danny316p

As Duplo rabbits go, this one was offered for a fairly low price at LEGOLAND Billund two years ago (and also as a free gift with Duplo purchases of a certain size). I picked up a couple at the time as gifts for friends and family; I wish I'd picked up more! I felt the quality was nice and they were very soft.

That avoids the "creepy" and "cheap" complaints I mentioned earlier, but it's also a more modern imaging of the character. I guess it makes sense, if, you know, you're buying DUPLO stuff for kids young enough to be in the target age range for it.

Humanoid characters are boring. How about a CCBS Jabba the Hutt? Or anything from this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_Star_Wars_species

...I'll also take Ewoks. That could be adorable.

It's really not about the set, it's about the pieces in quantity...I know I'll be buying in for this one.

Drome Racers wasn't well received by the public. I think that last racer I picked up might be the least I've ever paid for a set - it was in a "free or trash" bin. I guess we could try to get someone to pay me to take a set off their hands, so that set wouldn't have that distinction anymore...

I find that I'm more interested in tools than games. I liked the Creator games. Digital Designer was pretty good. It would be nice if they made it easier to build larger Worlds, or even an entire Universe, so you could basically live your Life inside of the game...

I'd be more interested in pushing LEGO to license out some characters to manufacturers that make quality stuffed animals. Most of the plush toys we've gotten with LEGO branding so far have been very cheap quality-wise - sometimes with fabrics that feel downright scratchy. I forget who made the plush minifigures that were available at Toys R Us a few years back, but those were horrific (even though a similar design had been passably made for LEGOLAND before).

Given that the European market has a few high-end manufacturers in that space, you'd think it would have been a no-brainer to license Ollie the Dragon (a long-running classic mascot of the LEGOLAND Parks) to a company like Steiff or Hermann that could make a top-notch version of the character for adult collectors - the European parks in particular could easily sell an iconic souvenir for the equivalent of a few hundred dollars each. It's not like LEGO doesn't aim sets at that demographic, or like LEGOLAND doesn't already carry licensed plush items from other toy manufacturers...

I think LEGO has done OK with picking things to make into plush toys. I already mentioned Ollie, but we also can get the DUPLO rabbit (even if it is a creepy rendition of the character) and a healthy variety of Friends and DUPLO animals. What I'd really like to see added to the assortment (although it may be inevitable someday) is a few plush toys based on animals introduced in the Collectible Minifigure range - the teddy bear being an extremely obvious pick, but the penguins and Batman's lobster would be great too.

I also feel a need to own (in as many forms as possible) the Bat-bear from the Batman movie.

If they made the Elves dragons in plush form, I'd feel a need to own them all. I'd be curious about other more organic characters from LEGO's past...I know I've seen pictures of the Aquazone octopus in plush form before. The green Dragon Masters dragon could be fun. Fabuland would work well, as would Arctic polar bears, the DUPLO cow, the Chima animals, the minifig fish, the Homemaker baby, Captain Redbeard's parrot, the sharks, the various Divers marine animals, the Paradisa pony, the TDN module...then again, some of those probably wouldn't sell very well.

I just found out that eBay has a LEGO plush section: http://www.ebay.com/bhp/lego-plush?rmvSB=true

(which Finn's sister might be expected to start collecting once she ages out of Duplo).

 

Age out? That isn't a thing. I, for one, would love to see LEGO make a 2 hour movie about how people who believe that are wrong about the sophisticated interlocking brick system.

Don't tell me that there's a maximum age on the box! That's only a suggestion!

It definitely isn't the first time, that's for sure. It's a shame I don't live on the coasts or I might go to one of these. Good luck with your setups!

On opposite coasts? I'd love to hear an example to prove me wrong, but I think no group in the US has attempted that sort of range. Now, in smaller countries where the two coasts aren't that far apart, it may have been done...

On second thought, re-reading that, I only said "clear across a country". That was dumb - there was one year GFLUG did a train show in Tampa, Florida the weekend before Brickworld Chicago. You'd think I'd remember that south-to-north stunt since I was there at both shows as a member of that LUG. Still, that's the short way across the US...the east coast and west coast are much farther apart.

We do (somewhat) take requests if you'd like to see us do a show somewhere else. We tend to repeat the same big conventions and events near the bulk of the group, but BioniLUG has done Brickworld Chicago, BrickUniverse Dallas, and BrickFete Toronto before too - we get invited to way more events than really make sense as a group, but we're more likely to consider a location if we know we have other BZPers or BioniLUG members interested in hanging out there.

I haven't heard of a cosplay theme for a LEGO Convention before. I'll have to keep that in mind if I go to Brickscascade.

It's new this year. I hope it goes well! It's a theme with some serious potential. When we do BrickFair New Jersey around Halloween, we also encourage people to dress up, with decent results.

However, the highlight of the year was seeing the Lenticular Toa mosaics at BrickFair last summer. I'd been wanting to do something like that ever since I discovered the concept, but it didn't become affordable until we made it a group project. I spent a ton of time designing and planning for these, unsure if I'd ever get a chance to see them in person. But I was able to make it to BrickFair, and got to help put the last few together, and they were totally amazing! Don't know how I'll be able to top those...

I'd say the lenticular mosaic project was a highlight for many of us...but I guess those of us involved aren't the ones most active on the forums.

I wonder what they'll do with all of our feedback about things they obviously weren't looking for when they wrote the survey.

I'm under the impression that these would work with any sort of bottle caps.

I think people who only see BZPower stuff online forget how big and successful BZP has been in recent years. After Bionicle was discontinued (the first time), things like the Convention Circuit program and BioniLUG popped up - both of which are beasts of their own that show no signs of dying out any time soon. We might be a fairly quiet online community, but all of the in-person stuff we've branched out into has been doing well.

I'll also reiterate what Aanchir said about other forums dying out - ignoring the social media cesspools, this is one of the more active places to discuss LEGO these days.

I figure we're lucky if the people at WB who write these things actually know about Bionicle. The teases we've had so far could easily be entirely from people at LEGO giving their input into stories that were already written by people outside of the company. We'll probably never know what portion of these movies comes from each of the given companies that work together to make the movies happen...

About a minute after posting this, I realized I'd been staring at multiple Power Rangers the whole time and didn't realize they weren't part of the crowd.

I may still be exhausted from the trip.

To provide background on how a new theme impacts an existing one: occasionally, LEGO changes (or scraps) product plans based on not wanting to compete with themselves. Note how we never get a nice red Creator house while there's a red City fire station on the shelves. This sort of thing is often written into contracts for licensed themes - for example, we didn't have any space themes for a few years when Star Wars first came out, and Castle was put on hiatus for the first waves of Lord of the Rings.

Other LEGO villains would have been pretty exciting in The LEGO Dimensions Batman Movie too...
 
There's now a reddit thread seemingly confirming this.

Come on Benjamin (whoever you are)

Benjamin is ChocolateFrogs (and apparently not reading this thread)

I had been thinking dark tan - however, I wouldn't put it past them to use dark tan bricks to represent an element in gold or copper. Even the model shops don't have that wide of a variety of bricks in any gold colors...

Maybe some other time. I'm really behind on Edward and Friends still.

Over on my other outlet, I've focused in on the ninja's tassel - an apparent hint that the normal LEGO part might be produced in a new color this year (so far, it's only available in black).

Ugh, typos in this post. Embarrassing. 

But really, that speeder bike is clearly the highlight of the show. Man, I really want that.

 

No, we haven't covered the highlight of the show yet. Unfortunately, it doesn't involve LEGO - KNEX put out a pretty fantastic display this year.

...but the Speeder Bike is definitely one of the better LEGO sets coming up.

 

One of the more hotly-debated "compatible with LEGO" toys of the past few years

 

[citation needed]

 

Fair enough, but I wanted to avoid discussing the controversy on our front page. There's some disagreement over exactly what the facts are, and I didn't want to take a side (especially not on BZPower's behalf).

My understanding of the issue, as informed by a variety of in-person conversations, e-mail threads, and social media rants:

Coaster Dynamix had previously had a relationship with Adam Reed Tucker (an LCP who is largely responsible for starting the Architecture series). The gossip breaks differently depending who you hear it from, but apparently that relationship ended badly and Coaster Dynamix discontinued Adam's "Roller Coaster Factory" sets (like this) in favor of developing a different LEGO-compatible roller coaster system. Coaster Dynamix is now rolling out a supposedly completely new system that doesn't build off of the previous one. Adam put the word out a while back that AFOLs shouldn't buy the new system because he thinks it is still based on his work. Last I heard, there were still legal proceedings taking place regarding whether or not Adam should be compensated further for his previous involvement in Coaster Dynamix' LEGO-compatible products. The last few concrete things I heard about that situation were gossip-y comments in person last November. Since then, I had been informed that the new Roller Coaster kits would be coming out "soon", but I hadn't seen any new details of the sets before Toy Fair (there was an AFOL at BrickFair Alabama who had a dinosaur theme park layout that uses some parts from Coaster Dynamix, but that was all I'd seen of the system - and I didn't know how current those were relative to the upcoming kits).

...admittedly, I don't think there's much overlap between the Bionicle community and the parts of the AFOL community that I associate more with Adam Reed Tucker (mainly Architecture, the LEGO Certified Professional program, and the Brickworld convention in Chicago). However, this was a topic of interest to the larger LEGO fan community, and the presence of one kit in an unexpected area made it likely that other LEGO fan outlets would miss it (even if they were already at Toy Fair in person).

There are other reasons the kits were hotly debated - Kickstarters that dragged out, delays in getting Roller Coaster Factory kits, issues with purism ("it's not really LEGO!"), arguments over the quality of the parts, etc. I'm not that interested in going down the rabbit hole, but I feel like I've heard an unusual amount of debate about Coaster Dynamix' attempts to enter the LEGO hobbyist market since the first Roller Coaster Factory sets were unveiled at Brickworld Chicago 2013.

 

 

*EDIT

 

I made a complete mistake in dates, I thought it was on a Saturday and missed it...

Sorry we missed you!

 

 

It was my fault anyways, but who knows, if there's a meet up in the future I might make that. I just hope everyone else had fun talking about les boonkles!

 

Les Boonkles? I think Les Paul and Les Moonves might have came up...

I've already started angling for a more expansive trip next year. Assuming my health holds up, of course...we left NY three days ago and my feet are still sore and swollen from walking around.

 

I voted for DUPLO. Those designs have been getting exciting lately, and no one pays attention because it's DUPLO. It's like how I tell most people about Bionicle things...

It's the gears thing, innit?

 

We also got an Exo-Suit last year, and an ostrich the year before that. Oh, and plenty of rare colors, bizarre shapes, and more licensed goodies...

I did get a few pictures of the books at the booth. Both have been finalized and look great. Maybe tomorrow...