Blondie-Wan

Okay, and you don’t go around stealing LEGO and killing people. I mean, since we’re just making a point of telling people not to do things they weren’t doing and all... Because who doesn’t get along well with people who say others are inherently immoral for merely existing! “Both sides” are not equal here. 😳 You may want to check it out; it’s astonishingly good. (And as it happens, this set’s designer also had a hand in its creation!) Apparently, several elements here are new in these colors - not just unprinted monochrome minifigure parts, but even some of the ordinary 1x2 bricks or plates, according to what I’ve read (edit: just realized I’m thinking of the Brickset review, helpfully linked to by RichardGoring elsewhere on this page). I’m looking forward to a detailed parts breakdown, and thinking of getting multiples myself (one to perhaps keep built indefinitely in the LEGO room as a display piece, and one or more as parts packs). SO MUCH THIS.

I don’t believe that TLG does produce a set that celebrates sexual immorality of any kind. And I think you, TLG, and I all agree that they shouldn’t and won’t. On the particulars of this set, though, I think we’re at loggerheads. If you think this set somehow promotes immorality, then I just don’t know what to tell you; on the contrary, I think this sets promotes a deeply moral view, one that accepts and celebrates the wondrous diversity of human beings, along with their expressions of love.

That’s actually a great question. I’d love to see a BLM set. LEGO is in a weird situation with regards to race, though, since outside of sets and themes depicting real people or licensed characters, they’ve typically depicted people in yellow, standing in for the entire range of human skin tones but which many people “read” as white by default. Of course they won’t “have” to make anything, but I sincerely hope they do make sets with LGBTQIA+ minifigures. Goodness, I sincerely hope so. How? Why would making charitable donations and disclosing what they are be Pandora’s box? Don’t they already do that? Heck, don’t most companies do that? AFAICT, most companies seem to regard showing off what good corporate citizens they are as a marketing opportunity, and if they can do some actual good in doing so, that’s almost a bonus. I plan to get it myself, in large part specifically to support the message it sends. But as just a LEGO fan, I’m also excited about it simply as a parts pack. Unfortunately, that’s our world. But that’s exactly why things like this are so necessary to begin with.

Indeed, the actual construction details of the builds are nearly always wildly different (with a handful of rare exceptions, like the Curiosity rover). It’s the ideas in Ideas that are important, and they do work to preserve the core concepts. They might completely redesign a set from the way the fan creator built it, but they’re not going to turn an airplane into a dinosaur. Indeed. Remember back in the day, when there were two Ghostbusters Ectomobile projects in the same review batch, and they said “message received!”? I think they do try to balance out their approvals to reflect what’s popular on the platform, and perhaps even let it guide some of what they do outside Ideas. I think that’s why we get so many sets based on real-life space exploration, for example. They can’t just approve every space exploration idea, but they can and do approve a healthy percentage of them, because Ideas users have repeatedly told them over and over in unmistakably clear terms they really like real-life space exploration sets, and I think it may even play a role in their decisions to do such sets outside Ideas, like the recent Apollo 11 Lunar Landing and the new Shuttle Discovery.

But not all parts of the review have to be done for each project. If they determine right off the bat that something isn’t a brand fit or that the licensing just can’t be worked out, they don’t need to waste resources exploring possible builds. And even granting that the wealth of projects reaching review does still demand more of the Ideas team (perhaps enough to warrant expanding the team?), I’m still hard-pressed to see a huge pool of set candidates as undesirable - likely not for TLG, and not for us, either. Unless one is placing bets in Vegas on a review batch winding up with a small number of product ideas, I really don’t see why we should want smaller batches.

Why? What if the circumstances that prevented something from being approved three years ago are no longer in effect now? For the first few years of CUUSOO / Ideas, they never released any sets through the program large enough to have US MSRPs greater than $49.99, and many thought they never would, but these days they’ve had Ideas sets costing over $300. We’ve seen sets proposed from licenses that TLG couldn’t use at the time that later became available to them. Until fairly recently it was pretty much an unassailable axiom that Ideas sets never have new parts (not colors or deco, but new shapes / molds), but even that is no longer a certainty. Depending upon the reasons something was declined, it is entirely possible that it can be approved at a later date. They’ve even specifically had a vote choosing a single set from a number of previously non-approved projects they deemed warranted a second look; that’s how we got the ISS. Possibly, but we don’t know that. They’ve had huge batches from which they’ve approved nothing, and small ones from which they ultimately approved as many as three out of six. It’s true they can’t make everything, but I think virtually everything declined was declined for some reason other than “we were just considering too gosh darn many other projects at the same time”. There have been any number of obstacles that have almost certainly included licensing issues, conflicts with TLG’s preexisting plans, feasibility issues, safety concerns, and just plain limited business cases. Moreover, if your concern is that creators’ chances of getting their projects approved is low if the batches are huge, making it so most of the creators don’t even get into the batch is not going to do much for their chances of approval.

57!!!

56!!!

55!!! This is awesome.

Possibly. They’ve had review batches as large as 13 projects that didn’t yield any approvals at all, but they’ve also had back-to-back reviews where they approved three things at once. I believe it really is just down to the merits and feasibility of individual projects.

52 proje- I mean, product ideas in the First 2021 Review Batch, and it’s still going!

Holy smokes - I’d seen photos of the set before, but somehow hadn’t noticed until just now that the Sandcrawler uses a couple printed 2x2 tiles. I’m amazed you didn’t focus on that in the review; it looks great with them! That omission aside, this is a fine review - nicely done! - of a lovely set, and I’m looking forward to adding it to my collection.

Hm. I see this thread jumped from 2015 to 2019, and completely passed over the last official Back to the Future thing LEGO made with nary a mention, the Brickheadz set of Marty and Doc. That set came out in 2018, so not all that long ago. The timeframe from then to now is very comparable to the timeframe that separated it from the first LEGO Dimensions pack for this franchise - and in fact, a not-dissimilar span separated that from the very first LEGO BttF product, the CUUSOO set. In fact, if we lump the two Dimensions packs together, it looks an awful lot like LEGO Back to the Future is almost a very low-key but still ongoing theme, on a roughly two-to-three-year cycle: 2013: 21103 DeLorean Time Machine (LEGO CUUSOO) 2015: 71201 Back to the Future Level Pack w/ Marty McFly (LEGO Dimensions) / 71230 Back to the Future Fun Pack w/ Doc Brown (January 2016) 2018: 41611 Marty McFly & Doc Brown Brickheadz If I were inclined to read much into that (I’m actually not, but for the moment let’s say we are, just for kicks), I’d say it actually bodes rather well for a new LEGO Back to the Future thing for 2021, and as it happens we do have rumors swirling about of a new UCS- / Creator Expert-style DeLorean Time Machine. I will say that while obviously I recognize there isn’t anywhere nearly as much potential with this theme as there is with certain other licensed themes such as Star Wars, there actually is considerable untapped potential, and Back to the Future could easily given more than what it has been so far. Honestly, I think it has comparable potential and appeal to Ghostbusters, and that’s already had both more and larger sets than Back to the Future. Both themes began with CUUSOO / Ideas sets of the franchise’s iconic central vehicles, continued with LEGO Dimensions packs in 2015 / 2016, and then got Brickheadz figure two-packs in 2018, but Ghostbusters has had a lot of “bigger and more” - a larger & more lavish Ideas set, two Dimensions Fun Packs instead of just one plus a whole Dimensions Story Pack for the reboot, a huge D2C building set for the Ghostbusters Firehouse Headquarters, a regular mass-market set for the reboot’s central vehicle(s), and finally last year’s Creator Expert set for the Ectomobile. Back to the Future could conceivably still get much of this. The two franchises have a lot in common - both arose in the ‘80s and are beloved to this day, both have multiple movies, both have animated TV adaptations, both have iconic vehicles as well as memorable building locations, etc. The main obstacle for BttF receiving further attention from LEGO of the sort comparable to what Ghostbusters has gotten is that BttF doesn’t have ongoing media support from new productions the way Ghostbusters does. Most of LEGO’s GB products - all four Dimensions packs (for both versions of the franchise), the Firehouse, and the reboot Ecto-1 - were all released in a single year (2016, the year the reboot came out), while the Creator Expert Ectomobile came out last year, the year Ghostbusters Afterlife was originally supposed to come out (before the pandemic disrupted everything, of course). Back to the Future doesn’t have any more movies due anytime soon, quite possibly ever. Still, I think Back to the Future is about as popular as is possible for any no-longer-active franchise, and it does still have as-yet untapped potential for sets.

50!!!

Recent hermit crabs?! Gahhh! I used to do such a good job of keeping up with the Minifigures, but I’ve fallen behind the last couple years. :(

49!!!

I forgot to mention it earlier, but back in January LD became the first game in which I earned a Platinum trophy. My, I do love this game. I do wish we could have gotten one more year of releases out of it, though goodness knows there’s already a ton to do with it. I know there’s been a lot of discussion of third year themes already, but I often find myself fantasizing about additions that could have been but weren’t, including several we never heard rumored or anything, just things I’d have loved to have seen and that I think might have fit: The Dark Crystal Labyrinth Big Trouble in Little China The Neverending Story Bionicle Elves Nexo Knights The LEGO Ninjago Movie Unikitty! I think the last couple items would have been fairly likely if Year 3 had happened, covering late 2017 and early 2018 (particularly TLNM), but the rest not so much, though I do think they’d have fit well alongside whatever else they’d have given us and what already exists in the game. And as indicated before, now that I’ve seen both shows, I’d dearly love it if we could have had Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra in this game.

That is a fantastic face. Beautifully done, viracocha.

A display piece is wacky? Maybe if it’s clown shoes... It’s a bit of an odd statement to me because display pieces (if by which we mean large-scale, possibly functional recreations of real-world objects, like the globe, typewriter, piano, maze, etc.) make up a significant percentage of Ideas approvals, but not the largest; historically, the largest single category into which Ideas approvals fall is licensed pop-culture entertainment properties, and we’ve often had people in this very thread lament that so many licenses are produced. Other categories of project with lots of Ideas sets include vehicles, and real-life scientific exploration & discovery & research & education (particularly but not quite exclusively space exploration). On the whole, though, Ideas has grown and expanded. The first few years, everything it yielded fell into one of three core categories (not necessarily by design, but still) - licensed pop-culture entertainment properties, vehicles, and/or scientific discovery and exploration and research - there were no sets over $50, none with Power Functions, no more than four sets a year, etc., and now every one of those barriers has been broken. ____________________________ 48!!!

Updated to add Looney Tunes.

Why? I don’t get what purpose that would serve, whether for us or for LEGO.

The First 2021 Review batch now has 45 projects!

No idea, sorry. What platform are you on (or should I just assume it’s the PS4, since you mentioned Supergirl)?

Yikes! This is a disturbing thread. I haven’t had stuff break, but I also still have tons of sets in boxes and whatnot, waiting to be built. (It seems like it’s more of a thread that should be in General rather than Star Wars, though.)

It looks wonderful! And the functionality is great. And now we know (re: the commemorating a shuttle now most notorious for the deaths of crew). It’s not Columbia at all, but Discovery (I guess this thread needs a name change).