Blondie-Wan

Just FYI, there’s actually more Indiana Jones screen material right now than there was for Star Wars, Toy Story, Middle-Earth, Pirates of the Caribbean, Cars, or any of numerous other franchises had when they first became LEGO themes. Of course many of those have since expanded dramatically and some now have far more material than Indiana Jones, and it’s also true the greater part of the Indy franchise doesn’t have a huge mindshare and isn't likely to ever get much in the way of merch, but FWIW it does exist; there are over 40 hours of filmed Indiana Jones adventures on which they could base sets if they wanted to. Well, the Indy franchise offers a lot of stuff outside the scope of what Adventurers does; it’s not all forgotten ancient temples hidden away in deserts and jungles. Indy also has a 20th-century historical milieu that broadly intersects with the sorts of things covered by all sorts of lines, from Adventurers to Architecture to City and modular buildings. And of course there are the characters. I love Adventurers myself, and hope to see it return, but it’s not like it’s an evergreen anyway. Frankly, those who want it back might yearn for LEGO to revive Indy and for that to do well, since its success would present the best argument for reviving Adventurers once the Indy line is retired again. I’d be good with it, though I’m not sure how likely it is (beyond the old joke about how LEGO sets might frequently diverge wildly from scenes on which they’re ostensibly based anyway). I think if LEGO were going to use the license at all, they’d prefer to utilize the scenes already in the franchise; otherwise why not do them in Adventurers, when they can do so without license costs? But I’d be very much up for it personally, especially if they used it to fill out the back story that was planned but never made it to screen, like Indy and Belloq crossing paths in 1920 and 1921.

I mean… they did make a set of it, so… And what’s wrong with playsets? Isn’t that what we want in a location?

There were actually three Last Crusade sets from the 2008-2009 line, one in the first wave (7620 Indiana Jones Motorcycle Chase) and two in the last (7197 Venice Canal Chase and 7198 Fighter Plane Attack). Each of the four theatrical films got at least two sets, and up to six (excluding promos, extended line stuff, etc.). The part of the screen franchise that was most woefully underrepresented was the TV series, which had no sets at all despite making up more than 80% of the filmed franchise in terms of sheer running time. Of course that’s because it’s the part of the franchise with which most people are least familiar, but I’m hopeful (not optimistic, exactly, but hopeful) it’ll get some love if and when the LEGO theme returns. Really? The films are full of iconic locations. The second movie is even named for one. I mean, I don’t profess to know how well they would do as sets in 2022, but FWIW the original line sold notably well, and a healthy chunk of the line was made of locations, along with vehicular chases and a couple other action setpieces from the films.

What a stunningly beautiful set. I’m kind of gobsmacked you’re leaning towards a negative review on the basis of it “not doing more” (!); considering how utterly gorgeous it is, I’d consider it fairly priced even if it had zero functionality and were a completely static model. The fact it works as it does? Just amazing, and complaining that it doesn’t do more feels a bit like complaining that Minifigures cannot actually move around on their own, speak, and assemble and disassemble themselves. For US fans the set seems reasonably priced, though of course the vagaries of exchange rates and TLG’s pricing typically seem to work against builders in other lands, and that appears to be the case here. Here, though, I find it difficult to complain; it feels worth getting even purely as a parts pack, never even minding the build. Perhaps that’s just me, though…

A solid review, marred only by the omission of the stickers, and made up for by the writing. As for the set, wow. As with many fans, I have a special fondness for Tatooine, given its centrality to so much of the saga, and I’ve long been planning a kind of “Tatooine build-athon”, in which I finally put together in one big stretch a stockpile of still-sealed sets I’ve been saving up: 9490 Droid Escape (2012) 75136 Droid Escape Pod (2016) 4477 T-16 Skyhopper (2003) 75081 T-16 Skyhopper (2015) 75265 T-16 Skyhopper vs. Bantha Microfighters (2020) 75198 Tatooine Battle Pack (2018) 10144 Sandcrawler (2004) 75173 Luke’s Landspeeder (2017) 75270 Obi-Wan’s Hut (2020) 75052 Mos Eisley Cantina (2014) 75205 Mos Eisley Cantina (2018) 4480 Jabba’s Palace (2003) 4476 Jabba’s Prize (2003) 9516 Jabba’s Palace (2012) 75005 Rancor Pit (2013) 75020 Jabba’s Sail Barge (2013) 9496 Desert Skiff (2012) … and now this latest Mos Eisley Cantina, which just arrived today (ordered for May the Fourth, and on backorder for a month!), plus perhaps a few I’m forgetting. I do have a number of additional sets (plus dupes of some of these) that I’ve opened and put together, and in fact I just recently opened and assembled second copies of both the 2014 Cantina and Obi-Wan’s Hut, but everything on this list is something I still have at least one sealed copy of. Alas, I lack a number of sets, most notably the UCS Sandcrawler and any pod racer set produced in the last decade (save 9675 Sebulba’s Podracer & Tatooine, from the first wave of Planets sets back in 2012), but still. It’s enough to make for a satisfying marathon, I think, and I’ll be happy afterwards to break down some of the material and MOC my own versions of this stuff using elements (parts and design aspects both) from all of these, plus other sets I have that I’ve put together already. Somehow I’ve managed to get all four major Mos Eisley Cantina sets TLG has made (I have two copies of the 2004 original, though both have long since been assembled and then disassembled, and their parts mixed into the general pool). I’m really looking forward to this one. I just wish they didn’t feel the need to continually tweak the Stormtroopers; I’m not crazy about the new helmet design. I’ll probably try to put together “ideal” Sandtroopers from various gigs from over the years, including some other older Stormtroopers to help expand the group a bit. And I’ll eventually mod the other earlier Cantinas and such into various additional Tatooine buildings.

Huh - Queer Eye? I hadn’t kept up with the thread. My copy of Everyone is Awesome arrived today, though, so that’s… awesome. I just put it together, and it’s delightful. I’ll keep it together a while, probably longer than usual since it’s such a nice display piece and even though it has useful parts I don’t especially need any of them for anything else right away. I might get a second copy.

Oh? Do we know what the Star Wars royalty rate is?

I think it’s reasonably likely - after all, it would hardly be the first time they revived a domant licensed theme they’d previously touched in order to capitalize on new media releases in the franchise after the franchise itself had lain dormant a while. It’s previously happened with Toy Story (with the sets that accompanied Toy Story 3 in 2010 followed by those that came with Toy Story 4 in 2019) and Pirates of the Caribbean (with the D2C Silent Mary set in 2017 for that year’s fifth film in the franchise, six years after the original 2011 theme accompanying the fourth movie). Other franchises with licensed LEGO themes that went away for a while and then returned include the Wizarding World (Harry Potter / Fantastic Beasts), Jurassic Park / Jurassic World, Marvel (after the original Spider-Man sets from 2002-2004), DC (after the original Batman sets from 2006-2008), Winnie the Pooh, and Mickey Mouse & Friends. Did I ever! The ‘08-‘09 line consisted primarily of 16 boxed retail sets; I got a combined total of over 50 copies of them. 7623 Temple Escape is the only one of the sixteen that I have only one copy of, and I’d have been happy to get more if circumstances permitted; I got anywhere from two to ten copies of each of the other fifteen sets. I also picked up the Brickmaster polybag, 20004 Indy’s Jungle Cruiser (the announcement they’d do that set was the final impetus I needed to sign up for Brickmaster), and most of the “extended line” stuff - all six of the minifigure keychains, one of the two minifigure / brick magnet packs, even two LEGO Nintendo DS cases with buildable surfaces with tile mosaics (I do not have a Nintendo DS, so I got those purely for the LEGO elements and aspects). I lack only the other magnet set and the ultra-rare stuthe two convention exclusives that were limited to a few hundred copies apiece. As you can probably surmise, yes. The movie was indeed in development hell for years, and I began to become doubtful myself. However, recent months have made it unequivocally clear the movie is finally going forward and on track for release next year. We know not only some of the producers but also the writers and director, and at least six cast members. Sets have been built. Shooting is starting this week. It’s happening. LEGO likely wouldn’t rerelease sets anyway; they’ve shied away from that in recent years. They might do completely new sets based on scenes they’ve done before (just like they’ve had multiple versions of the Millennium Falcon, Hogwarts, the Batmobile, etc. over the years), but rereleasing the exact same Indy sets they first released in 2008-‘09 was surely never in the cards. If by HF you mean Harrison Ford, he is indeed returning. He’s always been quite open about his interest in returning to the role; he’s always been keener to do Indy again than Han Solo or Rick Deckard. All great and obvious candidates for sets, and all things we never got in the original official line, though of course fan creations have filled in many gaps. There are a few other untreated moments from the films as well, such as the Hatay tank chase and the chase through Marshall College, and those might make fine commercial sets. For me personally, what I’d most love would be anything from the TV series, but as it just doesn’t have the recognition of the films I don’t really expect it to receive anything in the way of official sets. But you never know; Lucasfilm would surely love to have mercy out for the show, after all... The Grail Temple and the Dunn & Duffy Circus train have long struck me as some of the most viable candidates for D2C treatment. But this license might never get any, but anything’s possible... I love the existing fedora that was created for the theme, but a combined hat & hair one would be great to have. Alternately, if they wanted to keep using the existing one, I think it works well enough as is but would work even better if they printed hair on the back / sides of Indy’s head. I mean, they could do D2Cs of the Dunn & Duffy Circus train, Club Obi-Wan, the Temple of Doom, the Bantu Wind, Warehouse 51, the Grail temple, Akator, or all sorts of other things, but most of them are wildly unlikely. I’d be for it! I do think the Chachapoyan Fertility Idol temple from Raiders is as iconic as it gets for this license, and probably the single strongest candidate for anything to be remade (at least among “location” sets, as opposed to vehicular chases). And the Grail temple is a major exclusion, one a new line would hopefully address. I’ve long thought a CMF line would work well for this franchise. It would be an ideal way to include iconic characters omitted from the sets, particularly in various other outfits, as well as deeper dives into the canon that might be deemed too niche for full sets, like the TV show or the various books, games, comics, etc. I’d be so beyond delighted to have official LEGO minifigures of Helen Seymour, Remy Baudouin, and Sophia Hapgood. As much as I obviously love Indiana Jones, I’d also be thrilled to see Johnny Thunder and co. return. The Adventurers line was a joy. I certainly assume they’d offer more variety in face prints for Indy this time, including more obvious age differences. The last time, they used the exact same minifigure for every set in the entire first year, regardless of whether it was 1957 Indy or 1936 Indy. It actually worked for me, since I day does use pretty much the same exact outfit all the time in “field” mode, and the level of abstraction already inherent in the minifigure design allows for glossing over of differences like aging IMO, but with trends in minifigure design going the way they have the last several years, I expect them to get a lot more detailed, even if they don’t really need to.

Why? Is the virtual event something bad that we’d be better off without? If people were hoping for a specific new product launch, wouldn’t a big event that might well be full of multiple product launches be good? I’m looking forward to it. I bet it’ll be fun!

Today I was going to make my first visit to a LEGO Store in over a year and buy this set in person, but a family thing came up that kept me from going, so I just ordered it instead. Ah, well.

Oh, goodness yes. Here’s what I said in response to a comment on Facebook about this set the other day: ”When I first played with LEGO as a kid in the mid-‘70s, green was pretty much exclusive to baseplates and trees, and essentially all other bricks came in just five colors - red, yellow, blue, black, and white. Oh, and transparent. Gray and trans colors came along and helped me build many cherished memories of Classic Space before I entered my dark ages in the mid-‘80s, and then when I came back out in the early 2000s there were quite a few more colors, but still not like what we have now. As I type this I’m looking at the labels on three Creator buckets from 2002, all copies of 7837 Build and Create, proudly emblazoned “Limited Edition - Includes exclusive purple bricks”, and remembering how at the time just having bricks in a color like purple was a Big Deal, and of course now the LEGO palette is so much more broad-ranging than so many of us could ever have imagined back then. What a time to be alive, eh? Of course with this set, the meaning and message is the overwhelmingly most important aspect, and I am delighted that this company whose products I cherish has come out with such a strong, unambiguous statement of support for LGBTQIA+ equality, but purely as a fan of the brick I can’t pretend I’m not going to be excited just to get some of these parts in these colors. Even (or especially) if the minifigures are all unprinted and the other parts mostly basic bricks and plates, the set is a treasure trove.”

Update: you’ll all undoubtedly be glad to know I did that very thing, but it turns out I have a defective part in this seven-year-old set! Fortunately it’s nothing rare - one of the tan 1x6x2 arches. But still! I’m glad it wasn’t something set-specific licensed thing. Off to TLG’s customer service...

Ordered 75292 The Razor Crest and 75290 Mos Eisley Cantina for May the Fourth (along with a copy of the GWP 40451 Tatooine Homestead with each); I’m still awaiting the Cantina (it was back ordered), but looking forward to it. Today, for the anniversary of Star Wars, so far I’ve assembled a copy of 75270 Obi-Wan’s Hut; I might build another set later (thinking about one of two copies I have of 75052, the version of the Mos Eisley Cantina from 2014).

On the contrary, I mentioned it at least three times, and with other Technic-related terms, to boot.

Okay, in case 1974 is seriously concerned this thread isn’t sufficiently LEGO-y, then here, let me help... BRICKS bricks bricks bricks BRICKS studs, studs, tubes & studs MINIFIGURES MINIFIGURES baseplate BASEPLATE Duplo baseplate LEGO LEGO LEGO AFOL clutch power Technic clutch Bionicle Classic Space AFOL KFOL TFOL. LEGO CUUSOO, LEGO Ideas, Design by Me! Modular buildings, yo. Classic Space! Classic Space! Pirates, arrrr. LEGO House Star Wars! Town, Town, City, Town. World City, World City, Heartlake City, Ninjago City! Friends, Minidolls, Minifigures, Microfigures. ABS! ABS! Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, ABS. Power Functions! CCBS! Johnny Thunder! Zach the LEGO Maniac! Ole Kirk Kristiansen, LEGOLAND, Billund, Billund. LEGO Club! Brickmaster, Brickmaster, Scala, Aqua Raiders. Blacktron! Blacktron! 9v Trains. Dark stone, bley. Minifigure, Mindstorms, maxifig, Modulex. Minidoll! Minidolls! Bigfigs! Trophy figs! Technic, Technic, gear ratio, liftarm. LEGO Studios, clutch power, Clutch Powers, Chase McCain. Darth Vader, Batman, old gray, new gray. Hello there! General Kenobi! Monster Fighters, CHI! Forever sorting, LEGOLAND Discovery Center. TT Games. GWP, SNOT, BURP, POOP, leg godt. Only the best is good enough. Maersk! _____ There you go. Glad I could help! Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.

While most of your points are well-taken, I do think the question of “which Doctor?” has an obvious answer, given that it’s LEGO and that they offer multiple build options with these. If they were to do a Doctor Who LEGO Art set, they could very easily present it with options to do it with any of the Doctors, just as one can do different Iron Man pictures with that set. I mean, your other points about why a Doctor Who one is less feasible / likely are still quite true (though hey, it’s still possible), but I don’t think difficulty of choosing one particular incarnation of the Doctor is by itself much of an obstacle to this set idea. Huh, I hadn’t noticed the part before, but what’s the deal with that black element under the picture, just to the left of the gold minifigure crowbar? It looks like a double-wide brick separator. Edit: I just read a review of the new map set, and I see that’s exactly what it is. I hadn’t really kept up with this line, so I didn’t know about that part until today... or about the 16x16 “Technic baseplate” elements (or whatever one calls them) used as bases in this line. Huh! Neat. Hmm... I saw it! It’s certainly an unexpected choice, but I like it. It’s different, and deemphasizes the national boundaries and whatnot for natural features that are usually kind of ignored in big world maps like that. It gives it a distinctive point of identity among other world maps aside from simply being made of LEGO (even if that would have been enough). I don’t expect to get it, though, simply because they already make far too many things that I want (and on occasion I even find myself spending money on things that aren’t LEGO - crazy, I know), but I’d be very happy to put it on a wall if I had it.

If you’re doing non-purist customs, you might be better off getting unprinted brown minifigure heads and then adding custom faces.

Fantastic! Looking forward to seeing the final result.

Gee, maybe if so many Conservatives weren’t intent of demonizing people and saying they’re inherently bad for merely existing as their true selves, LEGO’s positive affirmations of basic decency wouldn’t come across as “Liberal”. Beautifully said. Indeed, I’ve been wondering whether this could be the first in a series of Pride-themed seasonal sets. They do seasonally-appropriate sets all year round, including the Winter Village line, the Advent Calendars, the occasional Monsters-themed thing around Halloween, various GWPs for everything from Easter to Halloween, etc.; why not make Pride Month a recurring LEGO “theme”? Again, That’s great, really, but you should understand what you’re talking about if you’re going to run around asserting you’re proclaiming truth.

Yeah, I was initially going to ask whether they thought it was anything from this absurdly long list of things it clearly isn’t - a pizza, a bicycle, an electric fan, a gym membership enrollment form, a sack of potatoes, a boomerang, a ballpoint pen, etc., but decided against it, and opted for just “aquarium filter” as it seemed sufficiently ludicrous on its own.

A statement like “people should be free to be themselves and enjoy equal rights and love who they want”? Yes, that statement is absolutely acceptable. Why wouldn’t it be? Isn’t that exactly what they’re doing? What do you think this is, an aquarium filter?

I think it’ll be like lots of popular sets, like the various current floral sets, for example - they’ll probably have periods of it going out of stock and then back in, as they do new production runs in an attempt to meet demand. Since it’s not touted as being limited to 20,000 copies or whatever, I think they’ll just keep it in production a good while, like any other set, and as it gets farther and farther from the release date it’ll become easier to get, like other hot sets (the Ideas Apollo Saturn V, for example). I think pretty much anyone who wants it will therefore eventually be able to get it, but it’s quite possible they won’t be able to get it in time for Pride Month this year, say (just as it’s occasionally been difficult to snag a new Winter Village set in time for Christmas, for example, but one could get it the following year).

(pic snipped) Perfect. Nicely done, TLG.

If TLG made a Noah’s Ark set that included two of each of a slew of different animals, I think a lot of us in EB would die of excitement. It would hardly matter whether we were Christian or not.

Omigosh. I know this is a late response, but that story is both appalling and hilarious, and thanks so much for sharing it.