Scalpers Rejoice !

LEGO-wise it's been a bit of a frustrating week so far, initially spent willing the last few AT-AT parts to arrive so I could start to build, then realising that I'm actually short of more parts than I first thought and therefore having to dive back into Bricklink. Still, they say that you have to suffer for your art, so maybe I'll appreciate the build all the more when it finally starts. Maybe.

While I've been waiting, I've consoled myself by perusing the various LEGO forums. One thing that's caught my eye has been the number of people posting "Wanted" messages on the Brickset Forum seeking to buy or trade exclusive items given out by LEGO at events such as San Diego Comic Con (SDCC). Good luck with that, guys...

LEGO have been doling out small numbers of limited edition minifigures and exclusive sets at events for years now, although I only became aware of this practice a couple of years back when I read reports of attendees at Star Wars Celebration V and SDCC picking up limited edition Star Wars Cube Dude sets (above - click to enlarge). Since then, LEGO giveaways at such events seem to have become an increasingly prominent part of the LEGO calendar, to the extent that speculation about what will be given away starts weeks beforehand, and the subsequent bragging by the lucky few then goes on for literally months afterwards....

Some of the most recent LEGO giveaways include four exclusive Super Heroes minifigures at SDCC 2012 - Phoenix (above), Bizarro, Shazam and Venom - and a trio of unique Green Lantern, Batman and Superman minifigures at SDCC and New York Comic Con (NYCC) last year. In previous years other themes such as Star Wars (below) and Indiana Jones have featured.

(c) Bricklink.com

On the surface, you might be inclined to give LEGO a big great pat on the back for their generosity and wonder what there is to complain about. LEGO are producing neat stuff to give away free, gratis and for nothing to LEGO collectors. The problem is that the route by which most of the passionate LEGO collectors eventually secure these items isn't via an obliging LEGO employee at a show, it's via eBay, or maybe Bricklink. And as you can probably gather, by the time most collectors get a look in, the nature of the transaction has gone from gift to gouging....

Let's look at some of the recent giveaways for evidence of this, starting with the Super Heroes Shazam minifigure (above) given away at SDCC earlier this year. Cost to recipient : nothing. Cheapest current Bricklink price : $165.00. Or you can try eBay, but once you've eliminated the custom minifigures you're looking at a $100 starting bid. Alternatively, I see that some eBay sellers are offering all four of the exclusive SDCC 2012 minifigures for the 'bargain' Buy It Now price of $749.98 - way to go ! Then there's the exclusive Batman minifigure from SDCC 2011 (below). Cost to recipient : zero, zilch, zip. Cheapest current Bricklink price : $254.99. Or you can Buy It Now on eBay for $180. I could go on, but I'm sure you get the gist - these items are expensive. I don't necessarily blame the sellers for trying to get what they can for the items; the current shoddy state of affairs is at least as much down to LEGO for putting the conditions in place for such a situation to predictably develop.

So what is the LEGO company hoping to achieve with these desirable giveaways ? My suspicion is that they're trying to attract new customers by targeting the freebies at events such as SDCC rather than, for instance, LEGO shows attended by genuine LEGO fans, and if they antagonise a few existing fans in the process then so be it. After all, those LEGO fans are already hooked. The company do need to be careful, though - with increasing numbers of people buying LEGO sets just for the minifigures these days, there's a chance that some will stop doing so if you take away their ability to "collect 'em all" by releasing exclusive minifigures which are out of their reach.

Honestly, while I have managed to track down a few of these exclusives, I'd actually prefer that LEGO just didn't bother with these giveaways at all. Tantalising sections of your audience in this way just seems cruel and potentially counterproductive to me, the joy of the few outweighed by the frustration of the many, with the only real winners being those opportunists seeking to make a financial killing out of the whole thing....

Block-tastic

It's not unusual to hear people complain that LEGO sets contain too many specialised parts these days. The argument goes that not only are such parts little use for anything other than the set that they came in, but that they also stifle creativity because people no longer need to figure out how to build things out of basic bricks anymore. Licensed themes such as Star Wars are often held to be particularly bad in this regard, although for me the City theme with its reliance on POOP is just as guilty. We also shouldn't forget that LEGO have been including large, custom parts in sets for decades; I still have a number of train bases from Set 171 Train Set without Motor to this day, for instance.

Anyway, on a trip to the U.S. a few months back I had a free evening and decided to make a pilgrimage to the local LEGO brand store which was just a short cab ride away. While I was there I made a discovery that should bring joy to the heart of any dyed-in-the-wool LEGO traditionalists out there, those people for whom anything other than basic bricks are blasphemy...

I found the fellow above (click pic to enlarge) near the Pick-a-Brick (PAB) wall, packaged in a small PAB cup. He's made almost entirely out of basic bricks, with 3 slopes and a green 6 x 8 plate thrown in for good measure, and you can't get much more basic than that... I was provided with the building instructions when I went to the counter to pay my $7.99, basically just a sheet of A4 paper with a series of colour-printed building steps. Not great quality, but just about good enough to follow.

Since arriving back in the UK, I've learned that the Rabbit above is one of a series of "Limited Edition" PAB models that LEGO have recently started to sell in their brand stores. I haven't been able to find much information about them, although Brickset has added a number of these "sets" to its database (click here to view them) and is continuing to add more information as it comes in. It looks like the Rabbit may have been the first of these PAB sets, available for purchase during April 2012 before being superceded by a model of an Artist in May. All of the sets follow the same basic pattern - crude, blocky sculptures fashioned from basic bricks available in the PAB wall, packaged in standard PAB containers, and supplied with either A4 colour-printed building instructions or no instructions at all depending on which store you visit....

Crude or not, I find these models quite appealing, and I've therefore also picked up a couple of others since. I found the Batman and Robin model below during a visit to the London Westfield LEGO store last week. This is only available during the month of June and came in a large PAB cup, at a cost of £11.

As far as I'm aware, this is the only PAB model so far to come with stickers - the Batman and Robin logos that you can see applied in the picture above. I'm told that some people buying this set in UK brand stores haven't been provided with building instructions; while I was given a set of instructions (pictures below - click to enlarge) it was mighty hard to follow them... I eventually had to resort to using a magnifying glass to figure out some of the building steps, but before you start accusing me of being an old git with failing eyesight, be aware that even my 4 year old son (who did most of the building) struggled to make sense of them either, so it's not just me....

The building instructions for at least some of these models are also available online; you can find the instructions plus a parts inventory for Batman and Robin here, and they're thankfully much easier to follow than their printed counterparts...

The other PAB model I have is the Royal Guard. This one was produced to celebrate Her Majesty the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and was only available in stores between June 2nd and 5th, priced at £6. Given the limited availability, I have atkinsar to thank for grabbing this one for me - thanks, Andy ! As ever, the model was packaged in a sealed PAB cup (below).

The model wasn't supplied with building instructions on this occasion, although given my experience with the Batman and Robin instructions maybe that's not such a bad thing... Instructions are available online here, and you can see a sample page below, including an inventory of parts.

Consistent with the other PAB models, it's a very quick and simple build, and you can see a picture of the finished model below. Although predominantly made up of basic bricks, two 1 x 2 plates and two 1 x 2 tiles with grille make an appearance, not to mention a handful of 2 x 2 45 degree slopes for the huge bearskin cap.

So what to make of these models ? Well, they're not everybody's cup of tea, that's for sure; a 'prominent AFOL' who will remain nameless (you know who you are !) recently remarked "I fail to see the attraction of these. They are just piles of basic bricks badly put together", and he's not the first person I've heard make comments like that. I don't think that completists or collectors will get too excited about these models either - they lack any model-specific packaging (or even paper instructions in some cases), don't contain any unusual or rare parts, and can in fact be easily recreated by anybody with a spare PAB cup and access to a few basic bricks, with nobody being any the wiser that they weren't actually bought in-store; the only hard-to-source aspect of the models is the Batman and Robin logo stickers, and even these will no doubt appear on Bricklink in due course. The models are not even particularly good value for money - you pay the same for these models as you would for a cup of PAB parts of your own choosing, and most people could and would squeeze a lot more pieces into a PAB cup than you get with any of these models.

And yet....all that having been said, I do think they have a certain block-tastic, old-school charm and I can't help liking them, although I get the feeling that I may be in the minority. I will likely pick up more of them, although probably wouldn't go too far out of my way to do so. Interestingly, a few people I know who aren't LEGO fans have told me that they liked the models when they saw them, so perhaps they may appeal to the more casual or occasional LEGO buyer who wanders into a brand store and spots them. Although whether they'd be able to decypher the paper instructions is anyone's guess, assuming they're even given any...

A Different World

As someone brought up in an era of basic bricks and plates with few specialised pieces to call upon, it's perhaps not surprising that the joys of Bionicle and more recently HERO Factory have eluded me. Hell, I'm even suspicious of Technic, although I am slowly starting to come around to that in my old age.... I genuinely struggle to see the attraction of LEGO pieces which don't have studs and which are therefore barely compatible with my huge existing LEGO collection. I fully understand that many others love Bionicle and the rest, and good luck to them, but it just doesn't appeal to me, in the same way I guess that I've never 'got' Meccano while millions of other people swear by it.

Given all of the above, therefore, something extremely unexpected happened last weekend. For the first time ever, I was tempted into buying one of these "non-LEGO" LEGO sets on a visit to a LEGO brand store. The 'something' that happened was LEGO producing a series of HERO Factory-style Super Heroes figures. Not a stud in sight, and an awful lot of frankly alien-looking pieces evident in the publicity shots, but Batman is Batman, so I handed over my money and took my first step into a strange new world....

The box for Set 4526 Batman (above) is smart-looking albeit unusually tall and narrow. It has strange, incomprehensible things printed on it like "FRICTION JOINT FOR BIGGER BUILDING", a reminder me that I was indeed intruding on a previously uncharted corner of the LEGO universe.

The instructions (above) feature the same artwork as the front of the box; they're the shape of a DVD box but smaller. Maybe it's just my imagination, but the pages seem thinner than those of other instruction booklets and I'm wondering if with the size and shape of the booklet and the texture of the paper LEGO are trying to recreate a comic book-like feel. This suspicion becomes stronger when you open the booklet and find a comic strip featuring Batman and the Joker inside the front cover (below; click to enlarge). It's a very slim instruction booklet, although still manages to accommodate an inventory of parts and 5 pages of advertising as well as the building steps.

In addition to the instructions, the box contains two sealed poly bags of parts and a larger loose black part which will form Batman's 'spine'. You can see a selection of parts below; for those like myself unaquainted with the likes of Bionicle and HERO Factory, the parts probably won't seem like LEGO at all....

Despite consisting of a paltry 12 building steps, the build itself took longer than it should have done, probably because I found myself a little disoriented by all the unfamiliar parts. The majority of connections seemed to be of the ball and socket variety; this allows for a substantial range of movement and ensures that Batman can be posed like a bone fide action figure. Even most of his body panels attach via ball and socket joints.

Batman cuts a surprisingly imposing figure once built, and he's bigger than I thought he'd be. By way of contrast, I introduced him to fellow do-gooder Buzz Lightyear from Set 7592 Construct-a-Buzz (below) and he's slightly taller. Batman's ball and socket construction technique, and his consequent expanded range of movement, means that he can be posed in a more realistic fashion than Buzz and adopts a more natural pose.

Close up, Batman's mask and face have a slightly matte look and feel compared with your average LEGO brick, and his classic comic book square jaw is nicely captured. The Batman symbol on his torso is printed - no stickers in this set, I'm pleased to report.

Overall, I'm really not sure what to make of this set. It doesn't look like LEGO to me, and the building experience was totally alien and not particularly enjoyable if I'm honest. I also can't see much likelihood of finding a use for the pieces in the kind of MOCs that I tend to build. I do however have to confess that I quite like the final result, and I suspect that there's a fair bit of play value for a particular demographic given that Batman can be posed like a fully-fledged action figure and looks quite cool.

Batman is part of a first wave of Super Heroes action figures, along with Set 4527 The Joker and Set 4528 Green Lantern. Three more figures - Iron Man, Captain America and The Hulk are expected to join them later this year. I'm undecided as yet whether I'll look to pick up more of these or not, although if I find them at a reasonable discount it might just tip the balance...

Batman consists of 40 pieces and has a MRSP of £10.99 ($14.99 U.S.). At time of writing he's available on Amazon's UK site at 11% off MRSP and comes with free delivery - click here to buy. Folks in the U.S. can get hold of Batman here, although you guys will have to pay the full $14.99 MRSP I'm afraid....