Aanchir

Ironically, in your photos the horns seem to fit better on the old Darth Maul head than the new one (the red printing matches up better between the crown piece and the face) In general, it seems like most of the new Darth Maul's problems could be solved if the face were wider. As it is, it seems like it was designed to match the actor without being retooled to fit the bulky, cylindrical shape inherent to LEGO minifigure heads. The end result captures Darth Maul's gaunt facial structure well, but it looks artificial, almost as though the minifigure is wearing a paper Halloween mask. I do like how great the new Darth Maul looks when wearing a hood (can't remember how the old face looked in a hood), as well as his simpler eyes. The old one's eyes with their yellow gradient were awfully complex! I do wish there were some way of making his eyes look more like a modern minifigure's, though-- circular with a sparkle on top. I can't think of any way to do it that would truly capture his creepy, yellow-eyed stare, though. The old one came close, but also had sclerae, something I consider a bad idea on minifigures.

That may be true to an extent, but I still think your definition of "iconic" is far too narrow. Something being "the start of something new" doesn't make it iconic, since many things that we consider iconic are themselves derivative. An ironic case in point is visible in your own post-- you consider Pokemon more iconic than Digimon, even though technically Digimon came first. It can be argued that Digimon fed off of Pokemon's success, but that's a knife that cuts both ways-- chances are the idea of monster training stories and games was just really popular concepts at the time, similar to how Doom Patrol and X-Men emerged at around the same time with very similar concepts. Whether one could have inspired the other is irrelevant, because neither was inherently more "derivative" than the other-- they were just working from extremely similar ideas. Another example is the LEGO Minifigure. I'm sure many people consider the LEGO Minifigure iconic, but when they say this they're not referring to the original ones from 1975 with one-piece legs, no arms, and no faces. They're referring to a minifigure in its current form, with flexible arms, legs, and hands. Some might even see a minifigure with the modern-day "eye sparkle" and call it iconic, just because it is immediately recognizable and extremely distinctive. Or MP3 players. The iPod was far from the first, but it is still extremely iconic, and if someone is asked to draw an MP3 player an iPod would probably be one of the first things they think of. By the loosest definition, all something needs to be iconic is to be a cultural icon, and that's something that doesn't necessitate it being the progenitor of something greater than itself. It's a really loose definition, but it has to be remembered that "iconic" isn't some single-tier designation that only the best of the best fits into. Things can be more iconic than one another, and I think it could probably be argued that certain images and concepts from the OT will always be more iconic than their PT counterparts. All I expect in the years to come is for the gap to narrow a bit. A lot of PT vehicles won't ever be as iconic as the X-Wing Starfighter, but they might one day be iconic enough to be immortalized in a UCS set. After all, the TIE Interceptor wasn't nearly as iconic as the X-Wing starfighter or even some things that have never appeared as UCS sets, like the original TIE fighter. Being iconic enough for a UCS set doesn't mean PT vehicles will magically become super-iconic as time goes on, either. But there are pretty much no Star Wars vehicles as iconic as the X-Wing Starfighter, Millennium Falcon, Death Star, and Star Destroyer. Unless we'd rather abandon UCS sets entirely or start a "remake cycle" like people are lamenting in minifig-scale sets already, then the bar will eventually have to be lowered.

Robots don't have muscles? I think Robonaut would like a word with you... In all seriousness, the argument "They're robots; they don't need X" is one that I find extremely tiresome. You could argue that being robots, they don't need human voices, or they don't need to speak a human language, or they don't need mouths, or they don't even need to be humanoid. But frankly, they're designed so that humans can identify with them, because even though humans don't play a significant role in the storyline, the theme itself has a human audience. And since anthropomorphic robots have been popular in fiction for years and years, it's a bit silly to argue that having armor that resembles abdominal muscles stretches the bounds of plausibility. In a more direct answer to the question, the presence of a six-pack could have something to do with the fact that the torso's also being used for the "ultrabuild" Iron Man in the Super Heroes theme. Or it could be just because the designers thought it looked cool.

Also podracers, loads of Trade Federation/CIS vehicles (like the MTT, AAT, or Vulture Droid), and a lot of vehicles seen on Coruscant. Overall, with the prequels I was quite impressed at how when there were similarities to OT ships, they seemed logical either because the PT ships were the OT ships' forerunners or just as a consequence of the ships sharing a galaxy with its own particular design standards. Brickdoctor, your point about PT vehicles not being as iconic is pretty valid, for the most part, but at the same time one has to wonder how a ship becomes iconic? As I mentioned, I had never heard of a B-Wing until the LEGO one came out, and for me it still feels about as obscure as the ARC-170-- something that appeared in one of the movies, but not an extremely memorable part of any scenes (the ship I remember most vividly from the Battle of Endor, not including ground forces, was of course the timeless Millennium Falcon). Is it just years of exposure that has given certain outstanding vehicle designs from the OT their iconic status? If that's the case, then I'm sure some of the vehicles that appear prominently in CW will end up holding a special place in some people's hearts once that has aged a couple decades. If it's a matter of unique design, there are plenty of Trade Federation/CIS ships that have that down pat. If it's just a matter of the design quality being to a certain caliber to begin with, then things get a lot more subjective... I'm personally a huge fan of many podracer designs, with their heavily-customized "scrapyard" aesthetic and decorative paint schemes. And I had a lot of fun watching the podrace scene in Episode I. But other people consider the podrace scenes to be one of the weakest parts of the PT, and I'm sure there are many who find the design of podracers (with their flimsy connection between the cockpit and engines) too implausible to appreciate to the same degree as the sturdy-looking ships of the Rebel Alliance. Overall, I like to remain optimistic that someday the prequels will be a little more widely acknowledged and appreciated, even if not to the same degree as the OT. I certainly feel that from an art/design perspective, the prequel trilogy had vehicles just as outstanding as many from the original trilogy. Certainly some PT vehicles can't hold a candle to some OT vehicles, but that cuts both ways-- I certainly consider the Naboo N-1 starfighter far superior to the Twin-Pod Cloud Car, for example.

The connection isn't totally "legal" in real life. For one thing, the Technic holes of the first brick and the side studs of the second brick aren't centered at the same point vertically, so if parts were connected across the top and bottom certain parts might be forced into compression. Additionally, it is illegal for a System part to be connected to Technic holes by more than one stud, because this makes the parts hard to separate. The first reason might have something to do with LDD crashing if the tops and bottoms of the two bricks are level, since there's technically a slight collision involved. Seems a bit extreme for LDD to crash completely, though. The second reason it's illegal really shouldn't cause any problems like that since LDD's tolerance allows studs to fit in Technic holes without a collision, but perhaps in conjunction with the first reason it causes a larger problem.

IN the Rattle Copter box image, the torso and hood are pretty clearly black on my computer screen. Same goes for the catalog image. The only place where his torso and hood look grey is on the booster pack, which is a terribly low-quality render. It's possible that it might be grey in the final thing, because all of these images are preliminary (and preliminary photos can be poor-quality and not show colors clearly), but frankly it's really rude to just act as though everyone who thinks Lloyd's torso and hood look black is flat-out wrong. All his parts but his head and hands look black to me, so it could just be a matter of perception.

It's a feasible way to imagine it, but we both know TLG would not do this. The human characters in a theme are almost invariably included so that kids playing with the toys have characters they can easily identify with. If it were aliens versus dinosaurs, then it would be easier for the protagonist/antagonist roles to be interchangeable, but still kids would be more likely to identify with the more humanoid faction. Remember that the storyline to a LEGO theme is just a backbone for the product, not the other way around. The plot is rarely something a kid couldn't come close to figuring out with just a quick glance at the set and character designs. I think it's more likely for the theme to be one that kids can understand just by picking up the toy-- that there are human "good guys" trying to capture dinosaurs. There might be a little bit of story expansion by the designers-- for instance, creating named characters with specific backgrounds and personalities. But anything far beyond that in complexity is just wresting control of the story away from the kids and into the hands of the designers, which would contradict TLG's spirit of imagination. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of story themes-- BIONICLE and Hero Factory are some of my favorite themes. But when a kid sees a toy they're going to want to make up stories with it, and so it's important that the stories the designers offer aren't too greatly at odds with the ones the kids will tend to make up.

Usually I don't either. At least, I don't measure in inches or centimeters in action figure themes. I sometimes pay closer attention to measurements when creating City or Star Wars MOCs because, for instance, if I wanted to create a podracer to scale with Anakin's and Sebulba's Podracers, then I'd need to measure them to know what scale they're at. A pretty reliable rule of thumb is that one stud/module is equal to 8 mm. In action figure themes, I tend to measure only in modules, usually to figure out comparative size (if I want to build or draw a Matoran, I generally want them to be to scale with other Matoran and Toa from the year of sets I'm replicating). But I was curious about the "9 inches" statement because that is something that's often included in catalogs and retail websites. So I was unsure if info about these sets had emerged which I had overlooked. But since the measurement doesn't seem to match my observations, I'm thinking it might have just been an assumption because the proportions looked Inika-ish.

Where's the thing about "9-inch heroes" coming from? I haven't seen anything about how tall the new Hero sets are. They look taller in pictures, but that's partly because they seem to have smaller Hero Cores than previous waves. Surge in particular seems to be no taller than a 3.0 Hero set, while Rocka seems at most an inch taller-- around 8 inches tall, closer to a Toa Metru in size than a Toa Inika. I'm basing my measurements on what I can see in the catalog images. Rocka seems to have regular 3M feet, 7M lower leg beams, 6M upper leg beams, and a regular 9M torso beam. His total height would thus be around 25 studs-- about 20 centimeters or just under 8 inches. Surge, in contrast, seems to have 5M upper leg beams and 5M lower leg beams, for an overall height of around 22 studs (17.6 cm or just under 7 inches). The only thing that I find Inika-ish about the height of these new heroes is how long their legs are compared to their torsos, which is IMO a much bigger problem than height alone would be. It's still somewhat reasonable, and not much different than Toa Metru proportions, but at the same time I hope it's not a slippery slope to Kiina-style proportions. Although at least now there exist beams in suitable sizes to prevent the "gorilla arms" that so many post-2006 BIONICLE sets were criticized for-- rather than having to use leg joints for the arms, the arms can now be proportioned according to the torsos, at least to an extent. I dunno; someone on Flickr had been in contact with someone who works in a LEGO store who was able to confirm that Black Phantom would change. And I don't think this was just hopeful ignorance since even the changes they were told to expect (differently-built feet and armor shells on the wing/blade things on his back) didn't seem to have this person convinced that the final version of Black Phantom could be much better. Anyway, given the stage of prototype Black Phantom seems to be at, I expect somewhat significant changes by the final version-- it's just unclear whether the changes will make the model any better. Fire Lord and Witch Doctor both changed significantly between the early prototypes and the final sets. Notably, Fire Lord's color scheme was even more jumbled than the final set, with copious transparent shells on the legs and arms and yellow Technic parts on the feet. Witch Doctor originally had a more complex staff, as seen on his preliminary box art at ToyFair. Considering these changes, slight changes in Black Phantom's weird arm-things and his feet sound pretty believable. The same can't be said for the smaller sets, which I don't expect to change too drastically. Maybe a few color or decoration changes like we saw in some of the 2.0 Heroes (early pics of Evo gave him a blue head and Hero Core), but that's it. I don't think BIONICLE started in 2000 anywhere in the world, unless you mean that's when sets started appearing in stores (the same way 2011 sets started appearing in stores in November-December 2010). In some parts of the world, the sets did start appearing at the beginning of 2001, so some stores would have had them on shelves slightly earlier, but they were still 2001 sets. The difference was whether or not they were Summer 2001 sets (they were in the US). Also, BIONICLE did sometimes have half-year sagas. Although the Bohrok-Kal and the Rahkshi arcs are often lumped together, the two were pretty much distinct storylines from one another.

Gosh, there haven't been any posts in this topic for months! I guess it makes sense since the new sets we're currently expecting and discussing are due out in 2012, but it's a really stark contrast from the "story themes" I'm used to like Ninjago and Hero Factory, where there's regularly new content to discuss. Anyway, my reason for bringing this topic back is mainly to share with people that there's a new mini-movie on the LEGO City website. This one doesn't focus on any particular sub-theme, unlike the Harbor and Space ones released previously, but I figured it's still more 2011 news than 2012. I love this latest movie because, as usual, imagination and creativity end up saving the day. These are LEGO values that I can truly relate to, and really reminiscent of the way I used to play with my LEGO sets. It wasn't a true LEGO play experience if you weren't building something new on the spot to solve whatever problems the plot threw your way! Hopefully other AFOLs will have a similar sense of nostalgia when watching this video.

I kind of like both the T-piece and the small claw piece in Technic categories, just because the main alternative places to put them are the two minifigure parts/accessories categories, which are already clogged to the brim. But it's possible some of the other reorganization recommended in this topic would clear up space for them, or create a new category where they could fit.

I don't think we will see a huge influx of prequel-inspired UCS sets anytime soon, for several reasons. Some are reasons people have already stated: the fact that die-hard prequel trilogy fans tend to overlap into original trilogy fans but not vice-versa, and the fact that the prequel trilogy was somewhat derivative just by virtue of coming after the original trilogy and thus having to be "reverse-engineered" to fit the universe of the first three films. While I don't like the implication that the prequels are weaker than the original trilogy because of this, I have to admit that many of their ships don't hold as special a place in my heart as the OT ships like the landspeeder or X-Wing. If you were to go back in time a couple decades, I'm sure you'd encounter people who felt the same way about Episode 5 and 6 ships compared to those in Episode 4. Heck, I'm an early 90s child and I hardly recognized the B-Wing when it first appeared as a set, simply because most of my memories of the original trilogy ships came from Star Wars: Rogue Squadron on the N64 (most of the missions in that game took place before Episode 6, with a few significant outliers). Now, I think if you were to give the prequel trilogy a couple more decades to "ferment", so to speak, there would be fewer people who remembered it all that differently from the original trilogy, just as today there are a lot fewer people who impose a strict partition between Episode 4 and its sequels than there were in the 80s. It will take more than kids who grew up on the prequels reaching adulthood for that feeling of "new and different" to go away. Now, this doesn't mean I don't think there's a market for UCS ships from the prequels. But it might be years before there's as strong a market for them as there is for ships from the original trilogy.

Why? Breez holds her gun with a regular hand just fine. The only one of the heroes that seems to need a Y-joint instead of a hand piece is Rocka, due to the way his crossbow assembles-- and even that requires us to assume a few things about the internal structure. By the way, while I don't mind Surge's lime-intensive color scheme in and of itself, it kinda bothers me that blue pieces are still so sparse in this upcoming wave. But I guess if you really need bright blue parts there's always the "ultrabuild" Batman, who has some quite useful ones such as blue torso shells. Captain America and Hulk also (so far) seem like they'll use bright blue, but neither has enough of it to make a really worthwhile parts pack for that color.

Nice catch! I had totally forgotten about Woody. Of course, the fact that his legs are a different mold might allow a bit more liberty there, since squeezing a print onto regular minifigure toes would be more difficult given how close the rounded "thigh" is to the top of the toes. But if Woody was possible, then I guess I'd be jumping to conclusions to say that TLG will never have a machine that can do just that for regular minifigure legs.

I doubt there will be two dinosaurs so similar in this theme at the exact same scale. Note that both the tiny dino in the base and the Coelophysis have just a single back stud. One is probably just more preliminary than the other. I could be wrong, of course, but it's just a bit odd to imagine two "almost-but-not-quite-identical" one-piece dinosaurs in a theme like this.

It's possible that themes that aren't new just don't sell as well-- either to consumers, or to retailers. Also, the more money spent advertising sets that aren't new, the less available to be spent advertising new sets. There are also probably production-related reasons for having only one year of sets in production at any one time-- I'm sure it requires fewer machines to print minifigures for one theme than minifigures for three themes, and is probably less of a hassle for quality control. Additionally, I'm not entirely sure whether the multiple-themes-per-year sales pattern was a result of continuing to produce older sets for multiple years or just a result of producing more than one wave's worth of them to begin with. Looking at old U.S. Shop at Home catalogs, I seem to notice a hint of desperation on the pages advertising previous years' sets. Now, if retailers were willing to continue buying the same themes for multiple years, there's no real difference between producing a large number of the sets to begin with and producing the same sets in multiple waves. But if a theme or even a particular set came along that was a "flop" in terms of sales, you can understand how TLG would have a hard time getting rid of whatever surplus they might have produced. There's also the fact that with today's multi-faction themes, having a wide number of sub-themes in production at any one time isn't as necessary for a full play experience. Of course, that opens a whole new can of worms, since many people-- with a number of valid reasons-- preferred single-faction themes that could interact with one another to today's multi-faction themes. Suffice it to say that multi-faction themes seem to have proven much more successful than single-faction themes due to their "straight out of the box" role-play potential, and I don't foresee a return to single-faction themes any time in the future.

The trouble with doing them that way would be that (to my knowledge) TLG has no way of printing the top surface of a minifigure's toes. She'd thus have a flesh-colored "stripe" between the front of the toe and the front of the leg. For a minifigure wearing sandals, that sort of solution might work, but not for a minifigure wearing boots.

The dog is actually in Bricklink's Dark Orange (TLG's 38 Dark Orange). Bricklink's Dark Flesh (TLG's 217 Brown) stopped appearing in new sets after 2006, and was probably discontinued at that time. The clip piece used to assemble the gazebo roof is actually from last year's Toy Story sets. Specifically, it's used to make the claw in the Trash Compactor Escape set. I think this may be its first appearance since then in an actual set. Anyway, great review! The lighting of some of your photos could have been better, as there's an uncanny orange glow in many of the "build" pictures, but it still shows the construction of the set in great detail. I like this set a great deal, but there are things I think could be improved. For instance, I'd much prefer the minifigures if the man in the bright green parka hood were wearing the matching bright green torso from this year's City Advent Calendar. The grey torso just seems flat-out underwhelming. The actual construction of the set is of course to die for-- I love the curved window to the post office-- and the minifigures are mostly desirable, but this one minifigure design choice bothers me significantly.

Ummm, what? LEGO's near bankruptcy was a consequence of a multi-year decline that started around the 90s, and was because of a lot of causes other than just what themes and products were current (there was a lot of production streamlining that had to take place for the company's recovery). Knights' Kingdom II took place during the time of radical changes when TLG was desperately trying to recover from the financial slippery slope they were already on. Yeah, Ninjago is a monumental success. The TV special on Cartoon Network got a lot of viewers, so many that a full TV-series is due to premiere towards the end of this year. Of course, it's only reasonable that it should be a huge success when it had a huge initial investment-- if it hadn't been so successful, it would have been a major disappointment, and it's clear from some marketing materials that TLG has actively designed it to be "their next BIONICLE". And yeah, there was a pretty significant gap between KK1 and KK2. Here's hoping there is no similar gap after Kingdoms, though I'm sure that with the Hobbit film soon to come, medieval fantasy will remain in the public consciousness. It would be foolishness for TLG not to take advantage of that, whether with a licensed theme or non-licensed fantasy theme.

Try this one.

It was so excellent to see this through to its conclusion. The end result is colorful, detailed, and imaginative. Each builder contributed their own personal ideas to create a diverse settlement truly depicting the spirit of imagination that is central to how we remember Classic Space.

A lot of people are really fans of them. If you look at the City Police station, they look really nice placed alongside each other, resembling an actual wall rather than just a stack of bricks. And saying they "copied it from Mega Bloks" is a bit harsh-- I'm sure TLG probably had prototypes of this sort of part for a long time, and may have just been inspired by how useful such a part is rather than that a competitor happened to have one.

Excellent and creative design! At first glance, it doesn't even appear to be LEGO, but with a closer look you can see that there are some extremely clever building techniques going towards giving that impression! If it were up to me, the only change I could think of making would be to swap the Y-joints on the feet for the new style, so that the feet continue to express the smoothness seen on the rest of the body. Also, I can definitely respect someone who chooses to leave certain parts un-armored. A lot of more amateur MOCs would put armor on every exposed bone, but while the LEGO aspect of this model is a little more visible because of the exposed thigh bones, the model's armor seems to follow a much more logical pattern this way. The upper limbs and waist are all equally exposed, giving the model a consistent aesthetic.

I don't own both, but my younger brother does, and I have to say that I prefer Witch Doctor. He's a really well-orchestrated design, even if his posability is somewhat limited to the point that his feet can't turn outward from his body. He's also extremely unique compared to Rocka XL-- while I expect TLG to stick to Fire Lord's build for at least a while longer, Witch Doctor's might not be seen again, at least not where it lends itself to such an amazing, bony aesthetic. Also, I'm personally not a huge fan of Rocka XL, since the main improvements from Fire Lord's build (more solid-looking upper and lower legs, primarily) come at the cost of places where Rocka XL's design is in fact weaker (less posability for the lower arms due to the choice of upper arm joint, a less cohesive torso design, and spiky armor accents which make posing the figure take more effort). You bring up a somewhat odd issue. I wonder how much HRT content generation and planning takes place under the Design byME team and how much takes place under the Hero Factory team. After all, the story updates have been used to make almost all aspects of the product-- from delays to changes in the parts palette-- fit seamlessly with the Hero Factory story. But then, it might be Hero Factory's simpler and more flexible story that allows for this sort of seamless fit even without the HF team's leadership. By the way, do you know what we failed to see in the latest HRT update? Changes in the naming and quality-assigning system for heroes. There are still no female names, you can still only assign your hero to be "on mission" with the six heroes from the 2.0 wave, and we still have the same absurd "favorite food" choices (not like those need as urgent an update, but I find it weird that with all the robot-related food items we have "Mexican" just thrown in there).

But was their business model in "the old days" reliable? It's possible that Kingdoms has simply stopped selling as well as it could, and thus they figure it would be safer to introduce a new theme in its place. Stubbornly keeping a theme around longer than it remains successful would just be a foolish business decision. Frankly, I didn't buy Kingdoms sets, but I loved their designs. And I think the theme's classic sort of conflict has a lot of potential that TLG has not yet explored. I will miss the theme if it ends. But if TLG is ending the theme they almost certainly have a justifiable reason, whether it's to make way for a licensed theme like LotR (many people's suspicion, even though I'm not entirely convinced) or to create a newer medieval theme with more appeal to the target audience.