearances; usually he's just driving the bus. Barney is drunk nearly all the time, and AFAICT Patty and Selma smoke all the time they're not at work or asleep.

Why would they not do Otto? He's a bus driver. They do bus drivers all the time. Barney and Moe I can see them not doing because of their associations with alcohol, but Patty and Selma are just as strongly associated with tobacco and they did them, and I don't even know what objection there might be with Otto.

They should be out soon, but there isn't a specific date. Usually they seem to come about a month to six weeks after a review batch deadline (so that for that month-to-six-weeks period, there are two full review batches in review at the same time, as with right now), so if I had to guess when we'll get the next announcement, I'd say early February (so, perhaps in a couple weeks). Sometimes they run longer, though (as with the last announcement, when they waited until about halfway between review batch deadlines only to announce nothing was approved - I suspect they took a little extra time partly because it was such a large batch, but also partly because they really wanted to approve at least one set and were trying to see if they could do anything to make it happen). But it could happen at any time, perhaps even later today. It's still coming; it should be the first Ideas set released this year (unless there's either an unusually long development / production period for it, or the next set announced gets fast-tracked through production, or both). In a thread on it over in the Special Themes forum, the project creator touthomme said there is a release date for it, but he can't say what it is.

He's on the list. Have another look! :) Right, but that character ("the Man Upstairs") doesn't have a minifigure. The guideline is actors who physically perform onscreen as characters who are represented by official LEGO minifigures, not of actors who physically portray onscreen characters in movies where they also have voice-only roles as other characters who are represented by official LEGO minifigures. If it were my list, I'd include voice roles, but hey... Dufresne's list, Dufresne's criteria. Perhaps I'll do my own. In the meantime, Will Ferrel's The LEGO Movie characters are, by the stated parameters of the list, properly accounted for (i.e., not at all).

I'm not sure how it could be implemented without simply duplicating the tagging functionality. I do think the sort options could be vastly improved, though, by simply allowing us to filter out projects we've already supported (or at the very least, having a graphic appear when they're listed that shows us whether we've already supported them or not).

Also, there are a lot of stunt performers missing, including Vic Armstrong, Bob Anderson, etc. And where are Frank Oz and Kathryn Mullen?

Given the second rule here, Ahmed Best should be on the list, since there are actually a few shots sprinkled here and there throughout Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace in which a part of Jar Jar Binks appears - a closeup of a hand here, a waist-down shot there, etc. - in which what we see actually is Best in the costume he wore on the set, not the CGI figure.

Speaking as someone who got a combined total of over fifty copies of the sixteen retail sets, I'll say that's a pretty good guess. It would definitely be tough for me, but I'd make it a top priority.

I'm looking forward to them! I imagine a number of other EBers will also come up with their own; I'll probably try a few myself.

If that's how you want to (not) vote, that's your prerogative, but ideas are fundamental to the whole enterprise, to the point of being its very name. It could well be that they even chose the name "Ideas" when they changed from CUUSOO specifically to underscore that point, in response to people who thought it was about something else, or wanted it to be. Anyway, if you don't go to LEGO Ideas to vote for ideas, then where do you think we should go for that? Well, no, because the project wasn't "crap" to most people. More importantly, it was a proof-of-concept, a means of demonstrating how it might work as a set, and it did that well, both to the voters and to the Ideas team. Note that at the time the Back to the Future projects were posted, it wasn't even required that projects show a brick build at all; a project could show a photo or drawing of a real-world object, with no LEGO elements at all, and say "I propose LEGO make a set of this thing", but no project that did so ever succeeded in attracting more than a tiny number of supports. And the ideas are still specific ideas. Those Back to the Future projects weren't just random proposals to make any Back to the Future thing in general; they were specifically to produce DeLorean time machines, one at minifigure scale, the other at a much larger, UCS / Model Team-type scale. Similarly, there were other projects still for the "Jules Verne" time train, Biff's car, the McFlys' 4x4 pickup, Doc Brown's truck, etc. Each of these was a proposal to produce a specific thing, and the votes were for those specific things. That's why each was its own project. Well, it wasn't just the Exo-suit - every CUUSOO / Ideas set has had at least some changes from the original projects; it's simply a fundamental part of the process (and not just for Ideas sets, but for LEGO sets in general). Illegal connections are just the tip of the iceberg - they may want to adjust the build for greater stability, or a different parts selection that will be easier to accommodate with the rest of their production (which could make the difference in whether it's viable to produce or not).

Sure, but anything over $100 is still a heck of a lot for a LEGO set, to most people. It makes a huge difference in how many people can afford the set to begin with, to say nothing of how many will actually get it. Possibly, but I wasn't talking about the set; I was talking about the project(s), specifically with regard to why they approved the minifigure-scale version and not the UCS one. The design of the final set has no bearing on that, especially since it came afterwards. Moreover, as far as the set goes, I fully agree the hood is terrible, but it can actually be greatly improved without too much effort, and done so mostly using the parts in the set. The set also comes with a bunch of great parts for making even a fully MOC'ed version. I think it looked rather decent, if imperfect. Moreover, you're still not distinguishing between the project, the concept it represents, and the final set. Forget about the project builds entirely; just consider the underlying ideas. The project that was approved is for a minifigure-scale DeLorean time machine, with minifigures of Doc Brown and Marty McFly. What reason is there to not approve that set? And if they hadn't approved that one, then why would they instead approve a UCS version of the same vehicle - a scale that's both more expensive and less popular? And remember, that project didn't even make it to review until much later; it's not as though they were in the same review, and TLG chose the minifigure scale instead of a UCS version reviewed at the same time. They chose it much earlier. The hood is indeed terrible, but again the end result that they hadn't yet conceived had no bearing on the initial decision to approved the project as a set or not.

Nifty! Perhaps this could also go in the Licensed forum, since it's essentially an Indy MOC?

Oh, that. That's not simply a "better" version of the same thing; it's a fundamentally different project - the same subject matter, sure, but at a completely different scale. It would have been a much larger, more expensive set, and seeing how the CUUSOO / Ideas program has yet to release a set retailing for more than $60 USD, it's far from clear they would ever have approved that one whether they'd already done the minifigure-scale one or not. The other one that they did accept was hardly a lousy project, regardless of what you think of the final set (it's actually from the same people who submitted this one), and as it was in the enormously popular minifigure scale - honestly, having official minifigures of Doc and Marty was a huge part of the appeal - it made much more sense to accept it, since it would be a more affordable set that TLG might reasonably expect to sell several times as many of as they could have of this. It makes total sense for them to have approved the one they did but not this larger version. I thought you were talking about some other DeLorean project I'd never seen before, by someone else, and possibly not even having anything to do with Back to the Future.

What one was the "perfect" one?

I'm surprised this thread hasn't gotten any activity in a while, considering how the CUUSOO / Ideas journey for this excellent project turned out. When the forthcoming set is released, I'd like to see it discussed here, with these early posts for historical context. touthomme, I'm quite looking forward to your set (and congratulations again!).

Restricting projects to 800 pieces or fewer would eliminate a lot of worthwhile projects, some of which could be made; also, not all parts are created equal. A project with a thousand parts, 400 of which are 1x1 plates or tiles, is more viable than one with only 200 parts if half of them are XL motors or 48x48 baseplates. It'd be more sensible to speak of a parts budget, but then of course we don't know exactly how parts are budgeted internally. Also, parts counts are only a loose guideline anyway, since a set that results from a project is going to have a different build, and may have a wildly different number of parts from the project proposal. A 900-piece project could become a 600-piece set. And on top of all that, lots of people don't even keep track of their piece counts anyway. And just how would one enforce the limit? As for LDD, it's a vital tool for much of the Ideas userbase. Not everyone with an idea has access to as many bricks as they'd like, or in the right colors or with appropriate deco; in some cases, an essential part may never ever have been offered before in the desired color. If you hate looking at LDD projects, you don't have to vote for them, but why should other people be limited by that?

I'm not sure I understand - who is "they" in this sentence, the Ideas team or Shayd? If the latter, Shayd said (s)he'd already submitted it; it just hasn't appeared yet. If the former, why would they single out this one project? Just talking about it here isn't much in the way of promotion, but it's true it's far from a controlled scientific experiment. Still potentially interesting, though.

I've wondered about them for a while. I have over 120 followers, despite having yet to actually submit my first project. One of my followers is my wife, but I've never understood what those others are doing following me.

Louis, the alligator. I wouldn't expect him. I could see Dr. Facilier, and / or Tiana.

It's now fully a week after Shayd submitted the project, and it still hasn't been posted. Hmm.

I don't know that it's "encouraged", but it does at least seem to be tolerated. Plenty of people have them in their sigs, IIRC. We've gotten conflicting information from mods about how we can otherwise share our CUUSOO/ Ideas projects here. We were told a while back that it would actually be okay to post our own projects as long as we didn't spam them repeatedly, and if you go back to the earlier posts in this thread (or its CUUSOO predecessor), you see a lot of people posting links to their own projects, but lately you get things like this shortly after anyone does: (bolding added for emphasis) If you go look at those site guidelines it says this: I always took this to mean one could post a topic about one's project/MOC, in addition to posting about it in the CUUSOO / Ideas thread - i.e., here (where it's both relevant to the discussion and was also previously stated to be okay, IIRC) - but the mods now usually seem to disagree, and they generally (though not always) edit others' posts if they contain links to the authors' projects, and remove said links. Oh, well. :/

A bunch more projects were posted today, and I still don't see Shayd's train. Shayd, have you gotten any communication from TLG about your project yet?

The creator is trying to see how well it will do compared to his (?) other projects without the direct promotion (s)he gave them; it has nothing to do with whether we promote it or not. Of course, it also will hardly prove definitive of anything, since each project is different, and appeals for different reasons; plain old luck also plays a huge role (as we saw with the Golden Girls projects, when the last of three projects inspired by the show somehow got "discovered" by mainstream media and promoted within an inch of its life, garnering more than half the votes it needed in a single day after being around just s couple months or so, while a predecessor project that was exceedingly similar somehow didn't get nearly as much notice). But I'm sure Shayd is also well aware of all this, too, and it won't diminish how interesting the results of this experiment. Beyond that, Shayd is clearly a talented builder, so naturally some of us are keen to see the project (and, perhaps, support it) purely because of that. Certainly the train fans here are going to want to see more nice train sets in general, whether they come from Ideas or elsewhere, right? And speaking for myself, since I gather your post was partly a response specifically to my previous one, I'm also interested in not just Shayd's project, but also Ideas in general, including the submission process. As I haven't yet submitted any of my own projects yet (though I've finally begun building my first, after years of getting distracted by the rest of day-to-day life), I'm naturally curious about the actual process itself. One of the facets of the process in which I'm interested is how long it takes something to get posted, particularly given that Shayd reported submitting six days ago and the project isn't there yet (though perhaps it will be later today). I noted how many projects were posted Friday and Monday, and speculated about the Ideas team working through a backlog. That's discussion not just of Shayd's project itself specifically, but about LEGO Ideas in general. I'm curious about how long my own projects, when I finally get them done and submitted, will languish unseen on LEGO's servers before finally appearing. I'm curious about the large number of projects appearing the last couple days they were posted (was there a spike in submissions around / because of the holidays? Of because of the new LEGO Ideas campaign push?). I'm curious about how many additional projects there might be that aren't getting posted because they don't meet the various standards. I'm curious about pretty much anything and everything having to do with LEGO Ideas (and of course this is the principal thread in which we discuss such matters). None of this has anything to do with Shayd's project, but that project's journey through the submission process might offer some clues about at least one or two of these questions, since we'll be able to see how many days passed between Shayd submitting it and the Ideas team finally posting it.

And now I see there were an amazing 51 additional projects posted today (!), I believe, and Shayd's train still isn't among them. I really wonder about that possible backlog I mentioned earlier. Granted, we just had the weekend (when stuff is submitted but not posted), but still...