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Aanchir

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Blog Comments posted by Aanchir

  1. I love the construction of the magic carpet in this set, since one of my first thoughts when seeing both the Ninjago tassel piece in 2016 and the Joker Manor funhouse mirror panel in 2017 was "this would be great on a new version of Aladdin's magic carpet!"

     

    I agree that the LEGO Disney Princess sets are often pretty basic and underwhelming as far as building is concerned. It's kind of understandable with this year's in particular, since regardless of size/price, they all have a 5+ age range (aside from the 4+/Juniors ones). In other themes like Friends and City, it's more typical for the target age to scale a little more according to the size of the sets, so medium-sized sets might have a 6+ target age and bigger sets might have a 7+, 8+, or even 9+ target age.

     

    Perhaps LEGO feels like older kids will be more drawn to the new or recent Disney IPs, rather than the classic princess movies and toys associated with them. After all, I feel like a lot of sets from other Disney subthemes like Frozen, Moana, and Tangled: The Series have done a better job in terms of both accuracy to the source material and impressiveness of the finished build than the ones with Disney Princess or Whisker Haven branding.

     

    I think the redesign of the Jasmine mini-doll and the new Aladdin mini-doll look quite good! Both use the Nougat skin tone that first appeared as a mini-doll skin tone on the redesigned Olivia from LEGO Friends, whereas the old Jasmine mini-doll used Medium Nougat. This seems to compare favorably with many of the movie's more brightly lit scenes. This also means that Medium Nougat can be used as the skin tone for the new Tiana mini-doll in 41162.

     

    Compared to many animals in the Disney sets, the bird in this one is rather generic, and a part of me preferred how the previous set featuring Jasmine used a LEGO Friends tiger cub as Rajah… even if he was way smaller than he ought to be! That at least was an animal that felt more distinctive.

     

    But I do approve of this new songbird element, which because of its small size and minimal printed detail will be equally suited to minifigure and mini-doll themes… much like other animals often shared between those themes like the spider, or baby bunny.

     

    The "collect and swap" feature of this set is a carry-over from last year's Disney Princess sets. I'm not too enthused by it myself, as it doesn't seem to mesh as naturally with the source material as the modular designs of the early 2000s Harry Potter sets, or offer as much versatility as the Creator 3-in-1 modular houses. But it does help seed the sets with some cool building elements.

  2. just fyi clicking the thumbnails to the leaflet just links to the thumbnails, not to the larger images!

     

    Wondering if you could come up with a more custom figure build that could use the Mata head pen beads as a head… Of course, the other possibility (since the stickers make these non-purist anyhow) could be to file down the neck stud of a blank minifigure torso.

  3. Isn't Ulysses itself like a nerdy Ulysses? Like, I know for certain that dropping references to mythology and literature all over the place in high school would get me pegged as a nerd just as quickly as dropping comic book or sci-fi references.

     

    Anyway, I haven't read Ready Player One myself, but with the movie on its way I've seen people sharing excerpts that make me rather uncomfortable with its handling of gender-related issues.

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  4. This is definitely a cool set, though I agree that the bikes are not super exciting to someone who's been collecting for a while. I really wish we could get another bike set with a play feature as fun as Kai's Blade Cycle's pop-out blades.

     

    Besides the falcon motif on Zane's bike, another thing that I like about it is how the Dark Azur really makes the color scheme pop. I feel the same way about the Flame Yellowish Orange on Kai's Katana V11 and the Bright Yellowish Green on Lloyd's Ninja Nightcrawler, and I am really hoping the next vehicles for Cole, Nya, and Jay will also have exciting color combinations like that. But if they don't I might just have to MOC Season 8 style ninja vehicles for them myself!

     

    Regarding Mr. E, my difficulty avoiding Season 8 spoilers from the episodes that have already aired in Australia means I have some theories about what his identity might be, but in any case I'm really grateful that the designers have done a better job lately ensuring that the identity of "mystery characters" isn't obvious from the very first set they appear in.

  5. We're less Bionicle-focused than we used to be, but I'm gonna be honest, there's never a whole lot of discussion of LEGO themes that aren't Bionicle (to my chagrin). There was a moderate amount of activity prior to Bionicle G2's cancellation but it's really waned since then.

     

    Any drama that happens here tends to mostly escape my notice until after the fact, though I don't mean to say that as if I'm glad to have been ignorant of whatever nastiness has gone down, because people getting hurt sucks, even more so when some of them are people I care about.

     

    I don't really wish this place would go back how it used to be… if anything, I just wish it could have more success changing with the times. With Bionicle being gone there's not a whole lot to say about it that hasn't been said before, and while I do wish more of my friends were still here I also wish that the forums had a little more new blood. Of course, social media has been supplanting internet forums on a wider scale, so perhaps some of that decline in activity has always been out of anyone's control.

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  6. I saw a good post on Tumblr once pointing out that if you go back to the source material, Aragorn and the Dúnedain should really be portrayed as North African. Gondor in general also has a number of Egyptian-inspired characteristics. While of course there's no reason a new Middle Earth adaptation needs to be beholden to the source material, Tolkien's descriptions certainly leave much more room for more racial diversity than Peter Jackson's adaptation did.

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  7. I really love this song as well! And I was definitely struck by the number of Ninjago callbacks in it — even to the Skullkins, who are rarely addressed by name even in the TV show! It makes me wonder if maybe these elements might have been planned to have a bigger role in the movie at one point, and this song was a relic of those earlier plans. There's definitely a lot of stuff in the "Making Of" book that hints some earlier plans for the movie would've been very different, such as including the Great Devourer as a major plot point.

    The other thing I'm struck by, though, is how the "Garmadon!" chant gives me flashbacks to

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  8.  

     

    How does it stack up to Journey to One?

    Not trying to answer for xccj, but my own answer would be: better voiced, better written, better animated, funnier, more emotional, and last but not least, longer.

     

    Oh Elves.  If only Bionicle were given your marketing power...

     

    Worth noting also that Elves didn't start out with an extraordinary marketing budget. In 2015, it launched with a 24-minute TV special with fairly shoddy animation and only three voice actors. Its first of only two chapter books (a direct adaptation of the TV special) didn't launch until August, and its first activity book didn't launch until October. It only got one app a year in its first two years, both of which were fairly basic. It never got any graphic novels, and certainly never got a huge Comic-Con event to get the word out.

     

    The fact that LEGO Elves is where it is now doesn't seem to be because it was given a substantially bigger marketing budget than Bionicle G2. Rather, its concept seemed to resonate more with kids even with fairly minimal promotion.

     

    It may have helped that it was aimed at a demographic that not as many other LEGO themes already catered to. Part of the point of Bionicle in the early 2000s was to appeal to boys who felt like they were getting too old for "regular LEGO" but weren't quite ready for most Technic sets. Nowadays, though, quite a few boy-oriented System themes like Ninjago and Nexo Knights target more or less the same age range Bionicle G1 did, using many of the same strategies.

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  9. I had mixed feelings about all the different social groups in the Bionicle area. While it did mean that there were a lot of people I didn't know as well as my BZPals, and that meant reliving the same awkwardness as when I wasn't as well-known in the BZPower crowd and couldn't be as much a part of their camaraderie, it also meant I got to see a lot of amazing MOCs I hadn't seen on the forums I frequent, which was really refreshing to me. I've since connected with some of those builders on sites/apps like Flickr, Tumblr, and Brickly so I get to see more of their stuff in the future!

  10. I had kind of hoped that we'd get a post-credits scene for The LEGO Batman Movie of Ben Affleck as Batman playing with LEGO sets in the Batcave. :P Didn't end up happening, and wouldn't have made a huge amount of sense given that the abyss is shown to be the same one as in The LEGO Movie, but it would've been funny.

  11. I don't really see how a two-year gap and relaunch would do anything to make the Bionicle sets and story more successful if they just picked up right where the previous ones left off. If anything it would just lead to the brand losing momentum and many existing fans drifting away, without creating a whole lot of incentive for new fans to take their place. While a well-executed ad campaign could help ameliorate this, there's no reason this would be any cheaper or more effective than just launching a marketing campaign right away, instead of creating a hiatus that gives people even more time to lose interest.

     

    LEGO Ninjago is the only non-licensed LEGO theme I'm aware of that was able to really and truly recover from a brief hiatus like you describe, but that recovery came fairly slowly. If keeping it going without a hiatus had been an option, it probably would have been better for the theme. Mind you, it's a somewhat different scenario in that Ninjago's hiatus came shortly after its popularity peaked rather than after a long and steady decline, but a hiatus for an already declining theme would probably have made regaining momentum even harder, since it wouldn't have been on as positive a track beforehand.

  12. To me the more notable thing here isn't that it continues the existing trend of protagonists who aren't white men, but rather that it's a protagonist who's a nonwhite woman. As much as I liked the casting in both The Force Awakens and Rogue One, I can't be the only one who feels that Star Wars has more than its fair share of white brunettes at this point. I hope we see more diverse women in the actual movies in the future, and not just as non-human characters like Oola, Luminara Unduli, and Maz Kanata.

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  13. Interesting MOCs! Although I think the original boat from the set is more visually interesting due to having more varied colors and textures. It also looks like you have the sail backwards; the concave end is supposed to face towards the back of the boat.Your Te Ka MOC is very nice! I wish the head could be a little more gaunt, but overall the scene is really dynamic and easily recognizable.

     

    I hope there are more Moana sets in the future. We're still getting Frozen sets, after all, and the quality of those has gone up (as best evidenced by comparing 41062 with 41148). So it'd be nice if the same thing happens with Moana sets.

  14. I can totally agree on The Phantom Menace being a stronger movie than many give it credit for. One thing I love about it is that it is more lighthearted in many ways than the other Star Wars movies, which is fitting as it takes place in a somewhat less jaded time. The stakes are generally lower (one peaceful planet has been occupied due to a trade dispute, as opposed to a fascist tyranny effectively imposing its rule on large swaths of the galaxy), and the most obvious issues in government are bureaucracy and inefficiency, not corruption and malice. The Jedi are still a powerful force that commands a lot of respect, a goofball gag character is given a chance to prove his worth, and twice it falls to a plucky, spirited kid to save the day.

     

    I've heard it said that A New Hope was inspired in part by the Vietnam War, and the idea of s rebels fighting against a much more powerful regime. By comparison, The Phantom Menace feels a bit more like a nostalgic, much less cynical vision of the 50s. This is apparent even in the starship designs, with Naboo's ships characterized by classy streamlining and chrome plating like a classic Studebaker rather than the rough and angular "used future" look of the Millennium Falcon or X-Wing. Anakin's precociousness is reminiscent of child characters from TV programs like "Lassie" or "The Andy Griffith Show", and the podrace (in addition its obvious Ben Hur references) echoes the early days of NASCAR.

     

    Obviously I'm sure some of my enjoyment of Episode I comes from my own nostalgia, as well. Like you, I was eight when it came out, and was extremely excited about it. My brother and I spent a lot of time playing "Star Wars Episode I: Racer" on the N64, reading the movie's tie-in "Incredible Cross-Sections" book, collecting fast food toys from KFC and Pizza Hut, and trying to build podracers out of LEGO (I'm still sad that there have been so few podracer sets since the movie's release). By Revenge of the Sith, my enthusiasm for Star Wars had dimmed considerably, perhaps as much because of my getting older as because of the relative merits of the movies. Even so, I still think that Star Wars Episode I doesn't get a fair shake. It's a beautiful movie visually, and I think its differences from the original trilogy work for it rather than against it.

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  15. The original "Cars" was fun and sentimental. The second "Cars" was still fun, but in a different way — it was mostly the creators just playing around with the characters and world through a "world tour" storyline. I enjoyed it, even though it didn't have nearly the same pathos as other Pixar flicks and is certainly not one I'd consider a favorite.

     

    If this trailer is anything to go by, they're taking Cars 3 in a more serious direction, but still no telling what the overall story will be about.

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