Ash

Ta-da! http://brickset.com/detail/?set=30029-1 But seriously.... other than that I don't know of any, but I'm not really an expert. There are occasionally some newpaper promotional packs, but I think most of them get released elsewhere as well. Don't know of any of those in the next week though.

* My kid "graduating" from Duplo and at the same time reawakening my own long dormant love of LEGO. This was around the same time as the AFOL con in Manchester and we were at the museum on the same day. I was really jealous and wished I'd known about it sooner (a mistake I won't be making this year). * We both became annual pass holders at the local Discovery Center. Frankly it's a bit pants, but living so close it's still good value for money as we go every month or so. * The big one was the announcement of the Lord of the Rings license. This tipped the balance into full-blown LEGO mania for me and even inspired me to finally start a blog! * The biggest double edge sword was the discover of Brickset's amazing Amazon bargain sniffing page. Goodbye money, hello 50% off bargains. I really lack the space and funds to be a full-blown MOC building AFOL, but at the moment I'm just enjoying the ride and having fun rediscovering LEGO.

Move to Belgium! I was there over the holidays and dropped into a toy shop and they had the entire range. All at full retail (European) price though. I rarely see it in stores in the UK and it's almost always full price. It was hard to resist breaking the bank on it, but I did pick up last year's advent calendar (which I love) and the little Blacksmith Attack set. I kind of missed all of Kingdoms (dark years!) and, despite being excited about the Lord of the Rings, really hope it makes a comeback. I just wish I saw it in stores and could pick up some of it on the cheap now and then.

A combination of factors including what they're wearing, type (or lack of) accessories and how they are portrayed on the box art. Maybe not "bringing the food" but often relatively passive. Even on the rare occasions when they seem to be a fully fledged team member they're still ridiculously under-represented. If LEGO is a unisex toy is there any reason why more of the minifigures in something like the new dinosaur line shouldn't be female?

I like most of the smaller Pharaoh's Quest sets. This is my favourite though. What's not to love about a killer beetle. It's on special a lot as well, I should pick up some spares! For some reason the Kingdom's stuff seems to be crazy expensive and hard to find in the UK. I'm at the in-laws in Belgium at the moment and a shop down the road has all of it. Very tempting! Still expensive though.

I like it. Especially the detail on the gates and towers.

Well this (and a couple of others) won't be happening. Movie characters only! I think at some point they have to do The the bridge at Khazad Dum (Gandalf vs Balrog). It's kind of a no brainer. * Apart from that I'd love to see some midi or architecture style renditions of some Middle Earth landmarks. * Some kind of pack containing the entire Fellowship (so I don't have to buy as many sets to get them!). * A Gray Havens set would be nice but seems pretty unlikely. It's more emotional than action orientated and I don't think stuff like that would sell well. I like a lot of other suggestions I've seen here as well. But I can't see myself buying too many sets overall.

I meant more the other way around. I'm sure people will be happy to buy them on the secondary market, I just don't think there's going to be many people selling split sets and it's going to be hard to find the figures seperately on Ebay or if you do they will be at a premium. Unlike Star Wars where you can split the set into ship and figures and sell seperately, these sets are pretty meaningless by themselves. I'm sure there will be some out there, but I doubt it will be as common a practice. It might just be a semantics thing though. By "secondary market" I mean the reselling of sets or pieces of sets on ebay, not non-lego fans who might be interested in these. I definitely agree with you that there will be a market there.

Love it! I'll have to try and make it for my kid. But I'm missing a couple of pieces.

My issue is that I think it is LEGO's fault. I don't have a problem with this line and I hope it's a success. However I do have a problem with the way LEGO is increasingly becoming a boy's toy and they don't seem to be making an effort to make their other lines more inclusive. Aside from licensed sets where they are somewhat limited by the source materials you just need to look at their recent in-house lines. Atlantis, Pharaoh's Quest, Alien Conquest and the new Dino line each have only a single female character who appears in only one or two sets. Most of the time they're some kind of support character not actually part of the team fighting Aliens or Dinosaurs or whatever. City is slightly better but still only had four or five out of around thirty or so last year. In the past there was a lot less emphasis on minifigures and conflict and LEGO as a building toy could be seen as unisex. However more and more the set revolve around a characters in some kind of narrative and in most of those narratives women seem to play a very minor role. I think LEGO's claim of being a unisex toy has been growing weaker as time goes by. Yes building a house out of LEGO isn't gender restrictive in anyway, but fighting Aliens or Dinosaurs apparently is and increasingly that's what LEGO is being marketed as. I think some for me that's a big part of the issue. That this line in itself isn't a bad thing. I'd just prefer LEGO to try and appeal to both genders in other ways as well. And this is as a father of a male child. I just think we should be past this by now and I get so tired of all his toys continuously reenforcing the idea that it's men who fight the bad guys, and men who have adventures and men who explore and women.... like looking after sick animals. It's just a message that's he's bombarded with constantly and I really don't see any reason why it should be the case. I think there is a perception that people who find any kind of controversy in something like this are just complaining for the sake of complaining and that wanting everything to be equal with regards to toys is just a silly goal. But I think a lot of the dialogue surrounding this particular toy is part of a much bigger and ongoing issues that affects boys as much as girls. I want my kid to be able to be a boy and do boyish thing and play with boy's toys (or girls toys if he wants!). I don't want to live in a world of uniform unisexuality. However, I also want him to grow up knowing that both girls and boys can do and be anything they want. And while I do my best to teach him this, the toys he plays with, the movies he watch, for the most part send a very different message which just seems crazy in this day and age.

At present I think my biggest issues with these sets is the fact that if you want to get the complete Fellowship than there is only one path to do so. It would have been fairly easy to mix it up a bit and give people a bit of a choice. I guess for me it's a little frustrating that of the two large sets it's the one I don't particularly want that has two (possibly three) exclusive Fellowship figures rather than the one I do want (and there's no way I'll be able to afford both). I know that this is something fans of other licensed themes have had to deal with for year, but there is a slight difference here as "The Fellowship" is a very well defined set of characters that a lot of people will want. As such it would be nice if there were a couple of diffrent routes to getting all of them. I suppose it's a plus that we don't have to buy all the sets to get them all. That would have just been cruel! Likewise when you do collect the Fellowship you don't end up with many duplicates (a couple of extra Frodos I think) which is pretty cool as well. Maybe I'm protesting too much!! That said these are still preliminaries and we don't know what else they have up their sleeves. So I'll hold off complaining too much until we know for sure. One other thing that comes to mind is that unlike the Star Wars sets there's going to be a much smaller secondary market for these figures (which will in turn inflate their prices). With Star Wars some people split sets because they have little interest in the figures and just want the ships. The ships, without figures, have a lot of appeal The same doesn't really apply to these as most of these scenes are pretty pointless without the figures. Anyway, mostly just thinking out loud!

Love it. The Kitchen-Aid in particular is awesome. I might have to steal this idea at some point. Maybe my wife would go easier on my LEGO habit then!

Now you can finally build an army of council workers standing at the side of the road and drinking tea!

I like this from a "hey that looks fun" perspective, but can't see myself buying any of it except the Creature from the Black Lagoon dude unless it's heavily discounted. It is good to see them releasing an off-the-wall theme like this though.

For people looking to build armies if the line was really succesful it would be cool if we got Star Wars style battlepacks with multiple generic minifigs for major factions. It strikes me as good fit for bulking out Lord of the Rings sets.

As well as the races (breeds?) already discussed there is the potential for Misty Mountain goblins in the Hobbit sets. In theory different again to the Moria goblins. Although we won't know for sure for a while yet (unless they're in the tease trailer!)

These are cazy expensive but I got my kid a 4X2 one recently and I was really pleased with it. Sturdy and well made (Expensive, sturdy and well made... hmmm sounds familiar). I saw this on special and couldn't resist getting it to keep his minifigs and accessories seperate. Next step is going under the couch to find all of them.

While there are some possible vehicles and creatures it's more that they would be part of larger sets rather than iconic must-have items themselves. An aging Star Wars fan who still sees LEGO as a kid's toy he's no longer interested in might walk past a landspeeder and think "sweet, that's totally going on my desk" and buy it (because that's exactly what I did when Star Wars Lego first launched). But a generic siege tower won't have the same effect and appeal. The Nazgul mount (Fell Beast) could be damn cool though. And of course there's always the Balrog (PLEASE LEGO GROUP PLEASE!)

Yeah, I can't see anything close to Star Wars happening. At best I think Harry Potter would be the best case scenario comparison, but even then that seems unlikely to me. The Lord of the Rings simply doesn't have as big an all ages fanbase as some of the other licenses. It's obviously popular and has it's fans, but i just don't see the same sort of cross-over with LEGO fans. It also lacks one of the major factors in the success of the Star Wars line: Vehicles. Playsets, locations and characters are all well and good. But the vehicles or Star Wars opens it up to a much bigger market of people who just like to build and display iconic spaceships and they make up a massive part of that range.

Yeah, two-characters makes more sense. The only confirmed addition so far is Orlando Bloom I guess? I had assumed John Rhys Davies would be as well but I was shocked... SHOCKED to find they never made a Sallah figure for Indiana Jones! And, maybe, in future sets Cate Blanchette and Christopher Lee. Can't think of anyone else.

I want Galadriel just for so Cate Blanchette can join the two minifigs club! But aside from that the license will be strictly limited to the movies and there will be no choice/leeway with regards to the books. They've always been two totally seperate licenses. I'm happy with that though, the movies are more visual and probably better suited to LEGO. With regards to Weathertop one of the things I like is that they have managed to make it a bit jagged and ruined. Obviously nothing like the stuff people do in MOCs, but a bit of a nod towards that style of building structures. The two baseplates look like they could be interesting shapes/sized as well. I completely agree with you that the playset aspect of it is well done. But as a vignette I think it's a little better than average. Compare it to similar PotC sets where everything is seperate stranded on it's own little plate... I like the way this is solid and all-in-one.

Obviously the best thing about this line is we finally get a Sean Bean minifig. Now I can buy the Mines of Moria set and put him in the Kindom's Joust set and pretend it's a Licensed Game of Thrones set :) But seriously.... my own response is similar to one I saw earlier. Unrealistic expectations, initial disappointment, followed by being a bit more interested/excited. My biggest issue is that Weathertop and Helms Deep both look plain ugly. I hope it's just because they're prototypes. One of the best things about the film visually was that even though Middle Earth was a world in decline all the ruins and old fortesses were still gorgeous. I really like the fact that Weathertop actually looks like a ruin, but it needs better colours. Well my other issue will probably be the price. PotC was just crazy expensive. I expect these will be to.

Hiya, I'm Ash, I was well into LEGO as a kid many decades ago and have fond memories of the original Space line in particular. Now I have a four year old son and buying him his first sets has rekindled my love of LEGO. I don't have the storage space or money to build up a big collection and at the moment I'm just buying odds and ends on sale when I get a chance. I managed to snag Prince of Persia Quest Against Time for half price so I got myself that for Christmas as my first "big" set. I covet Medieval Market Village but it's a bit out of my price range. If I had unlimited funds I'd want to go back and get the spaceships from the original Space line again though. However, what got me really excited was the announcement for LEGO the Lord of the Rings as I'm a huge fan of the movies (and the books) and for me it's the dream license! So excited in fact that I decided to start a blog about it (Which appatently I can't link yet :( ). Not that the world needs another LEGO blog, but I'd been wanting to play around with Wordpress for a while so there we go! Anyway, off to browse the forums. Finally a picture of our last Duplo MOC before we packed it up and sold it and used the money to start our "big boy" LEGO collection!