Weird Coincidence, News, and Wishes

Well, it’s now the second day in a row that the blog post isn’t what had been scheduled.  (Starting to wonder why I even have a schedule.) 

Thursdays are (more or less) supposed to be dedicated to wishlists of things that the LEGO Group should be producing, but isn’t.  (Today, for example, I was going to muse about the limited range of minifigure scale food.) 

But further down on the schedule of Thursday wishlists is one that suddenly became topical.  My first instinct was to simply jump it ahead in the schedule, but when I started thinking about writing that post, I realize that I haven’t put nearly enough thought into it yet. 

So I started contemplating just doing a short version of that topic, and then come back later to do a longer one. 

Then I remembered that I had some ‘old business’ regarding a previous wishlist which wasn’t really conducive to a full post (well, not MY traditional longwinded posts, anyway), and that led to this multi-topic post. 

Two Weeks Ago Today…

Let’s start out with the old business.  My very first wishlist post was in regard to characters that I’d like to see turn up in a future Collectable Minifigures series.  One of the figures I talked about was a character I called ‘Skeleton Costume Guy’. 

The day after I made that blog post, a set of leaked photos of eleven of October’s sixteen collectable minifigures series hit the internet.  And lo and behold, one of those figures was a minifig wearing a skeleton costume, just as I’d described the day before. 

There wasn’t a ‘Female Clown’ in the leaked photos, but two of the parts I mentioned when I’d blogged about her (a new pigtails mold, and striped tights or leggings) turned up, split between two minifigs (the zombie cheerleader and witch, respectively). 

Not long after the leaked photos for CMF series 14 hit, we also got a(n as yet unsubstantiated)  rumor about the 2016 Castle line… a rumor about a return to the 2007 – 2009 style ‘fantasy era’.  (Trolls, dwarves, skeletons, and so on.)  And even though “Troll” was on my wishlist for future CMFs, given the opportunity, I’d take a new theme that had trolls in it over a single troll figure anyday. 

New LEGO Ideas Projects Revealed

And now, the new business…  LEGO Ideas has announced their next two sets:  “WALL-E”, designed by Pixar’s Angus MacLane (and really, who better to build us a LEGO WALL-E?)  And “Doctor Who and Companions” designed by Andrew Clark. 

 

The "WALL-E" set looks really nice.  (My brother may or may not freak out when he hears the news about this set.)  If there’s extra money in my LEGO budget when it’s released I’ll probably get myself a set.  (Of course, I still haven’t gotten the Research Institute or Exo-Suit yet.  Or the Back to the Future set, now that I think about it…) 

But it wasn’t the WALL-E set that had me exclaiming “Holy Flarking Shiznit!” (or something remarkably similar).  No, that reaction was for the Doctor Who set.  The licensed LEGO Doctor Who set.  “LEGO Doctor Who set” is something I honestly never thought I’d be able to say without it following, “I wish they made a”. 

But there it is!  How much of the submitted MOC will make it into the final set remains to be seen, but if it makes it into production more-or-less intact, it will include the police box (which transforms into a interior wall), and the console room.  Plus, two doctors, two companions, and a few monsters.  Not too shabby. 

My hope here is that it will sell enough that LEGO decides to pick up the license for an entire Doctor Who theme.  Because while one offering from LEGO Ideas is better than nothing, you can’t really cram 50+ years of Whovian goodness into a single set. 

Doctor Who Theme Wishlist

So just what is it that I want from a Doctor Who series?  All the Doctors, all the companions, and a lot of the monsters and villains.  Police box exteriors, TARDIS interiors, alien worlds, time travel, and so much more. 

Given the way things work, it would probably be a Doctor Who theme focusing on the new series, with a subtheme called ‘Doctor Who Classic’.  (Yes, that puts 40ish years of content into the subtheme and 10ish years’ worth of stuff in the main theme, but the current series is what is going to be the most marketable to the modern demographic.) 

A Doctor Who theme has a built in cure for some of the complaints people have about some of the other licensed themes.  Too-many-Batmans-syndrome isn’t that big of a problem when your title character is actually 13 (and counting) different physical characters.  And too-many-revised-sets-syndrome is alleviated when the show’s main set changes almost as many times as the Doctor.  You release a new rendition of the X-Wing every couple of years, and people get sick of it.  That’s not the case with releasing a single set of each version of the TARDIS console room. 

And Doctor Who is a series that would absolutely thrive on battlepacks.  The majority of enemies in Doctor Who aren’t individuals, but hordes of monsters.  So while I’d like to see the Master and Davros and other similar characters in the sets, I don’t just want a Dalek.  I want a Dalek battlepack.  A Cyberman battlepack.  Sontarans.  Zygons.  Weeping Angels.  UNIT Soldiers.  Time Lords.  A Platoon of Judoon (on the Moon?).  And so on and so forth.  Battlepacks, battlepacks, battlepacks. 

The Next Step

It’s odd, but the Doctor Who LEGO Ideas set – which hinges on the concept of instantaneous travel from one time to another – is now a waiting game.  We don’t know exactly how the actual set will deviate from the original MOC.  And we don’t know exactly when it will be released. 

Once it finally does hit the shelves however… buy it.  Buy one for yourself, buy another for a friend.  Buy lots of them, and give them out as Christmas gifts.  (If you’re in a LUG that does drafts, convince people to draft them.)  Make LEGO see this as a huge moneymaker for them.  Then inform the company that if they made more Doctor Who sets, you’d buy more Doctor Who sets.