MAB

Galidor can be fun, especially if you see at as semi-realistic human and robot parts that can connect with system built parts. I remember spending hours with my kids making arms and legs and occasionally heads to attach to the Galidor bodies. My (possibly unpopular but maybe not) opinion about Galidor is that many of the haters are only haters as they have been conditioned into thinking that by others without actually playing with it.

The boat is pretty accurate compared to the movie. The shark is so much bigger than people, and would be about 20 studs long based on minifigure height. I'm glad that it isn't just a single molded part at that size. The shark and boat are the main parts of the set, and should be buildable. If people want accurate scale models that do not need to be assembled, well there are other brands that make such stuff.

I've also had errors recently, whereas I never had errors in the past going back to about 2012 when I first started using the old replacement parts service. My last order about a month or so ago was missing ten torsos (all the same torso), so I guess that this lot was either not picked or picked and put in another customer's bag.

It is not so much that resellers will lose money, but that they will control the market for a long time if the LEGO price is cheap (or even just reasonable). They could have sold it way cheaper but you will not get a look in, as resellers or people saying they really need 200 goats for themselves and friends, will continually wipe out stock even if they are per order limits. The only way LEGO could really combat it without a high price is to have a reasonable not too high but not too low price and have maybe 50000 ready to go. That way, they shouldn't sell out as the appearance of constant availability puts off second, third, fourth orders of 200 at a time. Resellers can really only make quick money if the part goes out of stock, otherwise it is a case of long term storage for high profits or very small profits or just avoiding losses if they buy parts that LEGO has continually in stock.

You are very unlikely to receive new condition bricks pre 1985 unless you paid a premium for them. If they were new in a sealed set of that age, usually the set is worth more than the parts. That turns around for modern sets, but new vintage sets have a significant premium compared to vintage parts. And if it was parted out, the seller would probably note their age, as again there would be a premium for parts that age in new condition.

I doubt the drop in price was due to customer complaints. It had only been available for what, a couple of hours?

Capes used to be relatively decent value. Prior to about 2016 or 17, in the UK, torsos used to be 53p and individual capes were generally about 50p, occasionally 60p but you had to phone to get them. One time I wanted 20 dark green capes and the only way to get them was buy the box for the Ra's al Ghul set. I think it was £1.98 for the box as it also had the collar cape, and Batman's and Robin's capes. I remember £40 seemed expensive for 20 capes but now it seems quite cheap. And of course I was able to sell on the unwanted capes. But the prices for capes now really outpaces the prices for torsos when they used to be similar.

They look great. Very memorable even though I haven’t watched that movie in decades.

No, I haven't built it yet. I've looked through the instructions online but was planning on building it when the evenings get dark. Although if it is selling well at that time, I'd sell it. I already have a lot of grey LEGO!

Haven't they sent you any emails about them recently? My Mountain Fortress was delivered last week. Although Europe might be earlier delivery than the US.

That is what I was thinking. I couldn't tell if the LOL was a joke that it had increased in price, or a joke that it hadn't.

In line with other CMF exclusives, I guess not unless it gets put into a regular box set. Although that goat is already reasonably priced on BL, especially if bought with the "free" minifigure parts. I'm hoping they do another couple of colours before they retire the mould, maybe a tan one, a dark tan one or one in a colour like dark orange. It will look more realistic than an army of white goats and grey goats.

I imagine they will stay in reasonably good availability. I think the price is too high for resellers to stock up in the 100s. I really doubt the demand for goats is there, especially high priced goats. High prices paid by a few doesn't indicate that there is huge demand. How many people are really going to be using 20 or 50 goats to drive that demand? The original hype for the goat seems to be more that it was scarce than because people wanted to army-build them. It has happened on quite a bit of Castle printed stuff, initially there is a lot of demand but the secondary market prices get driven down when resellers cannot shift them. The prices for a lot of Castle minifigure parts are now cheaper on BL than on LEGO.com as there is just too much stock in reseller hands to sell. What looked like a good investment when people were paying high prices soon becomes a burden when demand is satisfied. 20 x $2.50 is still $50. You still get free shipping and no processing fees at or near that level (depends on the country). Even if a bit cheaper, it is easy for a reseller to add a few more easy to sell parts. So they would just place multiple orders, as purchase limits don't carry over from order to order on PAB like they do for sets, and stock would be gone again. As to emailing them, remember that these are not their products. Their products are boxed sets and retail products. PAB is really quite different. What outcome do you want? As they are likely to just remove it from sale if it is costing customer services large amounts of time dealing with people complaining about a specific item.

It is not unnecessarily high. If it was $1.00, they would be out of stock already but available on bricklink and ebay for way more more than the $6 LEGO are currently charging.

The other barrier is that there is just so much other stuff available. To be on my purchase list now, a set has to hit at least a few of my targets: (i) be really good, (ii) fit with other sets I have and (iii) have some exclusivity within it that makes it worthwhile to buy the set and not just putting it together from existing parts. The latter might be exclusive prints or minifigures, but it might also be size, as it is far easier to put together small sets than larger ones.

So out of 150000 possible sets, that's about 50000 not needing to be made. That's only about 2/3rds sold this time around.

This is where having scoring functions that automatically determine whether it is a good model come into play. They are the difficult bit, but if they can come up with an algorithm to score models based on whatever criteria they want to score on, then the AI model can train itself. It designs new models and scores them, and keeps the high scores in the model to learn from. Then this undergoes many iterations, always learning from the high scoring results. Even though they start from a small number, they can generate millions to learn from and increasingly they learn from high scoring models to generate other high scoring models. That is why getting the scoring algorithm right is important as the AI model learns from the designs it designs. This is how AI works in some fields with relatively sparse initial data but reasonably well defined targets.

I reckon AI could be used to design LEGO sets, if trained on existing builds and a 'goodness' score could be defined could be defined to used to filter the acceptable designs and use these to iteratively train the model. The real problem here is defining what makes a good model to use as the score to automatically train the model without human input. I could see it going two ways, one in which the operator tells it what to design - a house, a car, etc - and the other to let it design something totally freely - where you might get a lot of wacky ideas such as sailing ships with wings, houses on legs, etc. Although probably not so wacky given Dreamzzz exists. For minifigures, it could probably be used now. Some years ago, people were using AI to produce minifigure images. But given how conservative minifigure print designs tend to be, I doubt they really need AI to generate artwork for the prints.

That probably is centred. But as the photo is not straight on, a parallax error makes it appear off centre.

So would you count things like the botanicals range as licensed as they are specific models of something. Similarly all the objects type sets that have appeared in IDEAS, or are things like the typewriter, maze and piano generic enough as they don't have a brand name? Presumably the Polaroid is licensed but the box art of the Creator camera looks very much like typical 70s and 80s cameras but would remain unlicensed. The interesting thing with that minifigure set is that they have a perfectly good in-house space logo that they could have used that would probably be popular with LEGO fans - the classic space moon logo - yet they chose to use the NASA logo (and presumably needed external permission to do so). The figure goes from being in the LEGO world to the real world by the use of the real world logo, much like the early sets containing Esso and Shell logos rather than generic garage signs.

I think that depends on the parents. My kids enjoy playing around with arduino, rasberry pi and other programmable boards. We frequently tear down old electronic toys bought for next to nothing from charity shops for motors, speakers and sound boards.

Plus this would give the possibility of a bit of height, having bag end on a small hill, rather than a very flat build. Plus some other lower landscape with a track for Gandalf to arrive in his cart. The downside is that it might be a bit similar to the existing Bag End and Gandalf Arrives, but that probably doesn't matter after this time.

For me, Rivendell gave us small updates for 11 existing figures, one new version of an existing character (old Bilbo), one character in a different outfit (Arwen), two new elves (but similar) and 6 statues (all similar). Unfortunately what the did with Frodo and Sam in Barad-Dur was very uninspiring. Even the first time around, now 12 years ago, they made multiple torsos for Frodo in different scenes.

I didn't say MOST, I said SOME. Sure, whether something is strictly licensed or not is usually clear. If it has the badge or name on the box, it is licensed. But whether someone that is a fan of LEGO cannot enjoy an accurate model of a LEGO motorcycle because it comes with some stickers or printed parts with a brand name on, not so much. That is why I think technic is a mixed theme. I don't think technic builders care so much about whether a badge is there, and if it is, it is usually a sign that the design is reasonably accurate to a real world vehicle, which is often what builders aim for. More that they see technic as a design / build style, rather than seeing the license and making that the reason behind whether they should buy or not. I say usually clear, as in the past as back as far as the 1950s, there have been licensed brands such as Shell and Esso appearing in LEGO unlicensed sets, even if they weren't mentioned on the box. Occasionally, this still happens in modern times. For example, this is apparently an unlicensed set, ...

I don't know. But that video is full of speculation.