Aanchir

I think this is an overly simplistic point of view. First of all, there's really no reason adults can't enjoy Ninjago as much as any other theme. Granted, it doesn't have the inherent nostalgic draw of LEGO themes that already existed when we were kids or themes based on movies that existed when we were kids, but the building level is far more advanced than, say, City or Castle, and even the story told in the TV series has way more substance to it than stuff like the Transformers movies. Perhaps more importantly, there are plenty of kids' animated movies that manage to thrive without relying on adult audiences. Pokémon: The First Movie, for example, was critically panned in the US but still made $31 million in its opening weekend. The Cars movies are frequently derided as much more childish than other Pixar fare (there's a reason the Cars 3 sets were released as part of the Duplo and Juniors themes), but Cars 2 had a $66 million opening weekend and Cars 3 had a $53 million opening weekend in the US. I understand that as adults we often want to think our opinions are important, but in the fields of toys and animated movies they're often nowhere near as significant as how actual kids feel. And last but not least, even if we assume that The LEGO Ninjago Movie performed worse than the others due to a lack of adult appeal, that doesn't mean its performance had anything to do with lack of AFOL appeal. Just as AFOLs make up a very small slice of the market for LEGO sets, we also make up a very small slice of adult moviegoers. And the adults whose perspectives probably have the biggest impact on the success or failure of a kids' animated movie are parents, not AFOLs. If the LEGO movies' box office sales depended on the movie's AFOL appeal, then chances are they all would have bombed — after all, even if there were a million AFOLs out there and every last one of them bought two average-priced (at the time, $8.17) tickets to the opening of The LEGO Movie, it would have accounted for less than a fourth of the movie's actual opening weekend box office revenue.

Nice dragon head builds, although I don't see anything particularly wrong with the original ones. After all, it's not particularly unusual for animals and monsters in the world of minifigures (like Smaug, or the LEGO Castle dragons, or the LEGO City alligators) to have curvy heads with printed eyes. And I'm not sure how well the new heads all suit the bodies they're paired with. The fire dragon and wind dragon heads in particular feel a bit too large and gaunt to really suit the curvier and more streamlined bodies of those dragons, plus the wind dragon head's color doesn't quite match its body. My favorite of these is probably the head you built for the queen dragon. It looks powerful and pretty well proportioned to the body, but also has a certain graceful elegance to it, rather than looking super harsh and aggressive.

Looks fantastic IMO! Lots of creative brick sculpting and lettering, new roller coaster and funhouse mirror elements, unique play features, a super distinctive overall design, and filling in several major gaps in the movie theme's minifigure selection! All for a very reasonable 7.2 cents per piece. That's not even touching on the creative callbacks like the "Forever Sorting 2" DVD box! I feel like this is way more enticing than a plain Wayne Manor set, and the reason is it's distinctiveness. Besides the Batcave, which was released in a separate set, Wayne Manor is basically just a big empty mansion. You could release a set like that as a Creator Expert set without any superhero characters and with a different name and many people wouldn't know the difference. But this set design really encapsulates what makes The LEGO Batman Movie (and Batman's world in general) unique from our own — the persistent influence of heroes and villains with larger-than-life personalities and practically absurd visual identities. It's the same as how a Batmobile set would inevitably have much more appeal than a set of an ordinary luxury car that happens to belong to Bruce Wayne. Besides that, it's WAY easier to convert the elaborately decorated Joker Manor into the much plainer Wayne Manor than the other way around, To all the people complaining about there being too many huge $200+ sets lately… LEGO doesn't design sets at this price point expecting people to try and get all of them.

I'd guess it's a couple factors: a) these sets generated massive appeal among young kids and not nearly so much among adults, and b) as those kids move on from LEGO their used sets tend to flood the market, killing the sort of scarcity that tends to drive higher prices. Sort of the same thing we see with Bionicle — lots of sellers on BrickLink, not so many buyers. By comparison, with sets that are either aimed at adults (like Creator Expert) or attract large numbers of adult collectors (like the licensed themes), once those sets are bought, they can remain off the market for years and years.

I think having two huge movie themes to focus on probably kept LEGO from having room to launch any new non-licensed themes this year. That said, they still have a dozen or so non-licensed themes, including several of their biggest themes like City, Friends, Ninjago, and Nexo Knights. So I feel like non-licensed themes are still getting a fair shake. I'm with you in hoping for a new non-licensed constraction theme in the near future! Even a constraction spin-off of an existing theme like Elves or Ninjago (sort of like the Chima buildable figures a few years back) would be a neat direction to take.

I think it looks quite good, myself. Small, dainty paws are a pretty distinctive trait of foxes.

There's been a number of minifigures with torso printing to suggest a bulging belly… the Sumo Wrestler, Grandpa, Homer Simpson, etc. But I guess you're suggesting a separate torso mold and/or a part that goes over the torso? In that case you're right that there have been very few figs like that… only ones I can think of are Bombur, whose belly is molded into his hair/beard piece, and Ursula whose belly and breasts are molded into her legs piece. Obviously both are way more specialized than what you probably have in mind. Personally I'd also like to see more heavy-set body types, but specifically in mini-dolls rather than classic minifigures. Minifigures are already pretty chubby by default, considering that their waists are bigger around than they are tall! Mini-dolls, on the other hand, have a more average physique, with a waist circumference around half their height. This might work for a lot of major Friends or Disney characters, but I find it lacking in the case of characters like Ursula, let alone characters who LEGO might want to include in future Disney sets like the Sultan from Aladdin or Chien Po from Mulan. And unlike the minifigure, which often uses printing alone to convey depth, the mini-doll already has four different molded torso styles to represent different body types… surely heavier body types shouldn't be out of the question.

Just got back from watching it. I had a lot of fun! I have to agree with the critics that it wasn't as good as the other LEGO movies, which as a huge Ninjago fan is a bit of a bummer. But I had a good time. Despite deviating from the show a bit, the characters were handled alright, though Lloyd's family was the clear focus. Lots of emotional moments, fun jokes, and beautiful animation. The biggest weaknesses were more story-related than anything… odd pacing & some plot threads resolved in a way that didn't feel totally earned. But while it's a weaker installment in the LEGO Cinematic Universe, I do feel like it still earned its place in that universe. I hope kids leave the theater with an enthusiastic interest in Ninjago going forward!

Fledge only stands on his back legs in the sets, but he still has four limbs (not counting wings). In the TV specials and webisodes the baby dragons like Lula generally walk on all fours like most of the adult dragons.

The trouble with that is that Futuron, Blacktron, Space Police, and M:Tron all also had the same "LEGOLAND Space System" branding that the Classic Space sets did. So "LEGOLAND Space" doesn't really help distinguish things any more clearly than "Classic Space" does. Speaking of that… there's a part of me that still wonders if we'll ever see another wave of sets that's branded solely as "LEGO Space", the same as how the latest Castle and Pirates sets were branded as "LEGO Castle" and "LEGO Pirates". Space is really the only one of those classic themes that hasn't really ever been designed with that sort of "back to basics" approach, and while those Castle and Pirates waves were sort of looked down on as stale and samey, I kind of wonder if all the nostalgia for classic space sets (and the lack of a similar approach in recent memory) would make people think about a Space wave like that at all differently.

There's a part of me that almost suspects that it IS the old Dark Turquoise… after all, LEGO brought that color back not too long ago for paints and textile elements (most recently for Anna's cape in a recent Frozen set), so of all retired colors it now stands perhaps the best chance of being used for actual bricks again. That said, it could also just be a misleadingly rendered Dark Azur.

I'd say they have a nice home in action/adventure themes since they incorporate more magic and fantasy elements than most other themes the Sci-Fi forum covers, and more sci-fi or modern-day elements than most other themes the Fantasy and Historic forum covers. The new stuff definitely has more of a tech angle than past stuff, but digital or not, Merlok and Monstrox are still effectively wizards casting spells to power up their forces. You don't see that sort of thing in, say, Space or Exo-Force. Nor even in other sci-fi leaning action themes like Rock Raiders, Alpha Team, and Aquazone.

I get some Chima vibes from the new sets, and I don't mean that in a bad way. Some of my favorite Chima sets were the Legend Beasts, and these guardian creatures are in many cases even bigger, more streamlined, and more impressive than those were. Beyond that, despite things like Emily's sword and crossbow or Aira's boomerang not actually featuring in the show, the idea of giving the Elves weapons seems to have caught on, because in these new sets they're even more heavily armed! Their new weapons are creatively built and given their distinctiveness compared to the more generic weapon pieces used in the past, I wouldn't be surprised if they feature in the story. It's quite neat how well the weapons fit the characters' personalities — Aira's bow is probably the most mechanically intricate, Naida's staff ties in with her strong magical abilities, Azari's hammer suits her tough and assertive personality, and Farran's shield reinforces how he's at his strongest when he's caring for or supporting others. It's interesting that these seem to cover basically an entire story arc, instead of certain content being obviously absent that might be saved for a second wave. I hope that means that it's going to a Ninjago-like model of separate story arcs for each wave, rather than meaning that this will be the Elves theme's final wave. We only get a couple buildings this time around, but I love how distinctive they both are. The largest set definitely has some kind of Technic function, which probably partly accounts for its 9–12 target age. Love the big mushrooms in that set as well! On that note: I have a hard time telling if that bluish green color on so much of the enemy stuff in this wave is just Dark Azur or if it's possibly a return of Bright Bluish Green (Dark Turquoise/Teal)? Normally I'm quite cynical about the possibility of older colors returning, but Bright Bluish Green has been used for textile elements not too long ago, and these parts look slightly more greenish than the Azurs often tend to look in renders.

Perhaps both? Just because it's imagined doesn't mean it can't also real. How can you be sure someone's not just imagining you?

Sand Purple (Sand Violet) was also used extensively in the Life on Mars theme! It was a fun color, although nowadays I feel like Medium Lavender is often a decent substitute. Fun fact: there was actually even a metallic (pearl) sand violet that was never really used for bricks. An "Earth Pink/Earth Reddish Violet" might look sort of the color of grape juice. Something kind of intermediate between black, red, and purple. I do have to admit that I've found myself wishing such a color existed in the past, when trying to construct a brick-built figure of Garnet from Steven Universe. The color of her shoulders and the left side of her body are such that Dark Red, Dark Purple (Medium Lilac), and Magenta (Bright Reddish Violet) all feel somewhat "off". But there's the question of how many sets or themes would actually end up using a color like that. There are a few reasons LEGO might want to avoid introducing too many new colors even to fill gaps in their palette. One is simply logistical — their color palette expanding out of control was a big issue in the early 2000s, with many of those colors only appearing in a few sets. The decision to cut back to between 50 and 60 colors that could be used extensively and shared between themes was very deliberate. Nowadays it's much, much harder to get new colors approved — Copper Metallic is actually the only new color that's been added to the palette since 2013, and the fact that it even got approved is part of why I'm so confident we'll see it again in other sets and themes. Another reason is more branding-related. Compared to real objects, customers often expect a certain brightness or richness from LEGO bricks. This is part of why so many colors got replaced with newer versions around 2004 — they were often colors that looked dull, dingy, or washed-out and didn't seem to truly fit in with classic LEGO colors like Bright Red, Bright Blue, or Bright Yellow. To an adult builder, a color like Salmon or Sand Red might be open up some really great possibilities! To a kid, though, it might just feel like a gross or dingy-looking pink.

On the flip side of what I said before, it is worth noting that many figs like I was describing (including those you've listed) are alternate versions of major characters in the movie. So even if that particular version of the character isn't too important or memorable, a fig of them can derive part of their appeal from how memorable and important that character was in general. But even then, a lot of the LEGO Batman Movie villains were of fairly minor importance to the movie as a whole, as were a lot of the characters in The LEGO Movie sets and minifigures series. Certainly many of them didn't get called out as blatantly as the Fuchsia Ninja does.

With regard to the fuschia ninja, worth considering how many figs we've gotten for The LEGO Movie and The LEGO Batman Movie that were likewise just momentary sight gags.

The thought experiment sort of starts to lose meaning when you start including long-retired sets at their original RRP… even ignoring appreciation in the aftermarket, inflation alone means that those sets cost a lot more than we often give them credit for. Sure, in 1979 you could have theoretically bought 25 Galaxy Explorers for $800… but back then, $800 was worth over 3 times what it's worth today. I'm a bit interested also that most people seem to be choosing sets they want for their personal collections… if I had $800 that I could only spend on LEGO, I feel like I'd probably spend at least part of that on gifts for other people!

Medium Azur and Dark Azur actually came out around the same time. Dark Azur first started appearing in 2011, in Galaxy Squad sets, while Medium Azur began appearing the very next year in Friends sets. One thing I love about Medium Azur is how great a look it offers for water (it's used in this capacity in a lot of Friends and Elves sets). Medium Azur is also a great "companion color" to Tr. Light Blue, which like the Azurs is more greenish than most of LEGO's other blue colors. I kind of doubt that any of the old coppers are coming back. However, LEGO introduced a brand-new copper color called 346 Copper Metallic just this year. So far it's only been used in the LEGO Ninjago Hands of Time sets but I think we can probably expect to see more of it in the future! I'm not sure if this will be useful for what you want to use it for, since compared to 139 Copper, it has less of the brown color of an old penny and more of the orange color of a copper wire or a shiny new penny. So probably not as useful for wrought iron. As far as purples and pinks are concerned, you can think of it this way. Back in the day many LEGO color names could be organized into a neat spectrum of primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. That means Reds, Reddish Oranges, Oranges, Yellowish Oranges, Yellows, Yellowish Greens, Greens, Bluish Greens, Blues, Bluish Violets, Violets, and Reddish Violets. I made a chart on LDD years ago organizing the colors named in this fashion by hue and tint/shade/tone, which you can see here. Today, a lot of those colors are retired, and in many cases new colors with less formulaic names have taken their place. But just thinking in terms of a horizontal spectrum of 12 different hues, what we might think of today as purples and pinks would take up between 1/6 and 1/4 of that spectrum (depending on whether you consider "bluish violets" more purple or more blue). Six colors out of 38 falling within this space hardly seems like overkill to me. Plus, even thinking of pink as more purple than red is kind of an arbitrary distinction — ask a kid what colors make pink and they'll usually say "white and red". To be honest, this is probably a big part of the reason that other tints of red (like the old Salmon/Medium Red and Light Salmon/Light Red) don't exist on the current palette. Incidentally, that chart also pretty effectively illustrates what I meant about tans and brown being derivatives of yellow and orange — darken or desaturate yellow or orange and you're inevitably left with some shade of tan or brown.

The reason LEGO no longer includes "inspiration models" on boxes or in instructions for most sets is that they always got loads and loads of calls to LEGO Customer Service asking for instructions, and the callers were inevitably disappointed to learn that instructions not only weren't available, but didn't exist. Not only did the cost of answering all these calls add up, but it forced LEGO into a situation where they could not satisfy the customers' wishes. A lot of "inspiration models" also weren't up to the same design standards as the models that instructions were provided for, so if a person did go to the effort to recreate them they'd often find that they were fragile or not very playable. Putting the inspiration models through all the same rigorous design testing and restrictions as other sets would have driven up the cost of these sets considerably. Another note: rather than "the good old days", the year 2003 (when the first batch of Designer Sets came out) was when the LEGO Group hit their lowest point financially and nearly went bankrupt. According to the book Brick by Brick (which I recommend to anyone who's interested in LEGO history and why they do things the way they do today), "In early 2004, an internal survey of the company's entire product portfolio revealed that 94 percent of LEGO sets were unprofitable. Only Star Wars and Bionicle kits were making money. Not only had LEGO sustained the largest losses, on a percentage basis, among toy makers, but it was by far the industry's least profitable brand." (p98) So it is not entirely surprising that they have not sought to imitate that business model. The Creator 3-in-1 line has generally been a lot more successful than the Designer Sets were. I agree the loss of these inspiration models is unfortunate, but that said, I understand why they went away. They're beginning to make a comeback in the Classic theme, though those sets are generally a lot simpler than the Designer Sets were.

I mean, we don't have exact numbers for individual sets, but we know the overall sales figures each year and what the most popular sets and themes have been for several of those years: Star Wars, City, Friends, Ninjago, and Duplo. If you think LEGO cancelling popular, long-running themes is the solution to their problems, why is it that you suggest cancelling Ninjago and Star Wars instead of, say, City and Duplo? Certainly City and Duplo are no less huge or repetitive than the themes you're so certain LEGO would be better off without. For that matter, why are the themes you suggest they SHOULD focus on ones like Castle, Space and Pirates rather than more recent mega-hits like Friends or Bionicle? Besides, of course, naive feelings of nostalgia telling you that LEGO should be more like what it was when you were a kid.

How is wishful thinking the only basis for that argument, when Star Wars and Ninjago have been bestselling themes for the past two years? That's a quantitative fact, not just a subjective feeling like all the wishy-washy notions that LEGO is doomed at the only thing that can save them is diverting all their attention to themes that were popular in the 80s. Your charts are good information but beyond those all you've been able to offer to defend your argument is some baffling assertion that buyers are no longer interested in some of the current most popular LEGO themes. LEGO is and will always be entirely free to reduce their emphasis on these themes when buyers genuinely lose interest. So far, it hasn't. And lol, I don't buy Ninjago sets as a financial investment. I buy them because they're some of my favorite sets with some of my favorite characters. And I've bought probably less than a dozen Star Wars sets in the past decade. Your idea of why my brother and I continue to acknowledge these themes' importance is just as ignorant as your idea of how popular and important they really are. Do you know what one of my ACTUAL favorite themes is? Bionicle, a theme that literally saved LEGO from bankruptcy 15 years ago. And you don't see me spouting any malarkey about how retiring Star Wars and bringing back Bionicle will solve all of LEGO's problems. Because I'm the kind of person who thinks facts speak louder than nostalgia, that the stuff I loved as a kid isn't necessarily what kids today want to see, and that a slight dip in sales isn't a sign that everything LEGO has to do away with all their biggest success stories of the past ten years.

In the case of ideas sets like Saturn V and hugely expensive sets like the new Millennium Falcon, LEGO is in a particularly tricky situation, as these are risky sets, and it's very tough to balance minimizing that risk without shortchanging customers. There was no doubt that a Millennium Falcon set would be popular, but there was probably a lot of doubt about how many people would not only willingly shell out $800 to get one, but do so right away instead of taking time to save up for it. The Saturn V's price point was not as unprecedentedly high LEGO sets in general, but it was unprecedentedly high for Ideas sets specifically. It had a slower climb to 10,000 supporters (about 15 months) than many past Ideas projects. And there hadn't been a lot of sets like it in the past to use as a measuring stick for its prospective demand. Another big question is that even if LEGO is able to fulfill all the demand for AFOL/TFOL-targeted sets like these… is it worth potentially shortchanging fans of their more KFOL-targeted staple themes like City and Friends? As I think I already mentioned in this thread, Friends has been huge lately, even if it doesn't get the kind of press that Ideas sets or big D2C sets tend to generate. LEGO has been trying to expand their production capacity lately, which is a big part of why they'd been hiring so many people, but if sales are flagging that kind of expansion isn't as viable an option, and forces LEGO to make some hard choices about where their resources are best used. Why LEGO is laying so many people off is clear and well-documented — because they had previously been on a hiring binge in anticipation of future growth (probably expecting that continued growth to offset the cost of all those new hires). With the company's growth stalling they have to dial things back again. Notably, the number of people they're laying off this year is not nearly as the number of new hires they took on between mid-2015 and mid-2016. And yeah, it's profoundly ignorant to assume themes like Star Wars and Ninjago are a long-term liability just because you don't like them and lump each new wave of sets together as "more of the same". Even moreso to assume that the solution is to revert to 80s themes that haven't proven themselves anywhere NEAR as beloved or reliable since the turn of the millennium. LEGO already HAD plans to end Ninjago four years ago, and went back on those plans when it became obvious how much more popular it was than they'd given it credit for and what a mistake it would be to end it.

Fair enough. For me the most iconic Batman logo is the more oval-shaped 80s/90s version that appears on Easter Batman — the newer-style bat icons on Wizbat are different enough from what I'm used to that I have no trouble seeing them as just plain bats.

Some of the reasons I tend to like LDD: I'm used to LDD's interface, controls, categories, and colors. The colors are a particularly big factor. Going into a program like Bricksmith or Stud.io I'm confronted with a vast number of colors, most of which I'm unlikely to wind up using, under names I have to think harder about to make sense of, in a confusing order. Some of the colors listed aren't even discrete LEGO colors at all, but rather just variants of other colors that are listed separately. Meanwhile, on Stud.io at least, there are many instances where entirely separate colors are conflated under one name. LDD keeps colors simpler, using their actual names and showing mainly just current colors in most menus. Working with ball joints in the other programs I've tried is a pain. On Bricksmith, you can't hinge a part or assembly along a specific axis of rotation like in real life — instead, you're forced to rotate the part or assembly along its center point and then haphazardly nudge it back into place. Often, this "nudging" requires actively going into the preferences and changing the grid size, and even then it only lets me approximate parts being connected. This is a nightmare for building posable figures and testing their range of movement. Stud.io at least has a hinge tool sort of like LDD's, but it's a pain to use with ball joints compared to the LDD version. Instead of just clicking on a set of arrows that show what axis of rotation you're manipulating, you have to click on one of several hinge points and just hope it's the one that corresponds to the direction you want to hinge the assembly in. You also can't view the numerical angles of a ball joint piece's current rotation all at once like you can on LDD. It's also buggier than LDD's hinge tool, from my experience. LDD has parts that the other programs often lack, like CCBS parts, which Lyi mentioned. This sort of cuts both ways, since LDD also lacks quite a few parts, and not just older parts that I'm unlikely to want to use, but also current ones like mini-doll parts. Half the reason I even bother having programs besides LDD is so that I can do stuff with mini-dolls, but I rarely end up doing that much with them anyway since the building process on these other programs is such a hassle. TBH, I'm so used to not making building instructions for my models that that's barely even a consideration, and I don't tend to build especially big models — hardly any of the stuff I build is more than 1000 pieces. I'm a Mac user, so a lot of the digital building software that comes most highly recommended doesn't even work on my computer. Ironically, the only way I've learned to create a model in these programs I'm really satisfied with is to import that model from LDD, then fix whatever parts disappeared or got misplaced during the import. This certainly has its uses — Stud.io in particular is very good at calculating the BrickLink price, height, width, depth, and weight of a model I've built on LDD. But I have had too many frustrations with these programs to use them as a first choice for building an original creation.