Aanchir

I believe so, yes. No idea what it unlocks, though.

CHI Sir Fangar and CHI Fluminox commercial:

Huh, I must have missed that. Guess I'll have to really start paying attention to shop.LEGO.com offers again!

Really? I thought I had heard that they had. Guess I was mistaken.

CHI Vardy has a nice face, a unique color scheme, and wings that look better than expected. I think the weapon looks better as a two-handed weapon like you see on the box than as two separate weapons like in most of your photos. I actually really like the look of Vardy's bony limbs, as they give him that skeletal, zombie-like look that characterizes many of this year's sets, not to mention that they give him a really wiry physique that sets him apart from the other more muscular "bad guys". Very appropriate for a bird. I feel like the neck looks best when bent in an N-shape like on the box — first joint bent forward, second joint bent upward. Your "Pose 2" photo is the only one that presents him this way. Overall, this fellow's not really on my wanted list, but he's still a pretty nice design in his own right.

The new CHI Cragger has a brilliant design and color scheme. I'd even go so far as to say this model improves on its predecessor, making the torso slightly shorter but armoring it better and doing away with the bony lower limbs that characterized it. The colors are well-organized — while the Dark Red shells do not match any other parts of the build, they do not look out of place in my opinion, and help the model to resemble Cragger's new costume from the System playsets a bit better. One correction — Cragger never had Sand Green in his color scheme. He had Olive Green, a newer color introduced in the Dino theme in 2012. The loss of it in this set does not bother me a great deal, but it would be interesting to see what the model would look like if you swapped the lower limb beams and hands for the ones in last year's CHI Cragger. The recolored head piece is great, though it's a shame the scar on his left eye is not more noticeable. It's peculiar that only one arm has spikes on it, as it's one of the only parts of the build that is not symmetrical. At the same time, I suppose part of the goal might have been to balance out the axe in the other hand. I quite like that axe design! Overall, this is probably my favorite of the "good guy" designs, though CHI Laval is a close contender as well. I don't care much for CHI Fluminox or CHI Panthar, and if I had to pick just two characters to get, these two returning characters might easily be the sets I go for. I'd love to design new versions of other returning characters, like Worriz and Razar, though I likely wouldn't go so far as repainting their faces with blue eyes to show that they're now on the side of good.

Good review. I like the beefiness of the shoulders, but I am bothered by the fact that the chest is not appropriately beefed up to match. It looks a bit unnatural to have a two-module gap between his inner arm and the sides of his torso. The head, however, looks great, as do his zombified "ice arm" and "ice leg". Very tasteful asymmetry there. And his back is armored quite well! I don't know whether the white upper arms help the set at all. Honestly, I think it would have been much better if the upper arms instead used the same Reddish Brown shells as his left leg, and perhaps a darker color of fur detail piece — even the black ones used by CHI Panthar. That way we would have gotten more than one of those delicious Reddish Brown shells. Swapping the Titanium Metallic shell from his lower right arm with a Reddish Brown one could also be nice. The hammer is beautifully designed, which is great since hammers are not a common weapon in constraction sets, nor an easy one to design. The use of System buckets is brilliant and puts my unwieldy hammer design from Kit Martello to shame in terms of economy of design. A hammer is also a great weapon for an asymmetrical character design like this. But I have to agree that the choice of a pin without added friction ridges doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Good review. This figure is nice but like CHI Sir Fangar it has some drawbacks. In particular, I feel like the legs are awkward and gangly. They could have easily been one module shorter. I don't have a problem with the color of the friction joints or the number of them in this set, but it frustrates me that the lower legs and ankles seem so bony. It's yet another reminder of how great it would be if there were a foot with the ankle placed one module lower, so that it could be used with a friction joint without inflating the height of the ankle to a ridiculous degree. Perhaps the legs would look better if the shells on the lower legs were larger. Six module shells might have helped hide the ankle and add more color at the same time. The torso build is really nice, though, even if it leaves the lowest one module of the torso without armor. The way the wings stick off the back, not so much. I agree that it compounds the awkwardness of the way they fold up and down. The back is also not very well armored for its size. I do prefer the way the wings look when assembled to the look of the individual part, though. The individual wing segment's connection points seem limiting, and I am not a huge fan of its texture. The weapon looks quite nice. I do not mind the yellow trigger one bit. It's a little bit skeletal-looking compared to Laval's sword or Cragger's axes, but I still think it works all right. The figure's head is also quite elegant! Love those blue eyes and that fiery crown of feathers.

Good review. I'm not totally fond of the way his shoulders look from the front or back. A 3/4 view looks great, but from the front or back it feels like maybe the 9x9 torso hurts him rather than helping him. Unlike the spherical or square shell detail pieces, these concave curved ones do little to mask the extra width. I wonder if he'd have looked better with a 9x7 torso. But on the whole, I love that the set looks well-balanced, much like last year's version. His colors are well-distributed and the new sword is cleverly built. You're right that the feet look much more lion-like than the hero feet from the previous CHI Laval. As far as parts are concerned, I like the new shell detail pieces a lot. They have an awesome, unique shape, and this set uses them fairly well besides the issue I mentioned with the width of the shoulders. I wonder what new building opportunities they might open up, especially if they show up in more colors. I do not do a lot of building in gold, but owning a set with this many useful gold pieces could definitely change that. I do not really like the new torso shell, though — while it's nifty from an aesthetic standpoint, the connection points are rather pitiful and the function strikes me as rather pointless. There's no sense using the torso without a CHI orb. It just leaves a gaping hole in the chest and makes no story sense, since these characters represent the CHI-enhanced versions of the characters. So why use the ability to pop it out of the torso as a selling point? I'd have much preferred a new CHI orb piece that works similarly to a Breakout-style Hero Core. It wouldn't be spherical, but I feel like it and the torso shell alike would be much more valuable as building elements. You're right that I prefer last year's weapon pieces to these new ones, but not just because of the more diverse colors. I feel like their designs were not quite so ornate and specialized, and as a result they could be used just as easily in a more sci-fi mechanical universe like BIONICLE or Hero Factory as in a more organic fantasy universe like Legends of Chima. The shape and the second connection point DO make this more versatile in terms of shape, though — I love how all four of the sets that use it make it into a different type of weapon. The piece count of this set makes it seem a little less desirable than the other sets, but then again, it actually has MORE pieces than the last CHI Laval if you discount the claws (which use twice as many parts in last year's set as in this year's). I think this set is much more elegant than CHI Panthar, and while a lot more generic in design than CHI Panthar or CHI Cragger, it still looks quite stylish in its own right. I'm somewhat hoping to add this set to my collection, but I don't know if I'd go out of my way to get it, especially since it's not available in retail on this side of the Atlantic. Maybe The Brick Show will be selling a review copy of it at a deep discount at Brickfair Virginia — my brother and I got CHI Worriz and CHI Razar for less than half price that way, and their parts have seen lots of use in my MOCs!

While I think the way this figure's shoulders are extended is clever, I am not terribly fond of how it is integrated with the rest of the build. Having the shoulders stick out so far from the torso just looks weird when the chest is the same width as on any of the other figures. Furno XL, Stormer XL, and CHI Gorzan had the chest appropriately beefed up to match the rest of the design, giving their overall physiques more of a Y or V shape than an awkward T shape. The cape and ribs help a bit — Mungus, unfortunately, doesn't have either, so his shoulders end up looking quite strange. Looking at the figure from side view, the torso looks too thin for my tastes, and the cape hanging limp between the torso and not-quite-wings does not help matters one bit. Again, Stormer XL, Furno XL, and CHI Gorzan all had beefier torsos, with the shoulders set back a bit more from the hips and at least a little bit of back armor. If somehow the cape could be folded OVER the not-quite-wings, then it would not only make his silhouette more imposing from the side, but it would also make the unfolding function look that much more dramatic. The staff is nice, if rather basic. The head is nice and fearsome. But on the whole, this doesn't end up looking like a character I'd really want to pay $20 for.

You have a very good point about how 2001-2003 handled it. I personally don't think it was handled nearly so well in 2004. The Morbuzakh struck me as a boring villain and it was incredibly frustrating that there was no easy way to act out or build the Toa's battles with the Morbuzakh — it was not an enemy designed to be built with LEGO, nor even an enemy with clear motivations. So while it might have been effective from a storytelling perspective, with the first half of 2004 being sort of a "detective story", it was irritating as far as the toys were concerned. Of course, in 2004 and 2005, the canister set release patterns were reversed in Europe, with the Vahki preceding the Toa Metru and the Visorak preceding the Toa Hordika. And while the former didn't mesh with the story media for the year, in which the Vahki were not a particularly visible threat until the second half of the year, the latter worked slightly better since the small sets could be used as "good guys" to face off against the canister set "bad guys". This pattern was utilized worldwide in 2006 and 2007, and also reflected in the storyline with the first book each year focusing on the Matoran's battles against the villains. It was still a bit frustrating in terms of storytelling, though, as the Matoran in 2006 and 2007 faded into the background by the time the year came to a close, making their importance to the story year as a whole a lot more tenuous. Who knows what Kazi, Dalu, and the others were up to once the Toa Inika and Piraka started descending towards the Mask of Life? Their story petered out shortly after the "real" heroes entered the scene and gave the villains a newer, more equal foe to fight — which ran directly counter to the message the first book tried to establish that "you don't have to be a Toa to be a hero." The Matoran of 2008 were only really relevant to the first half of the year as well, but it helped that the Phantoka and Mistika arcs overlapped chronologically. On that note, one other thing I like about post-2011 Hero Factory is that characters are no longer divided up into different sizes according to their story role. It's probably not fair to compare this to BIONICLE, since "small sets" in Hero Factory are not as impulse-priced as many "small sets" in BIONICLE were. But compared to earlier Hero Factory arcs, I'm quite happy that the size (and by extension, price) of a set no longer relates so strictly to a character's moral alignment or their importance in the story. Villain sets and hero sets alike can be small, medium, or large. And the only difference between small and medium hero characters, besides a negligible height difference, tends to be the amount of armor and equipment they carry. Story-wise, the heroes' importance to the current story arc has little to do with the size of the set they come in. Villains, not so much — the largest villains still are presented as posing the most considerable threat, though there is still little story difference between the small and medium-sized villains.

I can't imagine why that would change, considering that the finalized images of the set still have them.

Yeah, I spotted that as well. A real surprise to me that it and the Battle for Ninjago City are not being released simultaneously, since I thought they were part of the same wave.

Personally, I don't think separating the heroes and villains into separate waves would be worth it. I quite liked the decision to put heroes and villains in the same wave back in 2008, and really it no longer makes any sense to me to keep them separate. Why put the central conflict on hold for half a year so you can introduce the factions one at a time, when you could get things up and running right away and still keep things going for a full year? After all, the Phantoka and Mistika demonstrated quite well that releasing heroes and villains simultaneously has nothing to do with the issue the Hero Factory story is facing right now. Personally, what frustrates me about the Hero Factory story's current release pattern is that there is no supplementary story media to help fill the gaps. I had no problem with the brevity of the TV episodes during the Breakout or Brain Attack series when we had Greg Farshtey's chapter books to look forward to during the downtime between episodes. But now even the online story content (like info on characters and weapons) is fairly sparse compared to during those series.

In any case, it's still a roughly three year development time, which is pretty reasonable for a theatrical film. If it were a direct-to-DVD movie it would make more sense for development to just take a year or a year and a half — but the quality would be more on par with Clutch Powers or the BIONICLE films than with The LEGO Movie. A longer development time should result in a more well-polished (and hopefully more well-received) movie than previous direct-to-DVD fare.

Volume 2, Issue 6 is the exact source I was citing, yes, and that's the issue I linked to. The Classic Space interview can be found on pages 38–43. You should be able to purchase a digital copy directly from the site I linked you to (scroll down to where it says "Which Format?" and select "DIGITAL only", then click "add to cart"). But it probably does require a card rather than a bank transfer when you go to check out.

I wasn't sure if it was available for free online. It turns out that there is a free "preview edition" of Brickjournal Volume 2, Issue 6 here, but it only includes the first two pages of the interview (pages 19 and 20 of the preview, pages 38 and 39 of the full version). You can purchase the full version digitally for just $4, which I would highly recommend to any Space fans — even just the six-page "classic space" interview and the eight pages of Space Police III behind-the-scenes interviews are enough to make it well worth the price!

We already have confirmation of new Ninjago episodes in 2015 from a Cartoon Network press release, and I expect there will be a full lineup of sets to accompany them. I don't know why anyone was expecting a Ninjago movie to come any sooner than 2016. Theatrical films can't be churned out as quickly as direct-to-DVD films or TV specials. The LEGO Movie's development began in 2008! I don't think it's just the unexpected demographics that have driven Ninjago's success (though they are a factor — Dan and Kevin Hageman suggested in an interview that around 30% of the show's viewership is female, something I doubt the LEGO Group would have anticipated given their extremely boy-oriented marketing approach for the theme). As I understand it, Ninjago has been more successful than Chima even with its target demographic of 6– to 14-year-old boys. But at the same time, Ninjago was the LEGO Group's single most successful launch for a product line. Like, ever. Chima is definitely not a failure for falling short of that, and it already seems as though it will be successful enough to earn a third year of sets — bringing it to what is generally considered a fairly healthy lifespan for a single LEGO theme.

No, we already have received confirmation of new TV episodes in 2015 from a Cartoon Network press release. Honestly, I never really expected the Ninjago movie to be coming out in 2015. It was just greenlit this year, and there's no way we'd get a high-quality theatrical movie with less than two years development time. The LEGO Movie was in development for around six years! Obviously, the development of The LEGO Movie and the Ninjago TV series helped lay some groundwork that future LEGO movies can build on, hence why neither this nor the sequel to The LEGO Movie will take nearly as long to develop, but a 2015 release date seemed overly optimistic from the get-go.

Keep in mind that in the earlier days of the Russian space program, cosmonauts wore orange spacesuits, and red was the closest color to that which LEGO was using for minifigures at the time. This could possibly have inspired the decision to use red to represent the "bad" spacemen. In any case, you're right that the LEGO Group wasn't requiring kids to play with the figures any particular way, but I think Jens Nygaard Knudsen is probably the most authoritative subject on how the designers themselves envisioned the sets and characters. As Jens Nygaard Knudsen states in the same interview (this time specifically regarding the black classic spacemen, who were imagined as warriors), "...we were not allowed to make a big deal of this. We were not allowed to make war." This is the reason why no explicit conflict appears on packaging or in marketing materials for the Classic Space sets. Considering that a lot of the "antennas" and "sensor arrays" in classic space sets were meant by the designers to represent guns, I don't think nearly as much has changed as people think (except, perhaps, that LEGO designers are now much more honest about it). From the same Brickjournal issue 6 interview I mentioned in this post: Of course, if you want you can do the same thing he and the other designers did in the 70s and 80s and pretend that all those gun-looking things are actually futuristic antennas and sensor arrays... even if many of the weapons more obviously resemble guns and missiles today, you are still free to imagine them however you like.

I've really been getting into 4everfreebrony's music lately. This recent song became a fast favorite of mine:

When I was a kid, I didn't have any problem with stickers, but I always trusted my dad to put them on for many years because I knew he could do it best. I was thrilled when I was finally old enough to put on stickers myself. To me, it was just another part of the building process, and I still quite like a good sticker sheet today. What I did dislike, which were prevalent in my childhood 90s but have now practically disappeared, were STAMPs (Stickers Across Multiple Pieces). I typically let my dad separate those with a craft knife so that the parts could be disassembled without damaging the stickers. I also have other sticker-related pet peeves. In my opinion, stickers should generally line up with the sides of a piece so they're easy to apply, and I prefer white-backed stickers rather than clear-backed stickers any time unless the sticker is being applied to a transparent, metallic, or blended piece where the base color can't be matched with ink alone. It bothers me that Benny's Spaceship violates both of those rules with the stickers on the tail fins. I know some AFOLs prefer clear-backed stickers because they can use them on whatever part they like without worrying about the base color matching, but since I usually use stickers on the parts they are intended for, this does me no favors — and the disadvantages of clear-backed stickers are plentiful. Another reason some reviewers prefer clear-backed stickers is that the clear plastic film is allegedly more resilient than the paper used for white-backed stickers, but I have not had any such experience with my white-backed stickers. I have a strong suspicion that these concerns might only apply to much older sets than the ones in my collection. The last of my pet peeves is that a sticker should not be applied to a part that it can't remain attached to effectively. This mostly applies to stickers on 1x1 or 2x2 cylinders. Thankfully I haven't had any problems with this in recent sets.

It looks like it says "Green Ninja", but it might just be preliminary since the cover isn't finalized. If it IS the same in the finalized version, then we can expect another new Lloyd minifigure. In any case, this year has had a good lineup of figs: Kai Zane 1 (exposed robot parts/70724) Zane 2 (concealed robot parts/70726) Zane 3 (silver armor/70728) Cole Jay Lloyd 1 (gold-patterned robes/70722 and 70725) Lloyd 2 (silver armor/70728) Evil Wu Sensei Garmadon Nya (samurai armor) Cyrus Borg Pixal General Cryptor Nindroid Soldier Nindroid Drone Min-Droid Overlord Visual Dictionary exclusive fig That's nineteen minifigures — just one fig short of what Ninjago had in its first year! Naturally, I didn't count figs that just varied in terms of torso accessories or headgear, like the Jay minifigure from 70728 or the Nindroid Drone from 70727. I'll be disappointed if we don't get a plainclothes version of Nya though. It's been far too long since we've had one, and her new costume from the show is too awesome not to have as a fig — unlike many of the show-exclusive outfits like her party dress which are just minor variations on minifigure parts from other themes.

Actually, a similar tile appears in 70813 Rescue Reinforcements. Assuming this one performs the same function, they are codes to unlock bonus content in The LEGO Movie video game. Sometimes you want to blur out these kinds of unique codes that come in sets, because depending on what they're used for they might expire after one use. That's the case with the codes from the back of the Hero Cores from 2012–2013 Hero Factory sets, which were used in the "Breakout" and "Brain Attack" online games. I don't know if that's the case here — probably not, since that kind of functionality would require an online connection — but be wary about this in future reviews at least until you find out what the codes are supposed to be used for. Good review in general. One correction — Emmet's Piece of Resistance is colored Flat Silver (by Bricklink's terminology) or 315 Silver Metallic (by the LEGO Group's terminology). The Bricklink name Pearl Dark Grey describes considerably darker colors like 148 Dark Grey Metallic or 316 Titanium Metallic, both of which the BIONICLE fan community often calls "gunmetal". This is an amazing set that's definitely on my family's wish list. So much to love!

Oh yes. It was awesome! Truly an outstanding capstone to this season's ongoing story arc. It's good to see that there hasn't been too much disgruntlement over it in the brony community, either. Some people have some minor quibbles, naturally, but generally folks seem to agree that it told a fantastic story.