Aanchir

I’m not sure which new molds you’re referring to, but there’s a big difference between introducing stuff like a new hat, sword, or ninja hood that will show up across a whole bunch of different sets featuring a whole bunch of different characters, and introducing six new molds that will each be entirely specific to sets that contain a particular character. Some themes can certainly manage to make the latter work (Nexo Knights is a good example), but note that in that case those characters continued to use the same visor molds through the theme’s entire 5-wave run, whereas stuff like the Nexo Knights torso armor or Ninjago ninja hoods can be varied a lot more frequently because they’re used widely enough to recoup the molding costs in a shorter amount of time. Each Nexo Knights main character’s visor element only appears in 8 to 12 sets across all three years of sets, whereas their armor pieces (because they’re shared between characters) could easily be used 10 or more times in a single wave. It’s always sort of a trade off, and it’s up to the designers to determine which of these approaches is best suited to a particular theme’s budget and design philosophy, as well as its plans for the future.

First and foremost, Aquazone was one of the themes I was most interested in as a kid growing up in the 90s, but it rarely seems to get as much attention from AFOLs as Pirates, Space, Castle, or even other relatively short-lived 90s themes like Wild West and Adventurers. While Aquazone didn't last all that long, during the years it ran, it was often treated as about as big a deal as Castle, Space, or Pirates — perhaps part of why LEGO even spun it off as its own theme and not as the "Seatron" Space subtheme it was originally conceived as. Aquazone was one of the first themes to eschew many of the more ubiquitous genres of storytelling and embrace a much more obscure type of sci-fi. It was also one of the first themes to largely feel like a world of its own, and not just a fictionalized vision of our world's past, present, or future. In both of those respects, it could be said to have paved the way for other "high fantasy" themes like Bionicle, Ninjago, Legends of Chima, Elves, and Nexo Knights. In fact, the animal-based vehicles that have appeared in several of those themes can trace their heritage pretty directly to the sea-creature-based vehicles of the Aquasharks, Aquaraiders, and Stingrays. It also pioneered the idea of characters seeking out and competing over a bespoke fictional resource, the Hydrolator crystals that the factions processed to create breathable air. Similar ideas have become a staple of subsequent themes: energy crystals in Rock Raiders, Life on Mars, Mars Mission, and Power Miners, the mystical ruby in Adventurers, Voltstones in Insectoids, CHI in Legends of Chima, "mysterious crystals" in LEGO City Arctic and Volcano Explorers, the realm crystal in Ninjago, magical crystals in LEGO Elves, elemental crystals in Bionicle G2, and so on. Like many products of the mid-to-late 90s, it had loads of big and specialized parts that in hindsight make its prices and the simplicity of many of its builds feel rather shocking. But it also utilized quite a few parts that were not only fun but genuinely useful, including: An entire family of octagonal bricks (6032, 6037, 6039, 6042) that were designed with proportions and connection points ideally suited to SNOT building and Technic integration. The 3x3 marine propeller (6041) and propeller housing (6040), which again were extremely Technic compatible. You might not BELIEVE how fun it was as a kid to blow on one of these propellers and watch it spin rapidly with an exciting whirring sound. I'm glad that the propeller, at least, remains in use. Various hinged robotic arm and magnet elements, which for the most part predated Aquazone but were still iconic attributes of the theme. The shock absorber brick, which again predated Aquazone but was used together with the octagonal bricks in a manner unique to Aquazone sets as what was arguably the LEGO System's first style of "click hinge". Various minifigure accessories: harpoons (57467), utility knives (44658), and of course the iconic rock crystal… all of which have seen continued use as recently as last year, albeit usually redesigned. Needless to say, I wouldn't mind one bit if the next underwater theme were a new take on Aquazone! Another from my childhood that comes to mind is Spyrius. Blacktron has a much stronger reputation as the quintessential villainous Space faction (probably in part due to being consistently positioned as the Space Police's most persistent rivals), but I feel like Spyrius had a much more clearly defined identity with its clear and specific focus on espionage, well-defined fleet of robots and flying saucers, and over-the-top villain designs. The Spyrius droid was also one of the greatest minifigures of its day, with not only much more extensive printing than was normal at the time, but with some really creative graphic design that took cues from the LEGO skeleton and classic minifigure smile. Continuing through the 90s we arrive at Time Twisters. While Time Cruisers could feel a bit incoherent at times, the later Time Twisters subtheme had really compelling spooky vibes and a really slick color scheme of Black + Bright Blue + Earth Orange (classic brown). Both Time Cruisers and Time Twisters were also extremely functionality driven themes, and I feel like Time Twisters really pushed that to an awesome new level. As a bonus, it also reverted to a more conventional minifigure design language after the Time Cruisers' much more cartoonish facial features. The Avatar: The Last Airbender theme was definitely imperfect, and I would love for it to get a second pass one day since design standards have improved greatly since then. I myself mostly overlooked its sets when they first came out due to not being a follower of the TV show until the following year, and even if I had been a fan of the show, I think the poorly rendered box art and shoddy minifigures (with a terribly inadequate skin color for Katara and Sokka) would have still been a major turn-off. But many years after the sets came out, I decided to try building them on LEGO Digital Designer using the online instructions, and was surprised to find how many features from the show the designers had attempted to incorporate. For instance, the Fire Nation Ship's underwhelming blocky exterior hides interior details like the meditation chamber from the episode "The Warriors of Kyoshi" and the skiff from the episode "The Waterbending Scroll". I don't regret not buying the sets but I certainly have more respect for their designs than I did for many years. Power Miners is often overlooked or dismissed due to the persistence of Rock Raiders nostalgia, but in most respects Power Miners stands out as the superior theme, and not just because of how much builds had improved between 1999 and 2009. For one thing, much like Time Cruisers and Time Twisters, it is an extremely function-driven theme, with lots of elaborate Technic features the likes of which had never been seen before. The counter-rotating drills are a key example. Power Miners also had monster designs with far more detail, articulation, variety, functionality, and connection points than "Rocky" from the Rock Raiders theme. The Power Miners vehicles' main color schemes (Bright Yellowish Green and Bright Orange with white accents in the first year, and Bright Yellowish Green and Blue with Silver accents in the second) contrasted heavily with their settings, which made them visually striking and also realistic enough to offset the sheer whimsy of the actual vehicle designs. And its characters (while not heavily fleshed out in terms of personality) had a wonderful manic energy and a blue collar look that cemented them as reluctant heroes who were perhaps only there because they were the only ones crazy enough to take the job! And while both Power Miners and Rock Raiders introduced several large elements that got heavily criticized by AFOLs, those in Power Miners are far more versatile — for example, 61472 not only works as a drill stage, but can be used individually as a conical wheel, with two face to face as a cylindrical wheel, or even interlocked as crown gears (a function we have yet to see in sets, although it was employed in the show-only Ninjago vehicle the Tusk Invader). Never mind the cosmetic uses we've seen, like as stylized parapets in Garmadon's Dark Fortress! By comparison neither the wheels, nor drills, nor cockpits and rollcages from Rock Raiders ever saw any use in other themes. There are probably way more than this that I could think of but this feels like enough for now.

Well, besides “action-adventure” being a somewhat nebulously defined category with little to no official basis, it’s probably for the best that LEGO not launch too many new themes at any given time — that’s a quick way to dilute the excitement surrounding any of them individually. The kind of themes you want to see aren’t likely to make any kind of lasting comeback if LEGO sabotages them right out of the gate.

Yeah, it is sometimes a bit surprising how few molded animals (even smaller ones) show up in Ninjago besides stuff like fish, chickens, snakes, and spiders. There was the dog in the Master Wu Dragon set, and Monkey Wretch in the Skybound sets, but I don't think there have been ANY dogs, cats, horses, etc. in Ninjago sets so far. Maybe the designers avoid those sorts of animals because they're afraid their more "everyday" feel might dilute the theme's sense of otherworldly excitement, compared to scarier wild creatures like snakes/spiders or mythical creatures like dragons? It could be neat some day if Ninjago were to have a plotline involving physical or spirit versions of the animals that the ninja had as their classic emblems (Kai's lion emblem, Zane's wolf emblem, Cole's gorilla emblem, Jay's octopus emblem, Lloyd's dragon emblem, and Nya's crane emblem). I thought about this early on in the theme's lifespan but after Legends of Chima launched I figured LEGO would probably want to avoid that so it doesn't feel derivative/redundant. But by now it's been four years since Legends of Chima ended, and both LEGO Elves and LEGO Bionicle have been able to make a story arc involving supernatural animal companions work without feeling like a Chima knock-off in the intervening time, so I think the Ninjago theme might be able to make a similar plotline work as well. It could be an interesting change of pace from the typical emphasis on snakes and dragons.

Yeah, honestly the post-apocalyptic genre is hardly any more obscure than the dystopian genre which President Business's regime and the Super Secret Police in the first film quite clearly alluded to… and probably a lot more relevant in this day and age than the Western genre that they devoted a major setting to in the first film. What's more, there are many other very familiar childhood references within the Systar System: And yeah, concerns about the outer space scenes being "overrun with 'girly' stereotypes are absolutely silly, considering how that really cuts to the heart of one of the movie's biggest STRENGTHS — embracing many forms of iconic childhood toy and media imagery that were neglected by the original film. Like, it's fine that Castle, Pirates, Space, and Western are familiar themes to you. But considering that LEGO Friends is one of the most successful themes of the past decade, I think it goes without saying that including "girly" elements as more than a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo helps make this movie MORE relevant to the tastes of today's kids, not less.

So cute and creative!!! It's neat to see a LEGO Train MOC that really tries to explore the category in a new way. It almost feels like a LEGO equivalent of the classic Brio wooden train sets, in sort of the same way that the LEGO Racers Tiny Turbos felt like a LEGO equivalent of Hot Wheels. It occurred to me looking at this feature that this kind of smaller scale and push-powered design could really facilitate some features that are often much more complicated with full size, motorized LEGO trains, such as railway overpasses, bascule bridges, railway turntables, and engine sheds or roundhouses. These kinds of features are common among some other brands of toy train set, but while I've seen some MOCists come up with brilliant ways of achieving them for their own layouts, they often wind up way bigger, more complicated, or more expensive than anything you'd see in a typical LEGO train set. Even the relatively modest Train Engine Shed set from the World City theme (https://brickset.com/sets/10027-1/Train-Engine-Shed) is pretty unique among all train-related sets before or since, which tend to focus less on maintenance and more on passenger stations, cargo terminals, level crossings, signal houses, and of course the trains themselves. I suppose that in fairness, these might be more familiar sights to kids in this day and age, since I suspect that in this day and age security is pretty tight at engine sheds that are still actively used. I think some of my only real-life exposure to engine sheds and the like was seeing them as a young child in Thomas the Tank Engine books and videos, and seeing an old roundhouse that had been converted into a museum in Savannah, Georgia as an adult.

Sure, but that doesn't make Mega Bloks (well, Mega Construx now, since they rebranded) a type of LEGO any more than it makes LEGO a type of Mega Bloks/Mega Construx. They're two separate brands within one much larger product category (building toys).

"So identical" is kind of subjective. It kind of calls to mind a comment LEGO Friends designer Fenella Holden made about the development process and some of the difficulties getting designers accustomed to boy-targeted products to appreciate the needs of girl-targeted ones (as cited in this article): "It was an education. No one could understand, why do we need more than one handbag? So I’d have to say, well, is one sword enough for the knights, or is it better to have a dagger, too? And then they’d come around." Even when dealing with less gender-coded subject matter, it can be VERY easy to generalize stuff as similar or redundant when we don't have enough firsthand experience to appreciate the real-life nuances of it. In real life, Japanese conical hats come in numerous shapes, styles, and materials, some of which you can see examples of in this post from somebody who had similar questions about the differences between these two hats, or this category on Wikimedia Commons. Plus, there have been plenty of other minifig headgear pieces which have coexisted with similar types of headgear with only relatively subtle stylistic differences: Fedoras and Stetsons Elf and Goblin hats Circular and Octagonal peaked caps Spaceman, Galaxy Patrol, and Space Miner helmets Aquanaut, Aquashark, and Hydronaut helmets And of course in the Ninjago theme itself, the classic ninja hood, ninja hood with forehead crest, and ninja hood with headband… all three of which were in use in the summer 2016 Day of the Departed sets!

You seem to be severely underestimating just how many themes it would take for everyone to be satisfied… between current themes that have proven reliably popular, and past themes that the most people seem interested in LEGO bringing back, the minimum range of theme or theme groups would have to include: City Friends Ninjago Duplo Technic Classic Creator 3-in-1 Creator Expert Minifigures Juniors/4+ Ideas Architecture Seasonal (including seasonal BrickHeadz) Space Castle Pirates Trains Adventurers Bionicle/Constraction Star Wars Harry Potter/Fantastic Beasts The LEGO Movie (including sequels and spin-offs) DC Marvel Disney Princess Disney Pixar Jurassic Park/World Minecraft Speed Champions The Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit Themes in italics are those which are currently retired. Is the problem obvious yet? With about 360 new sets as of last year (excluding Education, polybag, value pack, and extended line products), splitting a number like that between 30 different themes would mean an average theme could have only six sets per year! Look at how underwhelmed people were for the 2008 Exo-Force range, 2010 Bionicle range, 2013 Ninjago range, 2013 Castle range, 2015 Pirates range, 2018 Nexo Knights range, etc. Even if these HADN'T been the final waves for these themes, there was a sense of indignity that themes that previously had anywhere from 10 to 38 new sets per year had been reduced to anywhere from five to seven. What you're proposing would make that the new normal for ALL themes. The City theme was at its smallest in 2007, with just 14 new retail sets. Besides the stand-alone advent calendar and airline promo, these were split between three subthemes: Fire, Trains, and Traffic (the last of which was a miscellaneous category roughly equivalent to today's Town and Great Vehicles sets). Your proposal cuts that number in half, and makes it unlikely to see more than two City subthemes per year. Realistically, the first of these would rotate from year to year between Police, Fire, and Construction/Mining/Demolition as was the norm from 2007 to 2011. The second would probably either revert to a generic catch-all Traffic subtheme or alternate between subthemes in the Aerospace (Airport/Cargo/Space), Nautical (Harbor/Coast Guard), and Exploration (Arctic/Deep Sea/Jungle/Volcano) subthemes. But either way there would be MUCH less room for variety in any given year. The number of new minifigures designed for many themes each year would also need to come down. Besides minifigures that vary only slightly from one another (like with a different neck accessory, helmet, or face), a wave of six sets typically only has room for between 12 and 16 decidedly unique minifigures. For example, the six Ninjago Hands of Time sets introduced 16 new minifig torso assemblies, 15 new minifig leg assemblies, and 11 new minifig heads. The "plenty of sets clearly targeted at AFOLs" are a drop in the bucket compared to those targeted at kids. Again, using 2018 as an example, there were 360-ish LEGO sets that year, excluding polybags, Education, Extended Line, convention exclusives, etc. Of those: 46 were recommended for ages 10+ (41 BrickHeadz sets, 3 Technic sets, TRON: Legacy, and Billund Airport) 2 were recommended for ages 11+ (Technic Rough Terrain Crane and Mack Anthem) 8 for ages 12+ (2 Creator Expert sets, 3 Architecture sets, 2 Ideas sets, and Ninjago City Docks) 3 for ages 14+ (Hulkbuster: Ultron Edition, Betrayal at Cloud City, and UCS Y-Wing) 7 for ages 16+ (3 Creator Expert sets, Statue of Liberty, Voltron, Hogwarts Castle, and Bugatti Chiron). So how that relates to how you define "sets clearly targeted at AFOLs" depends where you draw the line. For example: If you define AFOL-targeted sets as anything marked 10+ or older (which includes AFOLs, TFOLs, and many older KFOLs), that includes 66 sets, or about 18% of the overall product range If you define it as anything marked 12+ or older, it includes 18 sets, or just 5% If you define it as anything marked 14+ and older, it includes 10 sets, or less than 3% And if you define it as 16+ (which mostly includes AFOLs and older TFOLs), it includes a mere 7 sets, or less than 2%. But no matter how you define it, there are AT LEAST four times as many sets that aren't AFOL-targeted as ones that are. More importantly, even if we go with the most generous definition, under which "AFOL-targeted" describes the 18% of sets marked 10+ or older… all that acknowledges is that LEGO sees enough adult buyers to support those 66 specific sets. It doesn't somehow imply that the AFOL demographic is big enough to support all those sets AND entire additional waves of all the small or inactive themes that AFOLs think aren't getting enough emphasis. Particularly when many of these sets are targeted at older buyers are targeting a much wider demographic of adults than those who share the same tastes and preferences of the AFOL community. I mean, let's be real: the main appeal of, say, a Classic Space revival would not be among AFOLs in general, but rather with a specific subset of AFOLs who had formative childhood experiences playing with sets that were introduced between 32 and 40 years ago. Anybody the right age to have been in the target age range for Classic Space sets during their year of release is currently between 38 and 52 years old. And chances are, a lot more people within that age range are nostalgic for more mainstream IPs from that time (including ones LEGO has depicted in licensed sets such as Star Wars, ET, Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, and Back to the Future) than for Classic Space. I'll grant you that there are plenty of sets aimed at younger buyers (like this year's Benny's Space Squad) that are clearly meant to resonate with AFOLs on a nostalgic level. But ANY theme, even one aimed as young as Duplo, can include nostalgic touches as a bonus for AFOLs or for the parents of KFOLs. It's the same as how kid-targeted movies and shows, including preschool shows like Sesame Street, sometimes reference shows and movies that only older viewers are likely to recognize. That doesn't somehow make those movies and shows are primarily adult-targeted — they're just acknowledging any adults who are in the audience.

As of last year it wasn't a huge difference in terms of sheer number of non-polybag, non-extended line, non-education sets: by my count, 181 non-licensed sets and 178 licensed ones. And that's being rather generous, counting Ninjago City Docks, LEGOLAND-based sets, and any Architecture sets where one or more of the buildings is a protected IP as licensed. Of the currently available 2019 sets, according to those same terms, there are 95 non-licensed sets and only 77 licensed ones — even counting The LEGO Movie 2 sets as licensed. But I think that's to be expected. Of these 172 sets, non-licensed Creator, Duplo, City, Friends, and Ninjago sets each include 10 or more, for a total of 72 sets between just those five themes. Whereas the only licensed brands with 10 or more sets meeting these criteria are Star Wars and The LEGO Movie 2, with 36 sets between them (counting the LEGO Movie 2 branded sets from the Duplo, BrickHeadz, and Minifigures themes). If we also count 2019 sets that have been officially, publicly revealed and announced but not yet released, that adds 8 non-licensed sets and 24 licensed ones, balancing things out a bit more, but still with slightly more non-licensed (103) than licensed (101). And if we throw in other credibly rumored sets that haven't been officially revealed, that adds around 56 more non-licensed sets and 45 more licensed ones, for an estimated sum of around 159 non-licensed sets and 140 licensed ones. Based on last year's overall number of sets, I suspect there may be as many as 55 sets still to come in 2019 that haven't had enough rumors about them to know that they exist or credibly predict whether they are licensed or non-licensed — in particular, there's been a conspicuous lack of rumors of summer Disney Princess and Duplo sets. But overall, I expect the end result will still wind up with sets of this sort being somewhere between a 50/50 and 60/40 split, skewing in favor of non-licensed themes. And again, this is all operating under a pretty generous definition of licensed sets, since to a typical AFOL there's no meaningful difference in originality between Metalbeard's Motor Trike and a typical Ninjago set, or between licensed and non-licensed Architecture sets. Fair point! I think a good recent example is Jurassic World, which originated as a one-and-done license but achieved considerable success in that wave and has had a more stable presence since being brought back for the second movie. Movie licenses are pretty well suited to achieving this sort of flash-in-the-pan success, since the amount of hype surrounding a movie usually tends to peak in its year of release, and the amount of development time needed to create movies means that even those that achieve enough success to have a sequel greenlit can go anywhere from two to five years before a sequel comes out to reignite that hype. By contrast, with in-house themes, particularly the ones that are less generically archetypical than the classic ones and feature characters with particular names, personalities, and motivations, LEGO shoulders more of the burden for bringing the characters and brand to kids' attention, so when possible it can be better to design them with two or three years in mind to get the best return on that investment.

The new hat design was created for The LEGO Ninjago Movie. If I had to guess, it was just to offer more variety, since a lot of figures in the movie sets (civilians and major characters like Wu and Garmadon alike) wear one hat or the other, and it would feel extremely repetitive if that many characters had to share just ONE hat design. Since you didn't mention it in your post, I should point out that the new symbols on the ninja's hoods are just the first letter of each of their names in the cipher-based Ninjagon language introduced in The LEGO Ninjago Movie (specifically the "King" font from this sheet). So on a conceptual level it's definitely a step up in consistency than their hoods from the movie, which sometimes used the first letter/letters of their name, sometimes the first letter of their element, and sometimes something else entirely.

I think there are definitely still plenty of kids who could enjoy that just as well — certainly many AFOLs seem to cite examples like that when they generalize kids today as only caring about playing with the minifigures and not about creative building, particularly with regard to the licensed themes. But it's important to recognize there have probably always been a lot of kids who wanted something more from their toys than that, and if they couldn't get it from LEGO would stick to other types of toy that did include that type of stuff like working projectile launchers, lavishly furnished interiors, transformation features, etc. As an example, some of the articles about the development of LEGO Friends illustrated how common it was for girls to feel frustrated with a typical LEGO castle's lack of interior detail, since it meant there was nothing for the characters to DO inside, whereas many boys enjoyed it just fine because for them, its primary feature was to set the stage for playing out battle scenes. It wasn't any big deal for them whether the people had anywhere to eat or sleep. That's a particularly huge and glaring example of a previously untapped demographic, but there are probably many smaller ones out there that could get a more enjoyable experience if LEGO found ways to make sets that acknowledge those preferred play patterns. Before Nexo Knights and Elves, my feeling was that LEGO's omission of stuff like that from traditional Castle themes was just a matter of it being too impractical to include the play features that traditional Castle sets usually lacked AND the play features they already had at $100 or lower price points. But now, it's clear that they CAN do a lot of that type of stuff even within conventional LEGO Castle price points — albeit perhaps not at such a low target age range.

I think you and I are on the same page there. Damaged parts are definitely a bigger problem than confusing instructions, but that's part of why LEGO wants their customer service department's time and budget going towards logging and resolving those kind of serious complaints, and not stuff like play features not working because the builder made a mistake without noticing. Any of us who have been on hold with LEGO Customer Service know that any time they're on the line with a customer is time, another customer is probably on hold, possibly with an even more pressing issue! The added cost of additional instruction pages may add to the production costs of a set in some small capacity, but besides preventing customer service complaints or buyer frustrations that might result from excessive ambiguity, they also can help make the set accessible to a much wider audience. In a sense, some of this perceived "dumbing down" has enabled sets to become more complex/intricate while still being accessible to an audience as wide or wider. Consider the differences between https://brickset.com/sets/10210-1/Imperial-Flagship and https://brickset.com/sets/70618-1/Destiny-s-Bounty. The latter is much bigger in terms of both weight and piece count, has far more detail and complexity, etc… but it is accessible to ages 9 and up rather than ages 14 and up, probably in part because it has clearer, less confusing instructions and fewer flimsy areas that might frustrate younger builders. Likewise, https://brickset.com/sets/6590-1/Vacation-Camper from 1988 was marked for ages 7–12, while https://brickset.com/sets/60182-1/Pickup-Caravan is marked for ages 5–12, despite being way bigger and more complex. I don't think it's realistic to assume that five-year-olds today are simply smarter than they were 30 years ago, or that LEGO either severely underestimated their building ability back then or is severely overestimating their building ability now. Rather, the user-friendly features they've implemented like numbered bags, clearly color-coded elements, and longer, clearer building instructions have made it so that bigger builds and more advanced techniques can be used in sets without the same risk of confusing or alienating younger builders.

This is definitely true, particularly considering that consumer products are typically sold to retailers at a wholesale price of around 50% of their retail price. So if a retailer marks a set down 30%, they're still seeing around a 40% return on what THEY paid, minus whatever their overhead costs happen to be. Considering that most of these licensed themes speculated to be massive failures did not include a lot of sets, it's hard to imagine them hurting overall retail sales enough for those retailers to lose faith in the LEGO brand as a whole — not when they're dwarfed by the reliability of huge, long-lived themes like City, Friends, and Ninjago. And of course, LEGO's own share of the revenue and profits were made on the wholesale price that the retailers already paid. Also, for what it's worth, LEGO is not the only company making toys based on a wide range of licensed IPs, good and bad alike. Mattel, Hasbro, and a whole host of other companies are much, much more reliant on licensing partners than LEGO. But what all of these companies have in common is that they seek to diversify their risks and never put themselves in a position where a risky or unproven IP will make or break their financial results for that year. What's more, some of these supposed flops are perhaps being a little mischaracterized. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and The Angry Birds Movie each made over $330 million in the global box office. For comparison's sake, that's considerably more than The LEGO Batman Movie. To the studios, whether this is a success or failure depends on the movie's budget and the studio's expectation. But it that still means there are to a LOT of people watching these movies, and to toy companies that means a lot of potential customers. As for what critics think — what of it? Plenty of movies loved by kids and general audiences, and with a massive merchandising presence, have been panned by critics. Just look at how many more Transformers movies were made after the negative critical reaction to the second. That would not have gone on nearly as long if Hasbro weren't making money on merchandise sales. As far as clearance items on shelves go, I can't tell you how many times an AFOL has thought that the City, Friends, or Ninjago themes were failing because they saw stuff on clearance. It's not at all a good indicator of how much the theme has helped or hurt the company on a larger scale. Sometimes even a licensed theme bought by a relatively small segment of buyers can still be beneficial if those buyers weren't previously LEGO fans, particularly if any positive play experiences from those sets pique their interest in other themes.

Yeah. Truthfully, after Nexo Knights and Elves I have a lot more confidence that price point isn't as big a limitation on what kind of size and features are possible in Castle sets as I sometimes might have imagined. After all, Ragana's castle and Jestro's lair (at $100 and $120 price points, respectively) were able to include a lot of the typical features of flagship LEGO Castle sets (dungeon, throne room, catapults, traps, etc) while still making room for stuff like bedrooms, washrooms, and kitchens/ that more traditional Castle sets left me wanting. If LEGO can make room for all those types of features in a $100 set, or those PLUS a bunch of weird and wacky fantasy elements like turrets, buzzsaws, and giant hellmouths in a $120 set, then surely they should be capable of a unique and well-furnished traditional flagship castle at similar price points to ones they've had in the past. But of course, even hypothetically assuming LEGO could deliver a simply outstanding flagship castle at a $100 price point… pushing that to a $120 price point could still offer some advantages by allowing them to throw in, say, a molded dragon, and a couple more minifigs/horses.

Honestly, something I’ve been feeling for a while is that it may be about time that the price of a flagship Castle/Pirates set get hiked up to $120. I’m aware there’s some risk there, but themes like Ninjago, Friends, City, Legends of Chima, and Nexo Knights have often had flagship sets anywhere from $120 to $150. Whereas $100 has been the price point of other flagship Castle and Pirates sets since 2005! Granted, a $70 to $100 set can still be outstanding in terms of size, visual appeal, complexity, and play value —plenty of Ninjago and Elves sets have demonstrated that much. But I still get the sense that raising the flagship price point even just a bit could be a positive thing for these themes… particularly if it meant that sets at the next price point down like the various $50 enemy castles/prison towers could also get a boost to a somewhat more versatile price point of $70 or so.

I think part of the issue here is that you are being unreasonably particular about what kind of "look" can belong to a "particular preexisting subgenre", and about that being preferable to the long history of hybrid-genre storytelling that can't be so easily "pigeonholed". I mean, in Star Wars, Han Solo dresses like a cowboy, Obi-Wan dresses like a monk, and Lando dresses like a disco dancer, even when flying highly advanced spaceships. In Doctor Who, even the Doctor's most bizarre outfits from over the decades don't typically look particularly high tech or futuristic. But that doesn't diminish either series' qualifications as a staple of science fiction storytelling. So I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to act as though LEGO themes ought to be designed entirely in line with a far stricter sci-fi or historical fantasy rulebook. Purple was a pretty major part of the color scheme of the Serpentine-related builds/vehicles. Since there are no enemy vehicles in the Legacy sets, the minifigures and shrines have to pick up the slack when it comes to establishing that 2012 Serpentine aesthetic. There's also the matter of most of the Legacy villains being redesigns of fairly memorable familiar characters from the show. Acidicus hasn't had too big a role in the show, to the point that I don't remember if he was ever even mentioned or credited by name. Couple all that with Pythor being more or less Season One's "main villain", and the likely cost incentive of Pythor's head mold having been in use more recently than other major villains', and he's a natural choice to appear in the Legacy sets.

For a lot of the more generic bricks used in interiors I know there are also other justifications for using brighter colors… for example, it can help offset the cost of recolored elements that might otherwise not be used in many sets, like how many of last year's and this year's sets have used colors like Bright Bluish Green in places they're otherwise not visible. Also, more varied colors makes it easier to differentiate between parts that are similar in size/shape and quickly find the one you need when they're all in a pile — whether in regard to an individual set's contents, or your personal collection. I don't think either is a particular issue with parts as large or functionally specific as a bogie plate. I think the reason that functional elements like bogie plates and Technic pins/axles/gears are often color-coded has more to do with the fact that attaching the wrong piece, or in the case of bogie plates, attaching the right piece in the wrong place, can have a much bigger impact on a set's playability than an average brick or plate. The design of the train base pieces, with three adjacent Technic holes, means there's room for error in terms of where you attach the bogie plate. And a less experienced builder isn't necessarily going to anticipate the possibility that putting the bogie plate in the wrong plate might screw up the train's turning radius, or keep the wire from the battery box being long enough to reach the motor. And unfortunately, the number of low-quality toys out there means kids whose LEGO sets don't seem to work right aren't necessarily going to recognize it stems from errors on their part — they could just as easily think the design itself is defective, and end up costing LEGO money in unnecessary customer service calls, or even refrain from buying future sets. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these design decisions were actually based on feedback from LEGO Customer Service about what design features tend to cause the most confusion or frustration for kids and parents. At BrickFair New Jersey a member of LEGO's customer service department at BrickFair New Jersey explained that responding individually to a customer service call about a set can be enough to cancel out the profits from that set's sale, so LEGO generally wants their customer service department focused on resolving serious issues like missing parts or quality defects, not troubleshooting building mistakes that clearer product and/or instruction booklet design could have prevented entirely.

As cool as that would be, I think it would be kind of upsetting for kids who get into the app via Hidden Side and missed their chance to pick up the Scooby-Doo sets when they were available. I suspect that's also another reason that LEGO tends to stop supporting a lot of their toy-connected apps (Life of George, Fusion, Ultra Agents, etc) and offering them on iTunes/Google Play after the products in question have been retired for a while — because it leaves them with no way to satisfy customer service/tech support requests from people who download these apps and then want to know where to get the sets that tie in with them. Granted, that DOES mean they probably have to deal with the opposite (people getting an app-connected set secondhand and not being able to download the app), but at least in that case the bricks themselves are still usable in builds. Plus, I think it'd be much more common for parents looking for free, wholesome LEGO apps for their kids to accidentally download one that the kids can't play without a retired product, than for parents to buy retired sets specifically so their kids can enjoy the connected digital content. If the latter were a major PR issue, then they'd probably have already run into it with the online game/download codes that appear conspicuously in some older RoboRiders, Bionicle, Exo-Force, and Hero Factory sets, or with products like LEGO Studios or older LEGO Mindstorms kits that used computer software designed for now-defunct operating systems.

Something to keep in mind is that price per piece (from my understanding) has never only been solely about measuring the value of the set in terms of size/volume of bricks, but rather in terms of the complexity of the building experience and value as a parts pack. After all, there are often a lot more ways you can use two 2x4 bricks than one 2x8 brick, even if the amount of size/volume they add to the finished model is close to the same. Likewise, One particular context in which price per piece seemed to really get AFOLs' attention as a means of comparison was when comparing the value of 80s and early 90s sets with late 90s and early 2000s ones. The latter were often similar in overall size or sometimes even larger, but had lower piece counts and a much less intricate building experience due to a heavy reliance on big, specialized pieces. In that particular capacity, price per piece is still usually a valid way of comparing sets. It's just never really been a particularly precise way of measuring other types of value like what a set offers in terms of its play experience, overall size/display presence, or the quantity of old/common vs. new/rare contents. I don't think there IS any really quantitative way to compare which sets are a better value for money in all respects, since it not only varies depending on the type of contents but also on the subjective value the buyer assigns to stuff like building experience vs. size, how much value is added by potentially costly new elements, etc. I know some people have become rather cynical about the number of smaller parts like cheese slopes and Technic pins in sets, though for the most part I think you're right that the designers who put these parts in sets tend to be more focused on how they enhance the set's detail, stability, and building experience than on padding/inflating the piece count. After all, outside the Americas, they usually don't even put the piece counts on the boxes, so buyers who are making their purchasing decisions in stores rather than online are unlikely to be too preoccupied with that aspect of a set's value anyhow.

A few things. My name is Skye, I'm not a dude, and I'm not "hiding" behind walls of text, I'm just not very good at expressing myself concisely, which I'm not proud of . And frankly, you seem to be reading my comments pretty selectively if you somehow haven't noticed that I have made plenty of posts of my own — including in this very thread! — suggesting stuff I'd like to see in future Castle, Pirates, Space, or train sets. I absolutely don't think that other people's wishes for more or nicer sets in these categories are inherently "stupid", though sometimes I do get frustrated with the way that people act like LEGO can't possibly have any valid reason for not giving them exactly what they want from a particular category — even when set designers have explained some of the reasons why this stuff isn't as practical as fans might think. As I've said in this very thread, that applies just as much to when I encounter that kind of stubbornness in discussions about the themes that ARE my favorites, like Bionicle, Ninjago, and Elves. "How to bring back Bionicle/Why LEGO should bring back Bionicle" threads on some of the other sites I frequent are often downright obnoxious compared to the threads about the future of LEGO Castle or LEGO Space or LEGO Trains here on Eurobricks! So again, I'd like you to drop the attitude. YOU'RE the one who seems to think it's worth making entire posts or wasting entire paragraphs talking down to me or telling me I'm not welcome in this discussion. MY previous posts in this thread have just been sharing links, facts, and opinions about the same train-related topics everybody else has been discussing. When designers (particularly designers who are AFOLs themselves) do stuff like this, I don't know if it's as much about improving the overall sales numbers of the set/theme so much as trying either to leverage their role as a designer to give back to the communities they came from, or just to introduce stuff that would have appealed to THEM back before they became designers. After all, introducing a new recolor or mold usually doesn't just make it available from that set alone, but also from Bricks & Pieces, LUGBULK, or any future sets that other designers decide to include them in. The big hurdle is bringing the element into existence, and how AFOLs wind up obtaining them isn't quite as much of an immediate concern. In fact, designer Nick Vas recently sent a tweet to let AFOLs know when some of the recolors he introduced for the rare-ish Dragon Dance set were added to Bricks & Pieces: I can't say I care much about either clone brands or hobbyists copying individual older parts like these train windows — I suspect by now they've already lapsed into the public domain, since patents tend to expire after 20 years, trademarks can lapse if a company stops using them, and copyright on toy designs only applies to ornamental characteristics rather than functional ones. This last bit has been the cornerstone of a lot of IP litigation involving copies of the minifigure or mini-doll, since it often comes down to LEGO's legal team demonstrating that the same functional uses are achievable without an identical or near-identical ornamental design. The only real ornamental aspects of the train window frame and pane are based specifically on the real-life subject, not ones original to the LEGO piece. Third-party parts and sets do sometimes unnerve me for other reasons, like when they copy more recent parts/sets or ornamental aspects of part/set designs, but I don't see any problem with clone brands or customizers copying nearly 40-year-old functional elements that LEGO has stopped producing. Let alone with the customizers like ME Models who produce stuff like L-gauge rail pieces with different lengths or radii that are based on the same standards as older, still-in-use LEGO parts, but not specifically copying parts LEGO has made.

Yes, but only the sets for the first half of the year. Like last year, LEGO will probably be holding their own press event in late Spring to announce the new sets that they didn't exhibit at Toy Fair.

I saw one site report that there will be YouTube videos, but no idea whether that would mean a full series of webisodes or just a few promo videos like pretty much all themes get.

When the Detective's Office set came out a lot of people were similarly surprised about the mirror in that set. At some point the designer explained that they were able to do this because the mirror in that set (made from a reflective surface applied to one side of a foam sheet) is technically counted as a textile element, so it doesn't have quite the same costs or restrictions as new molds do. Textile-based LEGO elements like this are shaped using a digital die cutting machine, same as the way LEGO cuts custom-shaped stickers in sticker sheets. So I'm not surprised Ideas sets have access to new textile elements via the same loophole. Yeah, in general licenses are IP-specific, even for IPs that are related to the same brand or character. LEGO having a license to produce Mickey Mouse figures doesn't mean they already had a license for sets based on the Steamboat Willie short. In fact, even different Marvel movies are covered by separate licensing contracts — after all, Marvel doesn't want to give up the merchandising rights for any more of their portfolio than toy companies are willing to pay for, and toy companies don't want to pay for the merchandising rights to any more of Marvel's portfolio than they actually plan to use.

To be honest, if they wanted ghost minifigures with that kind of wispy shape they would probably just use a recolor of the same one as Ninjago introduced. After all, the Ninjago ghosts with that leg shape were depicted with a look not too unlike the ghosts in the Hidden Side app: https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/ninjago/images/2/21/Bansha1.png/revision/latest?cb=20150725222835 The bigger concern I was bringing up in my post was the ghost designs from the apps and illustrations being entirely transparent. LEGO has tried different approaches to making fully transparent minifigures in the past and none have fully met their safety and quality standards. The usual connections between minifigure parts are too tight to work as a connection between two polycarbonate parts (the material LEGO typically uses for transparent elements of standard LEGO hardness), since tight connections between polycarbonate can result in enough friction/resistance to limit their ability to rotate or even permanently damage them. If you've ever connected a transparent 1x1 round cone to a transparent lightsaber blade you ought to recognize how this can be a problem. LEGO has found workarounds for some issues like this in the past, either by using different materials, or creating new molds with connections that aren't quite as tight). Sometimes But so far they haven't found any adequate way to make this work with minifigures. Posts like this one from people lucky enough to own prototype minifigures can attest to them being much stiffer and more brittle than the ones that appear in sets. Ordinarily, LEGO deals with this by using transparent heads, arms, and/or legs but not transparent torsos, hips, and hands. But I really don't feel like this would be adequate for recreating the look of a ghost like in the illustration shared earlier, which don't really have many distinguishing characteristics (clothing, etc) besides their bodies being transparent. It'd just look like it was a pink ghost wearing a T-shirt and gloves made of pink bubble gum — gross, maybe, but not very creepy or ghostly looking. This is also why force ghosts and full-size holograms of people like those in Star Wars and Nexo Knights have yet to appear as physical minifigures. Someday, maybe…