Aanchir

That's the problem, though — for most of those years since 2007, LEGO has been thriving. Even today their sales are much stronger than they were three or four years ago. Why, then, is anyone assuming that something that's been going on for over ten years without issue is now a severe threat to LEGO? If anything, the long-term growth in the number of sets has been a response to continuous year-on-year sales growth. It's not just something that's been happening by accident. I'd question whether bigger sets/higher piece counts are actually a bad thing. That seems to rest on the assumption that price and piece count are rising at a similar rate. But as a counter-example, the average price-per-piece of recent Ninjago sets is much, MUCH lower than it was in 2011 or 2012. $80 in 2012 would buy you the 680-piece Destiny's Bounty or 622-piece Ultra Sonic Raider, while $80 this year would buy you the 1137-piece Dragon's Forge or 914-piece Ice Tank. Piece counts in 2011 and 2012 were also brought down by the large number of Ninjago spinner sets, which offered less than 25 pieces for $10. By comparison, Nexo Knights impulse sets like the Ultimate Knights and Battle Suits offer around three times as many pieces for the same price. Also, just as sets that don't have piece counts on Brickset might mean the number of sets this year is greater than it seems in the graph, it could also mean that the average piece counts and percentage of 999+ piece sets are less than they appear. You can't just assume that the missing data from your graph will reinforce your argument.

Don't those graphs indicate that the number of sets has been falling for the past two years? Isn't that sort of the opposite of the argument you're trying to make (that lately there have been too many sets)? After all, LEGO was certainly not struggling for sales in 2014 or 2015 — they were thriving, generating more demand during the holiday season than they could even manage to satisfy.

Bear in mind that back in the classic era, sets had a longer shelf life, so new sets would be competing for attention on shelves with sets from the past two or three years. I wouldn't say there was less internal competition in that scenario — just less consistent demand from set to set due to some being years older than others. I also think your notion that "too many sets" is the problem that nearly sent them to bankruptcy is a bit reductive. There are a lot of things that LEGO was doing wrong back then, which in general they've taken great care to avoid repeating. The number of sets on shelves this year didn't happen abruptly or without warning. Years before The LEGO Ninjago Movie and The LEGO Batman Movie, other themes like LEGO Ninjago, LEGO City, LEGO Star Wars, and LEGO Friends all had large numbers of sets, and rather than hurting their sales it's helped make them year-after-year bestsellers. LEGO is very good at growing or reducing individual themes gradually as they test what the market can bear, and if you think the LEGO Ninjago Movie or The LEGO Batman Movie's huge numbers of sets came out of nowhere, you haven't been paying very close attention. The reason they get such big waves is that they follow in the footsteps of The LEGO Movie and LEGO Ninjago, which each have had success with similarly broad product ranges. I'm curious which three sets you think are "insanely outside the kid target market," considering that there are only two sets that are priced higher than $120 (Destiny's Bounty and Ninjago City), and Ninjago has had a $120 set nearly every year since the theme began. I hardly think anybody would argue that every one of those bigger Ninjago sets was adult-targeted. For that matter, City has had sets priced as high as $180 or $200, and it is a decidedly kid-targeted theme! Going back further, classic pirate ships Black Seas Barracuda and Skull's Eye Schooner both cost over $200 in 2017 dollars when they first came out. Parents spend way more on toys for their kids than you give them credit for. There's no denying that Ninjago City is aimed mainly at teens and adults (and I doubt LEGO would have priced even it so high if it weren't following in the footsteps of other successful adult-targeted sets like Temple of Airjitzu and Metalbeard's Sea Cow). But there's no reason to think that Destiny's Bounty or Temple of the Ultimate Ultimate Weapon are not in fact aimed at kids in the age ranges marked on the box.

I think them not being "go-to" colors speaks more to the sensibilities of the builder than the quality of the colors. There's no particular reason a building or vehicle couldn't use any of those as a main color, and I'd say Emma's House and Heartlake Sports Center use purples quite well. Plus, as the saying goes, "any part can be a Space part", and that applies to colors too! Yeah, like that. The rarely-used color Bright Reddish Orange is a great example of this. Currently, for things that are around that color, neither Bright Red nor Bright Orange is an ideal match. For example, the Porsche 911 GT3 RS set used Bright Orange, but the original color of the car is more of a reddish orange, and I saw a number of reviews mention that the Bright Orange didn't quite feel right. The Twin Pod Cloud Car from Star Wars is another example where LEGO has been forced to choose between red and orange — they used Bright Red for the classic set, and Bright Orange (which was a closer match) for the "Planets" series mini-model, but a reddish-orange would probably have been preferable to either. My point isn't that these colors are "yellow-looking". My point is that there's much, much less you can do to a color like yellow or orange than to a color like green or blue before it stops looking yellow at all and starts looking brown or tan. Brick Yellow isn't really any further from classic yellow than Sand Green is from classic green, it's just that the word "yellow" is much more narrowly defined than the word "green". As such, it's just not realistic to expect as much variety in yellows or oranges as in most other color families.

I think they used Friends and Ninjago because they wanted to focus on some of their most popular current and upcoming themes, not because they had movies planned for all of them. I wouldn't at all mind a LEGO Friends movie that riffs on high school movies the way The LEGO Batman Movie riffs on superhero movies (though granted, some high school movie tropes are already being used in The LEGO Ninjago Movie).

Part of the reason there are so few yellows and oranges in your list is because a lot of the colors derived from yellow and orange fall into the Tan/Brown color family. Lighten a typical shade of orange and you arrive at something pretty close to Nougat (flesh) or Light Nougat (Light Flesh). Darken the same color and you get something close to Dark Orange or Reddish Brown — in fact, the classic brown color that Reddish Brown replaced was officially called "Earth Orange", meaning it had the same relationship to Bright Orange that Earth Blue (dark blue) has to Bright Blue (classic blue). Additionally, Brick Yellow (tan) and Sand Yellow (dark tan) are tones of Bright Yellow much like how Sand Green and Sand Blue are tones of Bright Green and Bright Blue. Your idea that some of the purples and pinks are "utterly redundant" feels a wee bit arbitrary? The only two listed that are particularly similar are Lavender and Medium Lavender, which are hardly any more redundant than Bright Green and Dark Green (classic green) or Medium Blue and Light Royal Blue. Plus at the end of your post you suggest bringing back a color that would fall into either the blue or green color family, both of which already offer plenty of variety according to your own list. It goes without saying that pink and purple are also extremely popular colors among girls and women, so singling them out as "useless and stupid" has some unfortunate implications. I'd say if anything feels conspicuously absent in my eyes it's a shade of reddish-orange — pretty much all other RGB tertiary colors have some LEGO color to approximate them, but the only reddish orange colors besides Transparent Fluorescent Reddish Orange are all retired (and were rarely used to begin with). I'd also like to see Nougat and Light Nougat used more for building elements rather than just skin tones — while you may think Nougat is "ugly", the Nougat family are the closest colors the current palette has to a "Light Orange", "Medium Orange", or "Sand Orange". Worth noting also since you are an LDD builder, Nougat and Medium Nougat look much richer and more different from one another in real life than on LDD.

If you do think you might want to dip your toes into other Ninjago sets, it wouldn't be a bad idea to be on the lookout for the Dragon's Forge… I've heard of it already getting marked down in some stores, and it's an amazingly elegant building with a creative dragon, a great price per piece, and a very interesting cast of characters! In general I agree about the movie wave being extraordinarily strong, but that said, I don't think Ninjago in general has really been slacking in that department in recent years. There have been lots of outstanding dragons, buildings, and vehicles between 2015 and this year. What the LEGO Ninjago Movie does best is expand the scale of these sets, raising the average price point of the ninja vehicles well above a typical vehicle, mech, or dragon set.

An important designer from the past is Jens Nygaard Knudsen, who designed the minifigure and was also very involved in designing LEGO Space sets from the theme's beginning all the way to the year 2000. Another big name is Niels Milan Pedersen, who worked alongside Knudsen and from my understanding is still working at LEGO as a part designer. He worked on projects ranging from classic LEGO Space, Town, and Castle sets and designed the original LEGO skeleton, crocodile, and octopus molds as well as many more recent molds like 2002 Galidor action figure parts and the sea creature headgear in the 2010 Atlantis theme. Let's not forget Daniel Krentz, who passed away just last year. He was the first non-Dane and the first AFOL to be hired as a LEGO designer (decades before the term "AFOL" was coined). He designed the original 375 Castle set (the "Yellow Castle") and many other Castle and Pirates sets over the years. Here's a pic of him on Flickr from fellow designer Mark Stafford, with some more facts about him and the sets he designed. Here's a pic of designers Daniel Krentz, Niels Milan Pedersen, and Bjarke Madsen with Castle sets they designed over the years!

So far, actual LEGO model design all happens at the global headquarters in Billund, rather than in regional hub offices like the London one. I'm having a hard time finding any information on whether any designers work in the London office — if they do, chances are they're working not on products but rather on things like catalogs, marketing materials, etc.

The LEGO Ninjago Movie soundtrack came out today. The track list has some potential spoilers, including possibly reinforcing something that I had speculated about before:

So judging from this discussion, no interest among historic builders in the Wizbat figure? To me it seems like that one's torso and skirt would be great for generic wizards in historic builds, since bats already have sort of spooky/occult connotations and the bat patterns on the robe and necklace aren't obvious Batman logos or anything like that. Granted, I realize that wizards aren't typically something you army-build the way centurions are, but even so it strikes me as odd that the centurion is the only figure here being considered for historic applications. Incidentally, the Ninjago Bricktober figs also have some parts that could possibly be useful in historic contexts, even if nothing quite as specific or sought after as classical Greek and Roman stuff. I'm looking especially at Neuro and Flashback Krux (the two in the middle). I seem to remember that a number of historic builders were interested in the previous Krux and Acronix figures in 70626 who reused the headgear of the CMF Rogue, but put off by Acronix's MP3 player and ear buds. This figure lacks those features.

If I had to guess, I'd say it's a highly simplified 55982, except with a bit of cheating since the bottom ball and the bottom part of the wheel are occupying the same space.

To be honest, I kind of see things the other way. The thing I've found about baseplates is that they encourage fairly rigid, grid-based thinking compared to smaller and more customizable bases. Not to mention that a 16x16 plate is much more versatile than a 16x16 base since you can connect things either to the top or to the bottom. With a set like https://brickset.com/sets/41311-1/Heartlake-Pizzeria, another amazing offering this year, you get both a 16x16 plate and an 8x16 plate. With those, you can do like the set does and use the larger one for the base and the smaller as a roof or second story, or you can use them both together as a larger base, or you can even raise them both for a building with a raised foundation. And you can extend them with other plates from your collection without the base becoming uneven. Baseplates discourage that kind of free thinking. In the hands of a kid or even most adults, the base of the pricier https://brickset.com/sets/6376-1/Breezeway-Café is unlikely to be used for anything other than a base. Don't get me wrong, baseplates have their uses. They're OK for creating perfect grid streets in a city, for example, which is how the modular buildings use them. But I've seen so many MOCs where builders try to force Castle or Elves sets together onto a rectangular grid, and it really spoils the more organic look that comes from being able to rearrange smaller bases to one's liking. Us AFOLs know advanced techniques to take builds "off-grid", but for kids the simplest way to achieve this kind of look is to be able to move the sets around freely on separate bases without an unnecessary rectangular footprint implying a "right" or a "wrong" way to line them up. The Elves sets, with their frequent use of rounded plates to give them a more organic-looking footprint, excel at this. Overall, I think we're much better off with full-thickness plates than half-thickness baseplates. In fact, I dream of a day when the outdated road plate system is supplanted by a more customizable system of plates and tiles. It'd mean no more need for AFOLs to waste effort transferring modular buildings onto road plates when they could just build the roads up around the buildings. Not to mention make it much easier to create inclined roads so your street layout is less "samey". Your notions about the mini-doll are simply at odds with reality. Friends has been a greater success with girls than any other theme in the company's history, and Elves is doing alright for itself as well. Friends has been among the top five best-selling LEGO themes for the past two years and will probably remain on that list this year. The Friends amusement park roller coaster was literally the second best-selling set last year, ranking higher than literally any other 2016 LEGO set (the only set ranking higher was 2015's Millennium Falcon). And the idea that the girls who love friends would love it even more with the classic, blocky minifigure is pure ignorance that flies in the face of the findings of an extensive global study of over 3500 girls and their families. I don't see why the idea that many girls might prefer their figures more lifelike than the minifigure is so hard for AFOLs to grasp. Have you considered that maybe the reason your Walmart moved Friends and Elves sets might be to bring them closer to other LEGO themes now that Friends has done so much to erode the stereotype that LEGO building is for boys? Or even that Walmart is sometimes just kind of clueless in terms of their shelving policies?

I'd dispute that. This year I feel like there have been a lot of great sets under the $75 price point. Some assorted standouts: https://brickset.com/sets/41188-1/Breakout-from-the-Goblin-King-s-Fortress https://brickset.com/sets/41317-1/Sunshine-Catamaran https://brickset.com/sets/31070-1/Turbo-Track-Racer https://brickset.com/sets/70614-1/Lightning-Jet https://brickset.com/sets/70626-1/Dawn-of-Iron-Doom https://brickset.com/sets/41323-1/Snow-Resort-Chalet https://brickset.com/sets/70904-1/Clayface-Splat-Attack https://brickset.com/sets/31064-1/Island-Adventures https://brickset.com/sets/41183-1/The-Goblin-King-s-Evil-Dragon https://brickset.com/sets/75881-1/2016-Ford-GT-1966-Ford-GT40 I could definitely name even more sets I consider especially strong designs from Friends, Elves, Ninjago, Speed Champions, etc. And that's just this year's sets — the past couple years have also had plenty of noteworthy products of their own even at low-to-medium price points. I think it's unsurprising that to us AFOLs these sets get overshadowed by the bigger stuff, especially the stuff targeted at older builders, but I don't think that's a sign that the smaller stuff is lacking in quality, value, or design effort.

I'm not sure what you mean; Jay's always been pretty insecure. It's one of the core facets of his character, evident in even some of his earliest episodes like "Snakebit" (in which he's embarrassed about his parents and his upbringing) and "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" (in which he's desperately afraid of screwing up his first date with Nya). When bad things happen (like the attack of the Great Devourer), Jay is basically the quickest to start feeling hopeless and overwhelmed. And a considerable number of Jay's more recent character arcs have been built on his insecurities about how Nya feels about him. Some of the stuff I've read definitely indicates that Jay is still smitten with Nya in the movie, although in this continuity they haven't yet initiated a relationship.

But again, the level of detail of the previous Nindroids was already pretty variable. The Nindroid Drones in 2014 didn't have headgear, leg printing, or even silver arms like the typical Nindroid Warriors. Even one of the Nindroid Warriors in the X-1 Ninja Charger set lacked leg printing or multicolored arms, basically sharing the Nindroid Drone design except with headgear. It'd be one thing if the past two years' Nindroids were less detailed than all the ones we'd gotten previously, but in fact their level of detail is somewhere in between the Nindroids we've gotten previously — more detailed than a typical drone, less detailed than a typical warrior.

The lack of shoulder armor is understandable because that's basically Cryptor's thing, and I wouldn't have expected leg printing on this one since the magazine figs tend to stick to parts from current or recent sets. I don't feel like it's that much of a letdown; certainly more distinctive than the Nindroid Drones who don't even get headgear. That's a pretty cool weapon he's got too!

That particular version is only in one set, but you make a fair point that there were other similar ones in other sets (just with different helmets, faces, etc). I just grabbed the first two examples I could come up with of recent-ish knight minifigures who only came in one set and were decked out in full helmets+armor.

For what it's worth, you could probably afford a LOT of Castle minifigures by reselling or trading the Disney Castle minifigures. Just going by the last six months' BrickLink sales, a new Donald, Daisy, Mickey, Minnie, and Tinkerbell could be sold for a minimum price of $55.53 and an average price of $82.01! And in many cases the prices of current lots for sale have risen even higher. For that kind of value you could get at least ten Castle figs, even relatively rare ones like the 2013 King's Knight or 2012 Black Falcon. Granted, figs you get that way wouldn't be new Castle minifigures in the sense of having new, unique designs, but as far as army building goes it still seems like it could be a pretty enticing possibility.

LEGO has used a similar technique before, in a Friends set no less! Adventure Camp Tree House used a larger tire and a longer chain for its tire swing! Good review overall. I don't particularly feel drawn to this set, since it's not a part of one of the themes I collect and doesn't really touch on any of my current or childhood interests. But it's certainly a work of art! The original project was great in its own right and the designers did a great job translating that into a finished set. This set has a really great, somewhat gloomy seaside atmosphere and would fit very nicely in a town layout.

Very cute! I love the proportions, ears, and whiskers!

Amazing creation! I might never have seen this normally since I don't usually venture into the Pirate MOCs forum, but I decided to today on a whim and I'm glad I did! I like the slightly comical feel of the traditional ship hull sitting atop some fairly modern-looking wheels. The cockpit dome is another incredibly distinctive choice, especially with those protective bars around it! The scene you created for the Colossal Battle contest feels very energetic and like something straight out of a comic book!

Beautiful! I especially love the stone wall, the pond, and the lanterns! The pink and white blossoms and purple and blue water lilies also add a real sense of serenity to this scene. I feel like a lot of MOCists don't fully appreciate how great an impact these kinds of gentler colors can have. I do kind of feel like the pagoda itself feels a bit out of proportion, with each floor being taller than it is wide… I would probably try to diminish the amount of space between each roofline and the top of the screens. The roofs themselves are quite beautiful, though!

Plant/undergrowth pieces like 3741, 6255, and 15279 can be great for adding texture/dimension to a forest floor and helping to separate the path from the wilderness. How dense you make them depends on what type of forest you want to make. Mushrooms are also easy to build using a 1x1 cone and 2x2 dish! The color is up to you, and there are even a couple printed radar dishes specially designed for use as mushrooms! (one in red and one in Sand Yellow/Dark Tan). Another suggestion I'd make is to try using darker colors for the ground. You're using a lot of Brick Yellow/Tan which is normally a nice color for building environments, but for a forest floor it looks very dry/arid. Forests are generally a lot more moist due to most of the soil coming from decomposing plant matter. Some possible alternate colors to think about using include Earth Green (Dark Green), Dark Orange, Dark Brown, or Olive Green. I also agree with Kabel and XBrickMonster, some trees will really help sell this as a forest floor. You can build the ground as accurately as possible but without trees it's hard to recreate the shadows that are so distinctive to a forest environment! Trees can also be useful to help organize the undergrowth — for example, mushrooms and moss tend to like to grow by the sides of trees, while grasses and leafy plants might prefer to grow further away from the tree trunks where they'll get more light. If you search "LEGO Forest" (without quotes) on Google or Flickr you should find plenty of MOCs that can give you even more ideas!

Interesting! Are you thinking of this portal's perimeter as a physical gateway like in Stargate? If so, it might be cool to add some decorative supports to the sides to make it look more ancient and mystical. But if it's just meant to be a hole in the open air that's not so necessary.