Jeffery Mewtamer

Can't say I'm surprised the thread is mostly about CCBS. Star Wars is one of Lego's longest running and most popular licenses, so there is already a plethora of minifigs and brick built ships, with some of the most iconic having received multiple incarnations over the years. By comparison, CCBS is still relatively new among Lego's product offerings, and from the way people talk on this forum, has only gotten over it's growing pains and hit its stride in the last year or two. Anyways, As I have no idea what most of the mentioned characters look like, even if I recognize their part in the story, I have to say my most wanted Star Wars set would be a build your own lightsaber kit sized for CCBS figures.

I've only ever seen bits and pieces of any of the movies, but having heard the Radio Drama versions of A New Hope and the Empire Strikes back, I can't imagine the movies being anything but disappointing by comparison, and that's not even considering the outdated visuals. The Radio Dramas obviously expanded things(you don't fit a dozen half-hour programs into a movie), but I never got the feeling that there was filler, so I imagine listening to the movies would leave me with a highly abridged feeling. Then again, in general, Movies are probably one of the most limiting of visual mediums.

^My only exposure to recent Star Wars media has been the recent novelizations of the OT, so I can't really comment on Disney's handling of new stories, but does decanonizing the EU material really effect anything? All of that material is still there and unaltered for fans of the EU or any new fans who want to delve into it, The story tellers on Disney's dime have less material they have to worry about contradicting with new stories, and there's nothing stopping Disney's writers from delving into the old EU and pulling ideas into the new Canon. Dislike the new stuff if you want to, but complaining about the de canonization of the EU strikes me as on par with people who act like a bad reboot movie prevents them from enjoying the older media within a beloved franchise.

And perhaps more importantly, how kindly is Lego likely to take a fan project asking for funding? Because some IP holders can be real jerks even about non-profit fanworks(Exhibit A: Nintendo's treatment of Metroid AM2R and Pokemon Uranium among others).

Honestly, I'm not seeing how calling their product off brand Lego is fundamentally different from Malt-o-meal cereals having writing on the bag that says compare to *Insert closest Kellogg's/General Mills analog* or when television ads compare the product being advertised to competitors. Granted, in this case, it sounds like they're ripping off specific sets or running some kind of scalping scam, which quite a bit more clear cut an IP violation than mentioning Lego's name in the copy for buckets of bricks not made by Lego.

Any part introduced prior to 1997 has an expired patent, assuming Lego always renews patents for the full 20 years. I believe duplicating a set design would fall under copyright and copyrights have the completely unreasonable lifespan of life + 70 years, and I don't think Lego was around back when copyrights had to be manually renewed. As for using the Lego name, that's a bit murkier. If Lego has become a generic term(which I'd argue it should), than anything goes. If the trademark on the name is still active, an off brand claiming to be Lego would certainly be a violation, but I'm not sure how far claims along the line of "like Lego" or "compatible with Lego" can go without being violations. Now, even if the name has been legally declared a generic term, it's quite possible current Lego logos are still under Trademark. Sadly, generification isn't a well-defined process and it almost always comes down to court decisions as to when a term becomes generic, but the idea is that a term becomes generic when the population starts using a brand name as a catch all term for a type of product(examples include dumpster for large trash bins, zipper for meshed teeth fasteners, velcro for hook and loop fasteners, Hoover for vacuum cleaner(though I confess I've never heard anyone call a Vacuum Cleaner a hoover). And yes, I'd argue that, colloquially, people use the term lego as a catch all for any building toy that uses studded bricks as their core component, and that it would've been declared a generic term years ago in a world where IP law wasn't broken.

^Wouldn't silver or black be more appropriate for a Toa of Iron? Though, has Lego ever made metallic parts in anything other than the classic coinage metals? In particular, have they ever made parts in bronze or any cool spectral colors(copper and gold both being warm spectral or near spectral colors)? Also, would I be correct in assuming Gunmetal is a duller metallic gray compared to Silver?

Speaking of Mindstorms, it would be cool if this turned out to be the announcement of a Lego brick case for a Raspberry Pi and an official interface for controlling mindstorm components from a pi. Bonus points if it included a command line interface or libraries for writing raw C++/Python programs to work with mindstorms. Mindstorm is cool, but the cost of Lego's own control bricks make getting started a bit too cost prohibitive in my mind.

I came in partway through G2, so nothing reminds me of Bionicle, but CCBS does remind me of the "attach bits of armor to a mannequin action figure"-style toys that replaced the Digivolving transformers of earlier seasons when Digimon Frontier hit stateside.

Were any of the Bionicle G2 sets ever actually carried by Amazon? I got all my Bionicle sets through Amazon, but I'm pretty sure they were all from third party sellers.

^But were they retired because the molds wore out and Lego didn't bother making new molds or were they retired because Lego decided to focus on sets using new parts? And even if the former, what's to stop Lego from deciding to create new molds to bring those parts out of retirement or design new parts that are equivalent but are redesigned to take advantage of advances in manufacturing technology since the originals were retired?

personally, I'd be more interested in a bucket o' bricks consisting of Throwbot and Bionicle G1 parts than remakes/re-issues of old sets.

In my defense, I was pretty much completely out of the Lego loop for roughly 15 years between the cancellation of Throwbots and my decision to give Bionicle G2 the chance I never gave G1, and teenaged me wasn't really interested in system sets(there wasn't enough to the sets I could afford or convince my parents to buy, and the sets that might have given teenaged me a better appreciation for brick building were too expensive to even dream about). Besides, I'm sure there are themes that even people who were active in Lego fandom during the themes run have forgotten or never heard of. I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything Lego has ever made and wouldn't expect anyone to be so. That said, even if I've mentioned things that previously had sets, I wouldn't mind them getting a reissue of those sets or new sets. And if they previously only had system sets, I wouldn't mind them getting CCBS or Technic sets.

I wasn't aware of the Doctor Who license or that Mindcraft and Angry Birds were of European origin. I also wouldn't count Cars and Football in the same class of media licenses even if those themes include licenses to have sets based on real cars or that use the likeness of real players or various logos. Still, one would think a European company big on licensing popular media would have more European franchises among their licenses, and to my knowledge, there's a complete lack of any Asian licenses, even among Japanese Animation and Video Games that have gained mainstream status in the West. Anyways, part of me says the holy grail of licensing would be a Lego-Namco-Bandai partnership that would allow Lego to produce sets for any property whose existing toy lines are handled by Namco-Bandai. Though, now that I think about it, Bandai might be one of the biggest reasons Lego hasn't capitalized on Japanese Pop Culture with international appeal. In general, I think nearly any toy company that deals in character-driven or story-driven lines could benefit greatly from a partnership with Lego. Anyways, for specific franchises, I'd like: Sonic the Hedgehog, especially sets based on the Genesis or Dreamcast Eras. Bonus points for lots of Technic-built Badniks and Eggman Mechs. Digimon Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of narnia. Dragonball, Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach, among other Shounen Jump titles.

I second that Code Lyoko would've been cool to see in Lego. Still, that goes back to the problem that, except for Harry Potter, Lego seems to never license non-American properties.