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The extending arm pieces for the telehandler are sort of specialized, but at the same time, I do think they're versatile enough to justify their existence. In the grand scheme of things, they're basically just like this part (or its classic equivalent, but with a gear function. And besides the extending arms of telehandlers, they've also been used for outriggers on trucks, and the inner part was used quite brilliantly as the ripcord of the ground launchers in Airjitzu Battle Grounds. I'm kind of surprised that the Ocean Explorer set is an August release, since in Europe it was released in December! As big Technic sets go it's not the most functionally impressive, but I still appreciate it since Technic doesn't get a lot of boats. Something really cool that was revealed at the Nuremberg Toy Fair is that not only do all of this year's sets include a printed "40 Years" 3M Technic beam to celebrate Technic's 40th anniversary, but also the Ultralight, Telehandler, and BMW Motorcycle can be combined into a new model using instructions that will be posted online in the second half of the year. And said combi model is actually a modern re-imagining of the classic Car Chassis set from 1980! Talk about a blast from the past! Extreme Adventure and 6x6 All-Terrain Tow Truck are really awesome in a lot of ways: rare colors, unusual designs, and cool functionality. I would almost think the piece counts got mixed up somehow, but thinking about it could make sense that Extreme Adventure has a higher piece count due to its many tiny treads while the Tow Truck has a lower piece count due to its Power Functions and giant tires. Overall there's no Technic stuff this time around that excites me quite as much as last year's Bucket Wheel Excavator, but there's still plenty to be impressed with. Creator is doing some really creative new stuff this year. In the first half, the Blue Express, Red Racer, and Airshow Aces sets are actually modular, with each vehicle made up of two or three sections connected together by Technic cross axles. They can be mixed and matched in lots of different ways, and LEGO has also posted inspirational videos to the Creator site and the LEGO Facebook page on how you can create your own modular vehicles at this scale. These impulse-priced sets can be kind of forgettable sometimes so it's nice that LEGO is giving them an additional play feature that sets them apart from other, larger sets. Mighty Dinosaurs is a nicely constructed, highly posable set with a sort of unfortunate name (pterodactyls aren't dinosaurs)! The ironic thing is that if they'd just called it "Mighty Dinosaur" (singular) it wouldn't have been a problem, since it's not uncommon for Creator set names to describe only the primary model (like this year's Sunset Street Bike). But that extra "s" implies the name is meant to describe all three (technically, four, since there's a bonus model on LEGO.com) models. I do hope we one day see more realistic dinosaurs in a LEGO set, but this does capture the iconic popular vision of these creatures pretty well for a brick-built model. Robo Explorer is a fun set, and it and Air Blazer were both actually designed by Bionicle designer John Ho. I'm not as fond of its alt-builds as I have been with some of the other recent animal or robot sets, but it's still a really cute concept nicely realized. Beachside Vacation sort of echoes the Beach Hut from two years ago, but I like its striped walls in some fairly rare colors, its raised foundation, and that adorable sea turtle build! The hammock is also a great new piece, and it's nice that it's seeing more use in City this summer. Park Street Townhouse, on the other hand, is brilliantly unique and a great parts pack (with ten of this useful piece, among other goodies). I also love Island Adventures with its brilliant sideways wing build and clever alternate builds. The new 3-in-1 modular houses coming in the summer are an interesting departure from the sorts of houses and buildings we've had in Creator sets before, and I've seen some people quite disappointed that these are open-backed playsets rather than buildings like the Beach Hut or Park Street Townhouse that can fold closed, or other enclosed buildings like the Family House from 2013. At the same time, like previous Creator houses, they make impressive use of basic parts to create cool details, and also they maintain the 3-in-1 gimmick. I wonder if the term "modular" means you can combine parts of the 3 models into different combinations, or even combine modules between sets! Turbo Track Racer is a brilliant large-scale car with some cool striped details. The gull-wing doors are creative, and it's neat that it reuses the Ferrari F40 windscreen. The Space Shuttle Explorer is pretty awesome, and I hope it paves the way for more "spacey" Creator models in the future! The rover and moonbase alternate builds are pretty neat. However, what it gains in brick-built intricacy it lacks in authenticity. Compared to the shuttle from the 2015 Spaceport set, the Creator one has no elevons on the back of the wings, nor any landing gear. I am a little disappointed that the Robo Explorer and/or Mighty Dinosaurs sets seem to take the place of the adorable animal sets we've gotten in recent years like Park Animals and Rainforest Animals. Other than that, though, there's a lot to like in this year's Creator range. As tame as the Classic theme generally is, I encourage people to take a look at how clever the instruction manuals for the new Creative Boxes are (here's the Red Creative Box as an example). Besides the regular building instructions, they also include a designer bio (with more info on the LEGO Classic website), ideas of how to combine the sets together, inspirational builds showing other ways you can use the pieces, and inspirational photos of other sorts of things you can build in the set's main color. It's a surprising amount of content and effort to be put into a manual for such a small and simple set, but hopefully it will help kick-start people's creativity! The gears in the new Duplo sets are cool and remind me of Gears! Gears! Gears!, another building toy I enjoyed as a kid. The Pizzeria is quite charming… between the Scarecrow Special Delivery set from The LEGO Batman Movie, the Heartlake Pizzeria from LEGO Friends, the Pizza Van from LEGO City, and this Duplo Pizzeria, LEGO sure has had a lot of sets focused on pizza this year! The Santa's Winter Holiday set surprises me since I hadn't seen it before, but I can see it being really popular! And I love the adorable mixed-race family in the Family House set. Duplo is good for that kind of diversity. The Duplo Batman sets are nice — just yesterday I was looking at those at Walmart and commenting on how adorable all the characters are! I'm not so fond of the overwhelmingly pink color of Minnie Mouse Bowtique. In Juniors, it's cool to get the first ever Snow White mini-doll, but regrettably without any dwarfs. It's also interesting that the Batman set includes a unique Mr. Freeze minifigure. The new, smaller floating boat hull is interesting and I wonder whether we'll see it in other themes at any point. I'm kinda disappointed that there are no new Ninjago Juniors sets… either LEGO wants to space those out or they simply didn't go over as well as they hoped. Overall the new Juniors sets sort of leave me cold compared to past standouts like Family House (wow, how many different sets with that name can I mention in one post?), Snake Showdown, Mia's Vet Clinic, and Knights' Castle. Thanks for the detailed coverage!

The price of LEGO has actually been pretty stable in the grand scheme of things — this article is four years old but mostly still relevant. City definitely tends to be one of the pricier themes in general, probably in part on account of its popularity, but when you compare sets like last year's Airport Passenger Terminal and 2010's Airport, the new one has only nine fewer pieces, actually weighs more, and has an additional minifigure for the same sticker price. City this year doesn't excite me nearly as much as Friends does, but "Fun at the Beach" is a great successor to last year's "Fun at the Park". More disabled representation in the Bus Station set is also never a bad thing. While Coast Guard is a series that it feels like we've seen a lot (most recently in 2013), the new sets do use some clever building techniques. And the Jungle Explorers series has a lot of the same uniqueness and novelty as the past few years' Volcano Explorers, Deep Sea Explorers, and Arctic Explorers series. I'm sure the new animal molds will be greatly appreciated by people who wish to populate a LEGO zoo!

Um, Axl's Rumble Maker was definitely on display… you guys tweeted about it yourselves from the event. I'm really loving some of the new brick-built monsters like the Heligoyle, the Stone Colossus, the rolling tower that comes with Knighton Castle, and the ADORABLE monster steed that comes with Aaron's Rock Climber. The limited posability of the Stone Colossus makes sense to me, having built similar-sized monsters in the past that struggled to hold their weight. Sometimes when you get up to that kind of size, less is more. It's cool to learn about its wing function, since other sites' reports from Toy Fair haven't really called attention to it. The prison cells in its legs are also pretty clever, and I love the crown/parapet on its head made from forbidden powers! There are also some pretty brilliant new monster minifigures coming up, like Lord Krakenskull, the Harpy (which uses a recolor of Skyra's hair from LEGO Elves), and General Garg. The "Stone Clay" and "Stone Queen Halbert" minifigures make me wonder where the story is heading. Maybe Jestro and Monstrox gain the ability to turn our heroes into stone? The new color schemes for the bots (with grey shoulders and brightly-colored helmets) are also really neat. I'm really glad that this year we get both Queen Halbert in her golden battle armor and King Halbert in his regal blue robes and crown, but a bit disappointed that Ava doesn't get a new outfit this year (Robin doesn't either, but he already had two or three different outfits last year). The Battle Suits are a lot of fun, and my brother and I have already bought Clay's, Axl's, and Aaron's, with plans to pick up the other two. It's awesome that the knights can now go toe-to-toe with some of the bigger monsters, and I love that their heads basically act as the battle suits' heads, visually giving the squat little minifigures more heroic proportions. It's something I've dabbled in on LEGO Digital Designer but the new cockpit pieces enclose a minifigure much more tightly and efficiently than anything I could come up with using more basic bricks. I'm not quite as psyched about many of the knight vehicles this year as I was about last year's. Clay's Falcon Fighter Blaster and Macy's Bot Drop Dragon are pretty brilliant, but I feel like a lot of the others fail to evoke the the animal motifs or medieval motifs that characterized many of the best Nexo Knights vehicles of 2016. Aaron, Axl, and Lance's new vehicles just sort of feel like generic sci-fi vehicles to me — really good ones, mind you, but without a real unifying concept to situate them in this theme. Maybe I'll warm up to them once I pick one up and can try out their functions (which in some cases are a bit tough to decipher) or the combination gimmick with the battle suits. The castle is definitely the crown jewel of the summer wave. It's a really elegant blend of a traditional castle and a futuristic sci-fi base. Also, much like the Elves theme, it far surpasses most traditional LEGO castles in how livable it is inside. It doesn't have a kitchen or bathromm, but it does have seven beds for the seven main characters (though oddly, none for the king and queen) and even a dining room! Also, the idea of Merlok getting uploaded into a robo-wizard body is pretty sweet! Also, it comes with Hamletta! I NEVER expected to see her in a set! Thanks so much for the detailed coverage!

I sort of feel like it was a mistake to lump coverage of all of these themes together, particuarly since Friends is such a massive theme just on its own! It makes it tough to respond to all of the amazing stuff on display here. Not helped when you're partway through an already massive post and you accidentally click the "home" button on your web browser and lose everything… though I know that's nobody's fault but mine. Anyway, Elves continues to be one of the most outstanding LEGO themes. The Capture of Sophie Jones set actually does take place in Elvendale after Sophie follows Emily through the portal, though it's interesting that here they show the portal forming in a rock face rather than in a tree as it's typically been shown in the past. I love the little grocery store run by Mr. Spry the squirrel! The Goblin King's name is Cronan and his dragon's name is Ashwing. I love the dragon's more wyvern-like design, sickly color scheme, and sharp black claws and spines. It really does make it look much more evil and aggressive than the previous dragons. The bears Blubeary and Lil' Blu are cute, and while the adult and baby bear molds here are usually used for bear cubs and mice/hamsters, I'm tickled pink by the idea that full-grown bears in Elvendale are teddy bear sized! The Airship is brilliant, and it's a bit of a shame that a lot of people's first impression was that it was just a palette-swapped Raid Zeppelin, since I think this one has a much more interesting design and play features. The "flying safe" is actually an ornithopter for Dukelin, the goblin captain. The storage compartment is normally on the back of it, and it has handles and flick-fire evil seeds on the front. The Goblin Village is incredibly nice! I love that it has beds for all the goblins and even a little goblin-sized toilet. The architecture and foliage alike contrast nicely from what we're used to from Elvendale to create a spookier look. This set also has some great animals. I love the Elves' new costumes but Azari's (which now has boots rather than sandals) is especially distinctive. It's great that Azari finally gets an iconic vehicle in the Goblin Forest Escape set, even though getting a pegasus in a set so small results in a pretty high price per piece. The recolored flame piece is interesting, particularly since the jagged look is quite unlike what I'm used to seeing in Elves sets. But it does work well to create a sense of speed! The Healing Hideout is a great addition to Elvendale, since no fantasy adventure is complete without a place to heal up during a dangerous journey. The snapping functions on both the carnivorous plant in this set and the ones in the Goblin King's Fortress set are pretty neat. The hideout itself is artfully built into a hollowed-out tree, and there seems to be a function to move the branches to better conceal the hideout's location. And getting some more dragons is always a nice bonus! Despite being smaller than other LEGO Elves castles, the Goblin King's Fortress is still brilliant! I love the spooky colors and architecture as well as the plants that cling to the walls and integrate with the thorny throne. Emily's clearly not messing around with that sword, and the Goblin King seems to be trying to create his own portal like the one on the Sky Castle! As far as Friends goes, I'm not a fan of the puppy show sets, but I love the new character spotlight sets! It's great that Olivia's robot Zobo now has a family of his own, and I like the continuity between the Stephanie's House and Friendship Cakes sets, which have similar architecture and both feature the pet bunnies she's been established to have in previous years! The Heartlake Pizzeria is probably the best pizzeria set there's ever been! I love the colors, architecture, and the incredible detail of the pizza kitchen! It would fit very well in the same neighborhood as Heartlake Food Market. The one thing it needs that it currently lacks is a staircase, but it would be easy enough to add one like the one in that set. The Sports Center is awesome! I love the swooshy modern architecture and the colors (which remind me of the colors for Planet Fitness). It's great that there's plenty of high-intensity workout equipment and that the set focuses on fun rather than body image. The biggest flaw of this set, in my eyes, is that the glass window behind the basketball hoop disappears into the space above it. It really needs a wall over top to finish framing it, even something as simple as a pair of 4x4 macaroni bricks. When I first heard about the summer pool I was worried it'd feel like a rehash of Heartlake City Pool, but thankfully it doesn't (and in fact, far exceeds that one). I love the heart-shaped hot tub, aquarium tank, and awesome waterslides! The new slide pieces will be fun to assemble into different layouts, especially because the 90-degree curved slide turns in the opposite direction of the older 180-degree curved slide. The new beach sets are all really fun and colorful looking, but my favorite has to be the catamaran! It's definitely a worthy successor to the Dolphin Cruiser, but arguably even more distinctive with its double-hulled shape, sliding glass door, and giant sail! The banana boat is just the icing on the cake! I am definitely VERY tempted to add it to my collection! The hospital is maybe the best LEGO hospital set ever! Not only are the colors and architecture very striking, but the interior is impeccably detailed! I like the stylish ambulance and helicopter as well as creative brick-built accessories like the water cooler, coffee machine, stretcher, and baby carriage. The baby in this set is a reprint of the one from the Tribal Woman minifigure, and I'm impressed at how well that works. If there's one fault to the set, it's that the wheelchair feels a bit clunky compared to its LEGO City counterpart. The snow resort series is delightfully novel, and I love all the varying winter sports represented. My favorite of the sets, however, might be the least sports-oriented of all of them: the chalet! The ski lift is pretty charming in its own right and has very clever functionality, although I wish the ski slope were bigger. The new Disney Princess sets are cute and well-constructed. They feature some great details from the movies, and the Ice Palace and Enchanted Evening sets both greatly improve on previous depictions of their respective scenes. It is kind of a shame we keep seeing so much focus on princesses who have already gotten multiple sets and none on Disney characters who would add more to the theme's diversity like Tiana, Mulan, Pocahontas, etc. At the same time, I wouldn't complain one bit if we started to see more Moana sets in future years!

Having built the Dawn of Iron Doom set, I can vouch for its quality. The fort is definitely designed to look ramshackle, but I wouldn't call it uninspired. The taller part is basically like an improvised scaffold or gantry tower for boarding the mech. And the whole fort is designed so it can be re-arranged or even joined together with the scenery from The Vermillion Attack. The Sensei Wu in this set is not so noteworthy, though, because it's the same costume as in last year's Samurai X Cave Chaos set except for the color of his hat. Even so, this is a much more affordable set than that was, and it's nice to have his hat in Brick Yellow (Tan) again after so many years of having it in Warm Gold (Pearl Gold). The name of the "new bronze color" is Copper Metallic, if anybody's interested. But BrickLink just lumps it together with the four or five different colors they already call Copper, because of course they do. On another color-related note, the canoes on the Destiny's Shadow are actually Olive Green, not Sand Green. Value-wise, the Destiny's Shadow, Dawn of Iron Doom, and Dragon's Forge all offer a fantastic price per piece, and the volume of pieces and the amount of play value you get with each is nothing to sneeze at, either. Dragon's Forge is the kind of set I feel comfortable recommending to people whether or not they have any interest in Ninjago, because it's got really gorgeous architecture, an awesome dragon, stylish minifigures, and an impressive degree of complexity. In the trailer I'm pretty sure that walker was piloted by Nya, not Zane. Zane pilots the larger grey-and-white tank. Nya in the LEGO Ninjago Movie is wearing Titanium Metallic as her primary color (much like in the Hands of Time sets), so it's possible that the minifigure you saw in that set that you thought was Cole was actually her? But I can't say for sure because I wasn't there and you guys were. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the stuff in the trailer that wasn't shown at Toy Fair will be released as store exclusive sets. I believe the LEGO Movie and The LEGO Batman Movie each had three store exclusive sets. Overall Ninjago has really impressed me this year, and I expect to be impressed by the LEGO Ninjago Movie and the sets that go with it as well! Curious when those might be officially unveiled to the public, but I'm definitely looking forward to it!

She has had her helmet in one set: http://brickset.com/sets/75106-1/Imperial-Assault-Carrier But I agree she should have it in more of her appearances! It's a nice helmet with a lot of personality! Anyway, love the Quadjumper and Rathtar Escape sets. The Quadjumper may have gotten very little screen time, but it was called out by name in The Force Awakens, and highly visible for those five seconds or so. That's more than can be said for, say, the Flash Speeder. Also, while Starkiller Base and the Finalizer are much more noteworthy, they would obviously need much higher price points, and LEGO generally has fewer of those to go around. The Rathtar Escape set feels very authentic even though a maze of corridors is a very tricky thing to realize as a playable set. It's neat that it looks like you could buy multiple sets and join them together for a larger layout. Granted, it'd be expensive, but the set is still a fine playset individually, and has a pretty fair value for its price point. It probably is safe to say that the highest non-UCS price points for the year will be reserved for The Last Jedi, much like the Millennium Falcon from TFA was the biggest non-UCS set in 2015.

According to the press release LEGO released before Toy Fair, "Popular characters also appear in buildable figure form with nine new sets." That's counting the five 2017 buildable figures that were shown at Toy Fair, so there will presumably be four buildable figures for The Last Jedi this fall. The issue with starfighter-sized vehicles is that they'd surely have an enormous price. Just look at the $200 price tag on the UCS TIE Fighter, and then realize that a version scaled to the size of a Star Wars buildable figure would be more than twice that size! So non-enclosed personal craft like speeder bikes or STAPs are probably the biggest Star Wars vehicles we could realistically get in buildable figure sets. MOCs, of course, are a different story. I'm not quite sure why I'm only now hearing so many worries about the future of brightly-colored CCBS sets, considering that the Baze Malbus buildable figure that just came out is probably the most brightly-colored of any of the Star Wars buildable figures we've had to date. Plus, a decade ago a lot of Bionicle fans were worried we might never see constraction sets in earth tones like brown and tan again! I agree though that a lot of the Star Wars buildable figure color schemes are a bit dull.

Yeah, but 2002 and 2003 were some of Bionicle's most successful years of all time. We already basically know Bionicle G2 didn't do as well as G1 did in those years — if it did, it almost certainly wouldn't have ended.

I respectfully disagree. I'd rather retain Bionicle's memory as it is than see it butchered by Disney... I don't see why that's a huge concern? From what I've seen, Disney has done a pretty decent job managing other properties they've acquired, like Marvel and Star Wars. Sure, they have made SOME questionable choices, but it's not like those properties' previous owners didn't. Every time Disney has acquired a popular property there's been worries that Disney will dumb it down or sugar-coat it, but usually those don't end up amounting to anything.

Prequel/Clone Wars characters I'd like to see: battle droids, super battle droids, droidekas, Count Dooku, Yoda, Ahsoka Tano, Padme, Mace Windu Rebels characters I'd like to see: Sabine Wren, Chopper, ummm… not sure who else; I've never actually seen Rebels. Rogue One characters I'd like to see: Saw Guerrera, Orson Krennic Original trilogy characters I'd like to see: Boba Fett, Tusken Raider, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Lando Calrissian, C-3PO, R2-D2 In general I lean towards droids, female characters, and characters with interesting costumes or color schemes. Bad guys in monochrome trooper-style armor tend to bore me. That said, I understand that an actual wave of sets would probably need a better balance of "good guy" and "bad guy" characters than what I've laid out here. And also that for a lot of people the armored trooper-type bad guy characters tend to be some of the best.

Ninjago would seem a plausible candidate. It's one of the LEGO Group's strongest IPs, it's action-oriented, and it's got nice colorful character designs. Many knock-offs have already created their own Ninjago-based CCBS characters, though they're usually fairly generic. The biggest obstacle with Ninjago is that compared to Chima or Super Heroes, it might be tough to really vary the hero designs too much. Some of the ninja costumes have been fairly varied (including the current Season 7/Hands of Time costumes), but not to the extent that they strongly imply very different heights, physiques, or silhouettes. Also, there's the question of what the characters' heads should look like. Human-like heads with noses and other realistic features might look peculiar on characters who have never been portrayed as humans in any media (well, besides a surprising cameo in a LEGO Friends episode). So keeping their heads minifigure-shaped might be the best solution. Nexo Knights could also be fun in constraction. In its case, its main characters have more obvious variations in their designs (particularly in the case of Axl), and their heavy armor offers more room to vary the builds than a more tight-fitting outfit might. As with Ninjago, keeping the characters' minifigure-shaped heads might still be ideal. A comic from one of the European Nexo Knights magazines gives a taste of what CCBS Nexo Knights might look like. Elves is another theme I'd love to see in constraction, but perhaps a riskier prospect, considering it's a girl-oriented theme and LEGO hasn't really dabbled in those as far as constraction is concerned. Girl-oriented action figures/"action dolls" are increasing in profile across brands like DC Super Hero Girls and Miraculous, but given many girls' higher expectations of realism that prompted the creation of the mini-doll, some new pieces (like a new, more streamlined arm beam or shell) might need to be introduced in order to make CCBS builds seem less boxy. LEGO would also have to think hard about how to maximize potential for rebuilding without slipping into totally unnatural territory — customizable outfits would be ideal, but this might require a different approach than many other CCBS sets. Super Heroes wouldn't be a totally new theme to CCBS, since LEGO had some Super Heroes CCBS sets in 2012, but it might be worth another shot if there aren't any rights issues. Superhero characters are a staple of the action figure market, and so are probably among the most promising licensed brands for CCBS sets. They often have very colorful and distinctive costumes as well as exciting powers. Judging from recent CCBS sets, I think LEGO would be able to design Super Heroes constraction sets much better today than they did in 2012. It's possible that the DC Super Hero Girls theme also might also be a safer way to experiment with girl-oriented constraction sets than an in-house theme.

Good review! I think this is a very good set and I'm excited to pick it up when it's released. Unlike a lot of the baddie characters from the Star Wars constraction range, this guy is nice and colorful and has a very unique costume design. He and Chirrut (I ship it) were also some of my favorite characters from the movie. His head sculpt feels reasonably authentic, fits the design language of these figures, and offers some nice racial diversity. Plus, since it doesn't have any headgear, it should not be too difficult to re-purpose in non-Star Wars creations. One nitpick: the review calls Baze's skin tone "dark flesh", which could be a bit confusing. This color, 18 Nougat, is just called "Flesh" on BrickLink, while the more common 283 Light Nougat is called "Light Flesh" there. BrickLink's "Dark Flesh" refers to the color 217 Brown, which we Bionicle fans know as Metru Brown, and their "Medium Dark Flesh" refers to 312 Medium Nougat. Bit by bit, we have been getting more Dark Brown constraction pieces! Maula's Ice Mammoth Stomper had a Dark Brown 8x5 torso shell, Rey had a Dark Brown 3M shell and Dark Brown feet, Jyn has a Dark Brown back plate, the Scarif Stormtrooper has Dark Brown 8x4 leg shells, and much of Chirrut's lightbow is built in Dark Brown. It would be interesting to see a set use CCBS more extensively in this color. The hexagonal armor add-on also appears in the Chirrut Îmwe set in white on his left arm, and will probably be used in other sets in the future. The more perplexing mold from this wave is the pointed Warm Gold piece used on Chirrut's lightbow, which so far IS only used in that one set. But both parts seem to be versatile enough designs that they may appear in future waves. If not, it's not as though constraction has never been known to introduce head, mask, or weapon pieces for just one set. And a small number of sets per wave doesn't necessarily mean that there's any less of a budget for those sets individually than there would be for sets in a larger wave.

It is set in the same universe as The LEGO Movie, but I don't think Finn and his dad are likely to appear as characters. The focus on that meta-narrative will probably be kept mostly constrained to The LEGO Movie and its direct sequels rather than the spin-off films.

This is true, and it kinda bugs. It also seems a bit nonsensical that only those four Elements were embodied by Golden Weapons. I'd like to think that the four Ninja could unlock Elemental Powers of their own accord with some training, but it seems unlikely to happen given their reliance on Lloyd. Even with as many elements as there are in the current Ninjago storyline, I think there's still meant to be something unique and special about the original four elements. They're the elements that were used to create Ninjago, and might behave differently than the other elements in other ways.

I believe Mark Stafford, who designed that model, has actually said it was never intended to be a set. It was just a "snakified" version of the classic Emerald Night set from 2009 meant to showcase what the snake vehicles could look like. Plus, the Serpentine mobile fortress in the show was not a steam train, and its only resemblance to that concept model was that it was long and had multiple carriages (no smokestack, no cow-catcher, no tender, etc).

I think a lot of people who wanted it to be more like the show were hoping for a new story in continuity with the show, rather than revisiting an old story. But that runs into a couple issues. First, it'd be hard to tell it in such a way that people who followed the show and people who didn't could still enjoy it equally. Second, it's VERY difficult to coordinate TV and movie storylines due to their differing production schedules. It's something Marvel has struggled a bit with while making Agents of Shield, and that's a series that for the most part focuses on a whole different set of characters than most of their movies. Trying to manage an ongoing, continuity-driven TV series along with a movie (and possible sequels, if the movie does well enough) that focus on the same cast of characters would be much, much harder.

We did get some pretty awesome ninja action moments in the trailer when Lloyd jumps off his dragon and starts slashing his sword at Garmadon's minions. Also a pretty neat visual trick in that scene: if you pause you can see they used curved LEGO pieces like windscreens and dinosaur tails in silver to trace out the arc of his sword strikes. Sort of like the type of slashing effect you often see in anime and video games. Not a lot of stealth, though, but I think it's understandable that a trailer like this focuses on action rather than suspense, since action scenes tend to pack more visual impact into shorter clips. I remember seeing a lot of this same complaint about the first LEGO Movie trailer (with Pitbull's "Feel This Moment") and the first LEGO Batman Movie trailer (with Wiz Khalifa's "Black and Yellow"). Neither song ended up in the actual movies as far as I can tell. It is a bit annoying that these trailers just use popular radio music rather than music that's more specific to the movie or the series, but I guess familiar songs are better at catching people's attention. I'm often surprised how many people's most vivid memory of Bionicle was the 2006 Toa Inika TV commercial with "Move Along", which at that point had already gotten plenty of airplay and appeared in several other ad campaigns. Whereas I see far fewer people besides hardcore Bionicle fans wax nostalgic for the Bionicle-specific songs by Cryoshell.

How about Temuera Morrison (Jango Fett and the clone troopers in Star Wars/Chief Tui in Moana)?

I often see topics that are sort of the opposite of this one, asking which aspects of the Ninjago TV show you would like to see in sets. But I rarely see stuff that asks the opposite question: are there things in the Ninjago sets that you wish would appear in the show? One thing I wish was more present in the show is Nya's daggers. They were her signature weapon in the 2011 sets, and both the 2012 and 2016 versions of Samurai X included a version on a pole as a naginata. But neither has been given any equivalent in the show. I know that pretty much none of the ninja use their classic signature weapons as much as they used to, and that Samurai X has her own signature weapon in the show (the boomerang blade), but I think these weapons really suit Nya. Kai's scar is another example. In the sets, Kai has always had a scar over his left eye (except for in the Target Minifigure Gift Set), but in the show this was omitted since such a battle-hardened look didn't fit with his backstory as a blacksmith in a peaceful village. However, that doesn't preclude the possibility of him sustaining a future injury in the show to better reconcile it with the sets. It could even be an interesting plot point from a narrative perspective since Kai is kind of vain and it would be interesting to see what he'd think if the ninja life started to wear on him physically. Can anybody else think of examples of things from the Ninjago sets that could be fun to see in the show?

Don't forget the Serpentine moving fortress from towards the end of season 1! That had a lot of excellent potential playset features. I agree that the Overlord Dragon, the Arcturus shuttle, and the Preeminent could have made fun sets, but that tense is important — now that they're no longer really relevant in the story, I feel like LEGO missed their chance to release them as sets, and it wouldn't make much sense to release them today. Elemental dragons for the other ninja besides Zane and Lloyd could be cool sets, and I somewhat disagree with Lyi's point about them feeling repetitive if they were similar in size. That might be the case if they were all released at once, but by spacing them out (which you can do, since they have lasting relevance to the story) I think they could remain interesting. On the other hand, I have absolutely no problem with getting the recent fusion dragons instead. Plus, sometimes things that we DON'T get in sets are nice since they give fans something to MOC. There are also some smaller artifact-type things that I'm disappointed didn't appear in the sets. For instance, we never got the Anacondrai staff in sets. It's easy to mock one up using a snake staff and an unprinted 1x1 round tile in Tr. Medium Reddish Violet or Tr. Bright Bluish Violet, but it would've been nice to get a version with its own unique print. An even more glaring omission is Samurai X's boomerang blade, which was one of her signature weapons in the show and even appeared on one of the trading cards, but is absent from the sets and hard to build due to its shape. And of course, there are plenty of character designs that could be fun to see in future sets. You could probably populate a whole topic with suggestions for those.

Arguably, they're just combining the formula that's been working for them with the previous Ninjago sets and TV show with the formula that's been working for them with the movies (quirky re-imaginings of familiar characters, comic actors in all the lead roles, new hair/headgear pieces that give each character a unique silhouette, storylines that gently poke fun at cliches within their genre, etc). And besides, whether the movie does well or poorly, the sets and TV show will still be picking up from where they left off. So LEGO can afford to take some measured risks with this movie.

Actually, it's Dave Franco, but he is his brother. Fixed! I'm not sure whether I just misread the USA Today article or if they made a typo themselves which they've since corrected. Probably the former, though. :/

Well, I don't know how he did that strange computer thing that let him see some codes that made him come up with the idea, but it is understandable that it may not prove that the idea exists. Many web browsers have an option to let you view a page's source code (on Windows I think you can right-click and select "View Page Source" or something like that). But I'm not even sure what page he was claiming to have found his "hints"; on the main Bionicle website and the Bionicle page from the LEGO Shop I found nothing of the sort. I don't know if the evidence was entirely made up, but even if he did legitimately find it someplace, he made some far-fetched assumptions in how he interpreted it.

Their cute little figurines to collect and/or customize. A lot of people like that sort of thing. I don't blame you for not being interested, though. They're certainly not everybody's cup of tea (after all, few toys are). These two are really nice! I especially love the Beast's teeth and little beard! I don't really have any plans to get them, though. I'm probably gonna hold out for figures based on themes I'm more interested in, like Ninjago. Though if they were to make Moana and Maui BrickHeadz I might be very tempted… I'm curious what the target age range on these is going to be. The SDCC exclusive BrickHeadz from last year were ages 10+, so these may be the same if they're going to continue aim them at more of a collector's market. Then again, those were two-packs, so individual packs may or may not have a lower age rating.

Just to clarify, there's no upper age limit. Anyone can join who has a mobile device and a LEGO.com account. Like most LEGO.com and LEGO Club content (message boards, galleries, articles, magazines, building challenges, etc), it's primarily intended to be fun for younger users and protect their safety and privacy, and may be frustrating to AFOLs who are used to communities with fewer limitations, but it still has some stuff that certain adults might enjoy. The app syncs with your LEGO.com account, and certain things like gallery creations and liked videos are shared between both platforms. I joined yesterday. My nickname is "SirFascinatingOctopus". Took a lot of rolls of the dice to get a nickname I was totally happy with! It would be much nicer if it would let you scroll back through nicknames you've already rolled so you didn't need to dismiss a decent nickname forever in hopes of getting a better one. I will warn that once you choose a nickname, you are stuck with it — as far as I can tell there's nowhere in the app to change your nickname. I did encounter one annoying glitch — I was unable to save anything I created for the LEGO Elves sticker challenge — but hopefully that will be sorted out soon. I also hope they add more character feeds, like maybe a LEGO Elves character or two. Overall, I think the app seems really well designed for what it's intended to be, even if some aspects are frustrating or could use fine-tuning.