Aanchir

There's a difference between aiming products at demographics other than the core audience and creating products that parents likely wouldn't consider appropriate for the core audience at all. The modular buildings may not be that suitable for a younger builder, but no reasonable parent's going to become outraged by seeing the trusted LEGO brand name on a product like those. The same isn't true of a licensed product based on an R-rated movie. Just look back a few years to see how nervous TLG was about releasing sets based on the PG-13-rated Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Evidently TLG's concerns didn't end up amounting to much, since the Harry Potter theme did come back with a product range including some scenes inspired by that movie. But it's easy to see that TLG has reasons to be concerned about how their licenses reflect on their company image. Another thing to consider is that Cuusoo sets tend to be niche products. 10,000 people voting on a Cuusoo proposal is somewhat significant, but as can be seen these days it doesn't take too much for a project to reach that threshold. And if those products are mass-manufactured they need to be marketed effectively if they're going to get the attention of people-- including AFOLs and non-AFOLs-- who will buy them. Taking an "adult-oriented" product out of the catalogs could have a huge negative impact on sales. AFOLs are already a fairly small demographic compared to the "core audience" TLG mentioned, and the fewer channels you have through which to promote the product, the less chance you have of gaining potential buyers' attention. Cuusoo is still perfectly viable for products that appeal mainly to AFOLs or other non-core demographics. But that doesn't mean that if a product is inappropriate for kids to begin with, whether it has to do with the products contents or the license it is connected with, it will get a free pass just because it got the requisite number of votes. Making rules to prevent proposals that won't pass the jury in the first place could indeed be helpful, but that sort of thing is part of the reason why Cuusoo is still in beta: they have not yet worked out all the kinks needed to ensure its effectiveness. They don't want to create extremely restrictive rules to begin with and risk discouraging entries that might fall into a grey area. Prohibiting military themes, for instance, might inspire people not to create proposals that include any military vehicles, even if those have appeared in sets before in the Indiana Jones theme. So they start with very few rules, only excluding the most blatantly unacceptable things like sexual themes. From there they watch closely to see what people propose and try to refine the rules with less sweeping adjustments that don't snuff out creativity. ----- Anyway, Cuusoo's been seeing projects reach 10,000 supporters a lot more quickly lately. Do you think they might raise the consideration threshold higher at any point now that they have more web traffic?

That brown color is wrong. Those brown parts should be 25 Earth Orange (classic brown).

Here are some other good pics of the Ninjago prototypes on display at AFOLcon: So many prototype Storm Fighters and snowmobiles. I still think that red version of the Storm Fighter is the worst of the bunch, though it gets some credit for likely being the version that first implemented the flaring wings. Some of the versions of Lasha's Bite Cycle are pretty weird, not that I'm too fond of the final version of that one.

I dunno; I think the muzzle is more wolfish than bearish.

This is my entry for BZPower's General Art Contest #18: Battlescapes. The theme was to draw any sort of battle or conflict involving LEGO or BIONICLE characters. I may have stretched that definition a bit. Click for fullsize: Topic deviantART page

Someone in the LEGO Friends topic linked to an article with some small-but-finalized images of summer LEGO sets, including Hero Factory sets. Nex (towards the bottom of the image) All the rest Can't wait until we have better pics of Speeda Demon's box art. It looks amazing.

I much prefer the finalized jet actually... that prototype looks awfully cluttered with all those high-detail BIONICLE and Hero Factory parts squished together in close proximity. Additionally, I wouldn't call that one's nose "sleek"-- it still has a regular slope brick at the very front, and the curve bricks lead to a lumpy, inconsistent look. Not to mention how the fuselage abruptly becomes wider towards the front of the windscreen. Sure, that prototype could have been streamlined into a simpler, more effective design rather than the cluttered-looking mess on display in that picture. And in my opinion, that's exactly what it did. It's one of the reasons I don't like romanticizing prototype sets. It's OK to wish the set design had gone in a different direction starting from the prototype model, but at that point in design the model is often worse than the final set in as many or more ways than it is better.

I think the "not recognizable as LEGO" thing was probably intentional, just looking at when the theme was introduced. Again, I think Galidor was in many ways trying to take the ways BIONICLE had been different than regular LEGO and push them to their absolute limit in hopes that the result would mirror or even outdo BIONICLE's early success. As I've often noted when comparing BIONICLE to Hero Factory, BIONICLE was fairly unique among LEGO themes in that it did try to distance itself from the LEGO brand. BIONICLE packaging usually had the LEGO logo at the bottom of the package, either centered or off to the side, with the BIONICLE logo much larger and more conspicuous. There are very few other themes that do that-- in most cases, TLG's brand manual dictates that the LEGO logo should always appear directly beside the theme logo. Likewise, when used in text, TLG insists that most themes be accompanied by the word LEGO® (i.e. LEGO® DUPLO®, LEGO® MINDSTORMS®, LEGO® Hero Factory, LEGO® Technic. Even as late as 2010, BIONICLE followed different rules than other themes-- in text, it's just BIONICLE®. Allegedly BIONICLE has its own separate style guide from the regular LEGO brand manual, though I haven't found any copies of this online. In many ways it's easy to understand the justification for this. In the late 90s and early 2000s, the LEGO Group was suffering financially. It's easy to see how they might feel the LEGO brand was a liability rather than an asset for some themes, especially ones like BIONICLE that were very, very different than the other products they were selling. They might also have been concerned that the LEGO branding would make the products feel like "little kids' toys" and thus the products and story would fail to appeal to the preteen and young teenage demographics they were targeting. And of course it can't be ignored that since BIONICLE was one of the first LEGO action figure themes, the LEGO Group may have wanted it to compete more with other (non-buildable) action figures, so they didn't want to connect it too closely with a brand name people associated with building blocks and not quality action figures. The same could apply for Galidor. Chances are that besides being a building toy with compatible connection points, it was not meant to be recognizable as a LEGO product range. And I imagine that even more so than BIONICLE it was intended to compete with other action figures and TV shows, not with other building toys. It's understandable, then, that they would sacrifice the brand recognition that they sought with their other themes for high-detail, lifelike creature parts. Overall I think they did an OK job with this-- the Galidor figures certainly had higher quality than many other action figures on the market, with several points of articulation, high-quality materials and printing, and of course interchangeable parts. Obviously this experiment failed. The Galidor TV show performed poorly, at least in the critical United States market. The toys also did poorly, and I think one of the main reasons for this isn't that they were too different from LEGO products but rather that they were too similar in one key respect: price. If the theme was intended to compete with non-buildable action figures, then it's understandable that people wouldn't want to pay LEGO prices for them, even if they were higher quality than some action figures on store shelves. One of the main reasons people pay high prices for LEGO products is that they associate the LEGO brand identity with quality building toys. By distancing the theme from this brand identity, TLG lost their usual justification for those prices, and the Galidor figures could easily be overlooked in favor of cheaper Transformers, Power Rangers, or superhero action figures which had their own, less expensive gimmicks. Fast-forward two years and it becomes clear TLG learned from this mistake. The Knights' Kingdom theme, their next attempt at an action figure theme, used similar joints to Galidor but didn't for a minute try to hide that it was a LEGO product. Studs were evident on most of the sets. Faces were yellow. The LEGO branding once again took precedent over the theme branding. And the action figure sets were balanced out by basic LEGO playsets using standard minifigures. Even without a TV show or a complex story to promote it, Knights' Kingdom lasted nearly two years longer than Galidor. More recently, Ninjago has had an extremely successful TV show, despite its traditional minifigure-based character designs and building toys. And this is in part because it was developed in a different climate: the LEGO Group has been experiencing great success with their traditional products in recent years, and there is now greater precedent for heavily story-driven LEGO themes. People associate the LEGO brand not only with quality building toys, but also with quality media like the LEGO Star Wars video games. And of course TLG now has ten more years of precedent for which ideas are successful and which-- like Galidor-- are not.

Galidor was IMO an example of LEGO taking BIONICLE's early success a bit too far. They apparently got the idea that since people loved story-driven action figure sets, they would love something that took said premise a bit more literally with a TV show and traditional-looking "action figures". It didn't work out too well among AFOLs, and apparently not among kids either-- though I'm sure the high price of the sets and the poor promotion of the television show played more of a role in its failure than any faults in the story or products themselves. BIONICLE definitely wins just by virtue of having been around long enough to really flesh out its universe, establish a personal connection between fans and the characters, and bring its main story to a much-awaited conclusion. Even if aspects of it got weaker as time went on, it held strong and managed to leave a lasting impression on a great number of fans. Galidor's joints are better in one major respect: being able to support more weight than a BIONICLE ball joint by itself. This is why that basic style of click-joint lives on today in a more System-compatible form. I don't think they were a major benefit to the Galidor products themselves since with the theme's more lifelike action figures, the constant clicking of posing the sets differently really took away from the role-play aspect for me.

That's up to TLG and (depending on whether the contract needs to be renewed) Disney. I imagine it won't end permanently for a while, but I also think it's reasonable that non-licensed Pirates could come back in between films if TLG is confident that it will be successful.

What have we here...? Hello, beautiful! I'll definitely be saving up for this one. Released in late June, too. That means they'll certainly have it at the LEGO store when Brickfair rolls around. They're calling this season one, though, which messes with my head. What does that make the 2011 episodes? The pilot, I guess, but since Wil Film and Bjarne Hansen have been calling the latest season Season 2 it messes with my personal numbering system more than a bit.

...All of which are complaints I'm sure they're well-aware of by now. I think this survey could actually be extremely useful to them since it asks a variety of questions they haven't asked before. I'm curious what they intend to do with the information. Seems like with some of the questions they could be hoping to improve their online communities like Rebrick and the LEGO Message Boards. And those could definitely be considered "important matters", as from my experience the LEGO Message Boards are a wasteland of non-constructive conversation and Rebrick does not offer nearly as meaningful an experience as other AFOL communities. It should also be considered that in previous surveys, the questions about "issues that bothered you about LEGO products" tended to involve choosing from a list of responses created by other AFOLs, or creating your own responses which would then show up for other AFOLs. Perhaps one reason those types of questions have been eliminated is that either they were unreliable in getting meaningful results (after all, not all AFOL responses would show up on everyone's version of the survey, and there might be six or seven different ways of phrasing the same problem), or that they would be difficult to compile responses from now that the survey is being done in so many languages. In general, though, these surveys exist to get TLG useful information, not just to let AFOLs blow off steam. There are several reasons why AFOL criticisms like those you mention might not be useful to them-- either because they can't afford to go with other options, or they've found the supposed "problems" don't really impact sales significantly, or they've already taken steps to correct the problems (as in the case of oversized packaging and certain quality-related complaints). TLG asks the questions that they feel are important, which in this case largely revolve around the personal background and commmunity involvement of AFOLs-- and whatever they plan to do with the information, I appreciate that they care about these things that set AFOLs apart from their average fans rather than just about general customer complaints.

So when you say "just a prototype", does that mean one that will become an actual set, or a rejected prototype? Looks almost like the "moving fortress" from Rise of the Great Devourer, but not quite. Guess that makes it unlikely that that particular vehicle will be a set, unless this set will be based on that vehicle or vice-versa. Also look at the coal car! IT'S FULL OF SNAKES!

OK, the "use meteors to create conflict" thing was a pretty clever idea in the Green Lantern comic, but now it's getting more than a little bit ridiculous.

I like the Nolan movies myself. They're far different than classic Batman, but one of the things I love most about Batman is that he's such an iconic character that anyone can really offer up their re-interpretations of the franchise. There have certainly been countless comics that diverge from the Batman canon-- just see here. I always enjoy seeing other people put their "spin" on established characters as long as the actual storytelling is still enjoyable. Sure, it's great when an adaptation is faithful to its source material, but I don't consider that the only measure by which adaptations can be judged. I have never seen Batman Begins, but I loved The Dark Knight and am hoping that this third installment in Nolan's trilogy won't lose that film's unique charm.

Yeah, I get that. TLG doesn't exactly have a reputation for prompt web updates, as I'm sure any BIONICLE fan knows! Still, I'm curious if the new Hero Creator will have any real merit for AFOLs or if it'll just be a watered-down LEGO Digital Designer. I guess we can expect it to be compatible with Hero Factory online games (including maybe Breakout?) but I'm hoping there's more to it than that.

So when are we getting the new online Hero Builder? The Hero Recon Team website said it would come in April, but clearly it hasn't, and furthermore Hero Recon updates have been sluggish (it's still telling us when we'll last be able to order weeks after that date has passed).

I'd think you'd want to customize the model more heavily to look as much like Samus as possible before putting it on Cuusoo. Currently there's a passing resemblance, but I don't think there's enough of one that Metroid fans in general would feel enthusiastic about having it as a real product. Still, it's a neat concept with a cool color scheme.

Pythor had black hands in the show, unless there's a scene where his hands are colored differently than usual (all the top Google Image results for Pythor P. Chumsworth show black hands). However, it is a shame that his purple arms, which he had in both the show and the version of the fig on display at Toy Fair, didn't make it to the final product. Not that I think purple arms would be better-looking or more useful for me, but it would have been nice to have consistency between the show and the physical product wherever possible.

My main point regarding the Chinese parts is that the Build-A-Mini stations are the best way to get them-- you can see the quality (or lack thereof) of the parts before you buy them, unlike most sets where you will only be able to see quality problems when you open the packaging. I didn't mean for it to get into a debate of whether they are/aren't good quality, but it's be a great privilege to get to see any parts with a reputation for inconsistency before you buy them. But if you want to avoid Chinese parts in general so as not to encourage TLG to keep using them, then I guess you wouldn't want to buy them anywhere including a Build-A-Mini station. One problem I've always had with Build-A-Mini is that I can never seem to find interesting minifigure accessories there. Last time I bought from one, I ended up getting a reddish brown push broom, a dark stone grey cutlass, and a pair of medium stone grey handcuffs. I would love to see chrome swords, laptops, and sausages. It's been a while since I've been to a LEGO store so perhaps I ought to make a trip out to one at some point soon and see if the selection at my nearest store has improved.

It is quite possible that this will be a one-wave theme, but at the same time I'm not sure "running out of ideas" would be too great an issue. Just look how many years Scooby-Doo has been able to keep producing new shows. Now, obviously some of the Scooby-Doo villains aren't "iconic" enough to fit well in a theme like this, with many just being ghosts with some specific theme. But there are a few ideas I can come up with: A ghost knight A witch A witch doctor A robot (could possibly be packaged with a return of the first wave's Mad Scientist) Bigfoot/the Abominable Snowman A pirate ghost A blob (might be difficult) A sea monster (sea serpent, maybe?) A headless horseman A gargoyle So I think there's a lot of directions this theme could go if it were to continue. It doesn't have to rely on obscure cryptids or mythological entities to maintain diversity in its "monsters".

I don't think anyone has a network of friends big enough to ensure them success on Cuusoo. IMO, one thing the high threshold for consideration does is make sure people CAN'T just rely on their friends for this kind of thing. Plus, having to rely on people outside the traditional AFOL community is a good thing as far as I'm concerned. One of the things Cuusoo accomplishes is drawing attention to the LEGO community from outside. People who might not have been too interested in TLG's current offerings might feel a lot more interested in a product for which they felt a sense of personal involvement. Especially if it is based on a genre or specific license that they feel passionately about, such as licensed proposals like the BttF DeLorean or genre-specific proposals like the Space Marines.

Well the release date stated for the next wave of spinners and booster packs at Toy Fair was June 2012, and just going by precedent it makes sense that they might start showing up two to five weeks in advance. It's getting to be that time where we have to start keeping our eyes peeled for new sets!

One reason I expect most of Stormer XL's decoration to be stickered in the final product, besides the quality of the stickers at Toy Fair looking finalized, is that most of his decorated parts are ones that have never been printed before (the only exception being his 5M upper leg shells). Think about it-- in most cases, printing a LEGO part requires a machine specialized to print a part that shape. This is why slope pieces can sometimes have the inclined portion printed, but the flat sides have always been stickered. While TLG could conceivably introduce machines to print 2.0 Hero torso shells or the Hulk's new torso piece, a sticker sheet seems like it would be the more efficient option unless TLG intends to print all of these parts much more often in the future.

I don't see that as a problem. They're all on smooth, flat areas where they should be easy to apply and should have no problems staying attached. But yes, from the looks of things all his decorations will be stickers, unless that feature at Toy Fair was preliminary.