Never apologise, never explain.

Welcome to the latest in this ever-growing series of posts that see me making excuses for not updating this blog, and promising to do better in future.  Where are we now?  Three?  Four?  Who knows? (1)

Anyway.  Moving on.

As promised, there's a review (of sorts) of the UCS Millennium Falcon coming up next, but my last post was 26th February 2018.  That's over three years ago.  

 THERE WILL NOW BE A TEMPORARY DIVERSION FROM LEGO BASED CONTENT.

PLEASE BEAR WITH US.

So what's been happening?

Well at that point I'd just undergone surgery for prostate cancer.  Chaps, if you're anywhere near the age of 50, if you're black or if you have any kind of family history of prostate issues, then stop reading, make an appointment with your GP and go and get checked.  It's not only one of the most common types of cancer in the UK, but caught early enough, it's also one of the most treatable.

To any ladies reading, if you have a man in your life that falls into the above categories, then pester him until he does something about it.

Nobody should die because they couldn't be bothered to get a check up. 

THANK YOU.  WE NOW RESUME OUR USUAL PROGRAMMING

I.E. RABBITING ABOUT LEGO

A quick look at the Purchase Spreadsheet reveals that there have been 209 separate acquisitions since that last blog post, most of which (2) were small, inexpensive sets.

I've actually built a few sets in the intervening time, including the Technic Lamborghini Sián, Dom's Dodge Charger from the Fast and Furious franchise, the Creator Expert Mustang and the Technic 4x4 X-Treme Off Roader.  One (actually, two, now I come to think of it) of these was an awesome build, one was pretty cool, and one currently holds the title of 'Worst Lego set I've ever bought'. 

More on that later.

The other significant thing that's happened is that we've had some work done on the house, and that has required us to temporarily rent a storage unit and transfer a number of items to it, from the house.  Including all my Lego.  This is the first time that my entire collection has been out of the loft at once.  Now while my wife and I have no secrets from each other (3), there may have been a few occasions when certain purchases were brought into the house and found their way into the loft before my beloved actually saw them.  So, because she doesn't venture into the loft herself (it requires some gymnastics to get up from the ladder and though the hatch) (4) there may have been some disparity between what was up there, and what she thought was up there.

The fact that she only gave me a baleful stare rather than going ballistic, reminded me of a quote by the American humorist, Dave Barry.  After getting paid a sizeable amount of money for writing a humorous article about sex... "I said to my wife that I was going to spend it on an electric guitar.  To which she replied: (and reader, I believe I married her in anticipation of this moment...)

'Fine.'"

She's good like that, my wife.

Anyway.  Rather than talk about Lego sets (which I promise I will in the next entry, so come back sometime in late 2024), I want to talk about the Dark ages.  Not the ones from history, which ran from 476AD to 1000AD (apologies to my history teachers, I had to look that up on Wikipedia) but 'Dark ages' in a Lego context.

For those not familiar with the term, a Lego fan's 'dark ages' refer to the gap between when they gave up Lego as a child - commonly in mid-to-late teens - and when they rediscovered a love of the brick.  Usually at the point where the term 'disposable income' has become a reality.  For some there was no dark age - they never lost their love of Billund's finest export (5), but many of us spent years in the wilderness.  For me it was about 30 years, until the 8110 Technic Unimog brought me back into the fold.  

But lately I've been wondering whether many people have a second (third?  fourth?) dark age?  When the bug bit, back around Christmas 2012, I just couldn't get enough of the stuff.  As this blog has documented, I started with Technic, spread out into Architecture, Star Wars and, well, quite a lot of other stuff.  Rarely a week would go by without a new acquisition coming into the house.  Far faster than I could build it, if I'm honest, which meant that when the aforementioned move of my collection came about, rather embarrassingly, around 90% of it was still sealed.  Great for resale value, but it hinted that I placed more importance on collecting than I did on building.

But then the purchasing slowed down.  To be fair, having cancer (which, annoyingly, made a reappearance in early 2020), will put a damper on your desire to buy toys.  Then being made redundant (which, annoyingly, happened in late 2020) does make you think twice about buying anything.  If you don't have an income, then it's a bit more difficult to justify spending £200 on a plastic toy.  But all that aside, I found that where I used to spend a lot of time trawling for Lego news, looking for new Lego books and all that jazz, I just... wasn't.

That's been the case for about two years, but lately... lately that itch has started to come back!

I guess I can liken it to a couple of other things in my life.  I love music.  Love listening to it and particularly love playing it.  I took up the drums in my late teens (6).  The other thing I took up in my teens was videogaming.  The lure of the late, lamented Clive Sinclair's 16K Spectrum took hold in around 1982 (my Mum and Dad bought it for me for Christmas, after I told them it would 'help me get a job in computers', which, to be fair, it did), and from then on I was hooked.  As well as being full of Lego, our loft is also home to just about every console that Sony, Nintendo, Sega, Atari, Microsoft and others have created in the past three decades.  

But I found that if I was in a band and playing music, then the dust grew thick on my consoles.  Maybe a few years would go by without me starting a new game.  And then something would happen.  I'd leave a band, or a band would break up, and I'd put my sticks down.  And before too long, I'd pick up a controller and I was back into gaming.  The two pastimes complemented each other, but rarely overlapped.

And thus, I think, it is with Lego.  For seven or eight years, it was, if not an obsession, then a hobby that I was very, very keen on.  And then other distractions got in the way.  Not hobbies as such, more "life", but it was enough to put Lego on the back burner.

But I found myself wondering about the next Modular building over the summer.  Not long ago I somehow came home with not one, not two, but three Lego advent calendars (7).  And last week I was in a local supermarket, and I saw some polybags that had been reduced.

Be rude not to, right?

And I found the pictures I'd taken when I was building the UCS Millennium Falcon, and before I knew it, I was halfway through writing a blog entry about it (8).

I don't think I'd call the last three years another dark age.  Maybe 'a gloomy period'.

But I can see a light shining up ahead.

Hey, Lego!  I'm back!  

Thanks for waiting for me.

 

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1. Six.  This is the sixth apology for an unscheduled delay.  I could get a job working on the railways!
2. Well.  Some of which.
3. At least I think we don't.
4. We really need to get a proper loft ladder at some point.
5. Probably Billund's only export.
6. More accurately, the drums chose me.  Parents.  Your child may choose to play the guitar, the piano, the flute or any one of the myriad instruments that are out there.  And after many expensive lessons and many disturbed neighbours, they may lose interest just as suddenly as they found it, and set aside said guitar / piano / flute / whatever.  Usually at the time that boys / girls become interesting.  But if your child is going to be a drummer, it's a disease that there is no cure for.  They will tap on anything and everything.  There is no reasoning with them.  If they're a drummer, they're a drummer and you'll just have to resign yourself to it.  Better still, encourage them.  It's one of the greatest things they'll ever do.
7. Star Wars, Harry Potter and Marvel.  Friends just doesn't float my boat. Might pick up a City one if I find it at a discount.
8. Yes!  It will be published!

Reboot

Welcome, or welcome back, depending on whether this is your first visit to my blog, or whether you used to follow it before I stopped updating it for a while.  And by ‘a while’ I mean 32 months.  Looking back at my last post, in July 2015, the opening paragraph related to the wonders of procrastination.

No little irony there, methinks.

Let’s just assume, for the purposes of expediency, that I came up with some valid excuse for not updating the blog, which you accept.  How about “I was pregnant.  With a Black Alpine Salamander.  Which has a gestation period of two to three years.”  That fits with both the timescale and the size of my waistline, so gender and species inconsistencies aside, we’ll go with that.

I have just completed a build which was crying out to be documented which is the main driver for me putting fingers to keyboard again, but I'll come to that shortly.  The purposes of this entry is simply to cover what's been going on in the nigh-on three years since I last posted an entry.  

I'll try to be brief.

Well quite a lot of new sets have been acquired, but rather fewer have been built.  It's led me to wonder (and this seems to be a not-uncommon theme among the AFOL community) whether I just like the 'collecting' thing rather than the 'making' thing.  Certainly I get a bit twitchy if I think there's a Technic set out there that I don't have, and I use all sorts of arguments (1) to justify picking them up 'before they go end of life' and I have to pay third party / scalper prices to complete my collection (2).

Anyway.  Looking back at my spreadsheet (3), it lists 149 acquisitions since July 14th 2015.  I will get in early with the 'many of those are small polybags / freebies / relatively cheap sets' excuse, which leaves some of the larger highlights as...

75827 Firehouse Headquarters:  Better known as the Ghostbusters HQ.  In 2016, Mrs Boo & I had a week in New York and we went and found the actual building (4), and the Lego design team have done a great job in replicating it.

42056 Technic Porsche 911 GT3 RS :  As Technic sets go, this was something a bit special.  'Luxury' packaging and an official tie-up with Porsche made this a bit more than 'just another big Technic set'.

75060 UCS Slave 1 / 75095 UCS Tie Fighter : That was quite an expensive visit to the Watford Lego Store.

However, the two biggies are in fact variations on a theme.  Some time ago I talked about the many different versions of the Millennium Falcon, and how - one day - I'd get myself a copy of the legendary 10179 Ultimate Collectors Series version.  Well back in October 2016, an opportunity arose to buy, via a friend of a forum member on Brickset, a MISB one.  It wasn't cheap.  Hell, it wasn't even expensive.  It cost more than my first two cars combined!  Ironically, the second major purchase was (almost) the same thing, as about six months after I bought that, the rumours started circulating that the UCS Falcon was going to be re-released.

And you know what?  Those rumours turned out to be true!  Now we could sit and talk until the fires burn low about how a) the seller made one of the canniest transactions he's ever likely to do, and b) how I was a bit of a muppet, as the new one was only (5) £649.99.

On a) I'd agree with you.  He said to me that he'd bought it as an investment, and boy did it pay off.  Sir, I take my hat off to you.  As far as b) is concerned though, do I feel ripped off?  No.  I'd rather have paid the original £342.99, but the fact is I didn't.  I now find myself in possession of not one, but both versions of an iconic model of an iconic spaceship.

As I said to someone online a while back, if I could have the choice of a mint Fiat 500 from the 60's, with all its flaws, or a modern version of it, with air bags, ABS and whatnot, I know which one I'd take - I'll have the classic every time.

So I paid through the nose, but I ended up with what I wanted.

The end.

And it's the build of the new 75192 UCS Falcon that I've just completed.  I shall expound at length in an upcoming blog entry on that particular experience, but it's not giving too much away to say that the review is likely to contain the expression "WooHoo!".

Otherwise it was business as usual - keeping up with the Technic releases, a couple of Architecture sets that interested me, the odd Star Wars set and a few of the Ideas sets (6), but then something happened at Christmas to take me down a (potentially expensive) side road.

I'll save that for another day though.

I'm going to aim to have updates to this blog coming out fairly regularly from now on (7), if for nothing else than to keep my brain and fingers working.  So watch this space - review of the fastest hunk of junk in the Galaxy, coming soon!

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(1).  'Man Maths', I believe this is called.  

(2) Naturally, the 'You could just not buy it at all.' option is rarely, if ever, given an airing, and when it is, it's dismissed with unseemly haste.

(3) Yes, I have a spreadsheet that documents my collection, including price paid, discount on RRP etc.  There's probably a way of describing it that doesn't make it sound nerdy and sad, but I can't think what it might be at the moment.

(4) Junction of North Moore Street and Varick Street in Tribeca if you're interested.

(5)  Only.  Only six hundred and fifty quid!  Only!  It's only an 'only' in comparison to what I paid for the original.  By any other measure, that's a lot of money.  I'm not loaded by any means, and I absolutely get that I've spent on two plastic toys what many families have to live on for months.  I'm very fortunate.  I know that. 

(6) I am becoming increasingly impressed with the sets coming out of the Lego Ideas programme.  From a few niche sets in the early days to the (looking back on it now) fairly clunky BTTF Delorean, it has progressed to bringing out some stupendous sets.  The Saturn V and Old Fishing Store are highlights, but high-fives have to be given for sets like the Caterham 620R, the Beatles' Yellow Submarine and the Big Bang Theory set.

(7) Yeah, I've said that before, and look what happened!

Bricks as Art - Nathan Sawaya’s ‘The Art of The Brick’

Procrastination is a wonderful thing.  Those of us blessed with it can always find an excuse for putting something off.  That wobbly shelf?  The garage that needs tidying?  No problem!  We’ll do it “soon”.  Maybe even “tomorrow’.

Just not “right now”.

However, to paraphrase the old Yellow Pages advert, procrastination isn’t just there for the  bad things in life.  Sometimes it gets in the way of stuff that you do actually want to do.

Want to see that film on the big screen?  It finished last week.

Pick that book up at a discount?  The sale’s over.

So when ‘The Art of the Brick’, Nathan Sawaya’s globetrotting Lego exhibition arrived at the Old Truman Brewery in London last September, I thought “I’ll go and see that.  No rush though - I’ve got plenty of time.”

And then the closing date passed.  

Fortunately, serendipity lent a hand, and I found that the exhibition had been extended to April 12th.  No doubt due to ‘overwhelming public demand’.  

I promptly forgot all about it.

Until a week before closing.  The last weekend it was on.  And we were going away.

Clearly someone, somewhere wanted me to see it, and so very thoughtfully gave me a dose of food poisoning just before we were due to pack up and head for Wales.  But Saturday morning rolled round, I crawled out of bed feeling rather better than I had for 48 hours, and suddenly we were looking at a Sunday with no plans.

To the internet!

Tickets purchased, a slightly reluctant wife and I got up early the next morning and headed out.  Lugging a bag full of DSLR gear with me, we got on the train, and about an hour later, emerged from Liverpool Street station.  I’d gone for early tickets, so the streets were largely empty, and when we got to the Truman Brewery, that was largely empty too.  It turned out to be a pretty cool exhibition space and a major plus point for me was that you could take as many photos as you like (as long as you didn’t use flash).  Given that most places like this chase you off like a plague-carrying zombie with halitosis at the sight of a camera, this was a bit of a result. (1)

Fortunately, my better half, who’d agreed to come along, was actually quite interested to see the works, and so didn’t mind too much about our slow progress through the gallery as I snapped away. 

The first room contained a number of classical sculptures, some well known, like the Venus De Milo, Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ and Michelangelo’s ‘David’, others less so, such as ‘Winged Victory of Samothrace’.  All were, at a guess, somewhere between 50% and 75% of actual size, though I’m afraid I may be way off the mark, my classical education not being all it could be.

Michelangelo's 'David'

The next room was, at first glance, a step back from the imposing statues we’d just left behind.  They were framed mosaics that replicated famous paintings, although closer inspection showed that there was more to them than met the initially-skeptical eye.

First up was ‘The Scream’ by Edvard Munch, something that most people will recognise: a slightly distorted figure on a bridge against an abstract - possibly fiery (2) - background. 

It was only as you drew closer that you realised that while the background was a ‘normal’ Lego-tiled mosaic background, the figure itself was three dimensional!

(The) Scream - 3D.  Not a cheesy horror film.

Next to it was a replica of one of my favourite paintings, ‘The Great Wave Off Kanagawa’ by Hokusai.  This too was three dimensional, but in a much more subtle fashion, only coming ‘out of the frame’ by a couple of bricks, but enough to give the waves real definition.

Detail from 'The Great Wave...'

Most of the other (five or six) ‘paintings’ in the room were flat, and varied in effectiveness.  “Girl With A Pearl Earring’ was unusual insomuch as it was a flat mosaic with the exception of the earring itself, which stood proud.  I spent a few minutes trying to work out whether it was a genuine Lego piece or not (it was a clear ‘bubble’ sort of thing).  I’m not sure, though more knowledgable people than I can probably give a definitive answer.

If pushed, I’d probably say that my favourite in the room was ‘San Giorgio Maggiore At Dusk’ by Monet.  Depicting the monastary-island of San Maggiore in Venice, the original is impressionist bordering on abstract, and Sawaya’s work does a fantastic job of replicating this.  Made up (as far as I can tell) of nothing but 1x1 tiles, maybe with a few 1x4’s in the sky, it must have taken a huge amount of planning, or an awful lot of trial and error.

San Giorgio Maggiore in all its impressionist glory

Next up was what I would describe as ‘display pieces’.  Not supposed to be anything in particular, they were oversized objects that wouldn’t look out of place in a hotel lobby, or in one of those achingly hip loft apartments whose owners have gone to extraordinary expense to make the place look empty.  A couple of chess pieces (‘Queen’ and ‘Pawn’) sat next to a three dimensional ‘twist’ of Lego / rope.  “Writer’ was a life-sized figure holding an oversized pencil, while “Polar Bear’ was, well you can probably figure out what that was.

Queen and Pawn

Some of the other pieces in the room impressed with their size, but didn’t seem to pique the interest in the same way.  An apple that was twice the size of my head was, to my mind, just a lot of red bricks.

In fact the one that caught my eye most was one of the smallest.  Simply titled ‘The Box’, it was inspired by a Roddy Doyle short story, and featured a figure, sitting on a bed, looking at a gift-wrapped box.  It was probably no more than a foot long and about 10 inches high.  It used just a few colours, was largely straight lines, and apart from the figure, used no complex building techniques at all.  It was probably the first in the exhibition where someone with a modest Lego collection could think “I could go home and make that!”   

Inspired by Roddy Doyle's 'The Box'

The following small gallery was a bit of a mixture, containing some musical-inspired pieces (a life-like and life-sized cello, plus ‘Sing’, an oversized musical note with a human head for the ‘blobby bit of the note’ (3) ).  The other sculptures were inspired by the solar system, with the smallest - a globe of the Earth, not much bigger than a football - being the most pleasing to look at.  Made up of 1x1 and 1x2 bricks in pleasing pastel shades, it’s the sort of thing I’d like in our house.

At this point we started to get to the ‘statement pieces’, and ‘Blue’ warranted a room all to itself.  It’s a figure, swimming.  Made entirely of blue bricks, it rests on a glass, or acrylic, sheet, representing the surface of the water.  Thus Sawaya has only created the part of the swimmer visible as they’re frozen, mid front-crawl.  Sadly the combination of the lighting, and my inexperience with a relatively new camera meant that when I got home and looked at my pictures, the piece was renamed ‘Purple’.

We then moved into the largest gallery space so far, and this is where Sawaya’s ‘Greatest Hits’ were displayed.

Much of his work is based around anonymous human figures, often combined with something abstract.  The first piece, for example, was around three feet high, and consisted of a figure with his arms raised.  The arms morphed into an arched ladder, coming down in  front of him, which he’d started to climb up.

“Building Red’, meanwhile, was a bust of a Lego man, putting himself back together from the pile of bricks that surrounded him.

All very deep and meaningful.

Three facemasks, each around four feet high were striking.  ‘Blue Facemask’ was a self portait, and ‘Red Facemask’ was a friend of Sawaya’s, while ‘Yellow Facemask’ had just sat on a drawing pin from the looks of things.

Facemasks

Three figures , titled ‘Red Torso’, ‘Yellow Torso’ and ‘Blue Torso’ dominated the centre of the room.  They were each life sized upper bodies, but with heads of a sphere, a pyramid and a cube respectively.

Torsos

A few other pieces drew my attention, but in the corner of the room was the one that everybody had come to see.

Simply titled ‘Yellow’, it’s a life-sized torso of a man, made entirely of yellow bricks, pulling his chest open from where a slew of more yellow bricks cascades onto the table.  In any medium more realistic than Lego it would be somewhere between disturbing and stomach-churning, but being in little plastic bricks it has a certain elegance.

Yellow

Moving on, we reached what might have been called the ‘Angst room’.  It was certainly filled with many figures, all of whom seemed to be suffering some sort of anguish, whether it was sitting with their head in their hands, or indeed looking at the pile of bricks on the floor that used to be their hands!  

Someone's not having a good day

There was a lot of stuff in this room.  Cracked heads, disintegrating bodies, clutching hands.

Maybe Nathan needs a holiday...

The next room was rather different.

In among a few other pieces and portraits were three life-sized figures, of a middle-aged woman, a girl in her late teens / early twenties and a crow.

They were on a plinth alongside a TV screen, and a film was being looped.  We sat down on one of the benches and watched ‘Daddy Warblocks’.

Directed by Chris Nash, with Lego sculptures by Sawaya, it’s about 10 minutes long, and either kitsch or very moving, depending on how heartless (or otherwise) you are.

With very little dialogue, we see a man saying goodbye to his wife as she heads out for a trip.  While she’s gone, he builds a bird from Lego and it comes to life.

As you do, he then builds ‘Penny’, his teenage daughter, and explains the world to her, and tells her about her mother, Rita, who’s away.  The film ends with him taking a photo of his daughter who is, of course, just Lego once more.  And standing alongside her is the statue of Rita, her ‘mother’.

I loved it.

Penny & Rita

We were nearing the end of the exhibition now.  A ‘British Room’ had been created for the London show, with some icons, such as a Phone Box, the Beatles and One Direction!

You could also have your photo taken in a chair, alongside one of Sawaya’s figures.

And normally, that would have been that.  However, as we’d gone late in the exhibition’s run, we were treated to some ‘bonus content’.  ‘In Pieces’ was a collaboration between Sawaya and photographer Dean West.  The explanation and ‘concept’ as we went in was, quite frankly, complete tosh :  “Identity as cultural creation” and whatnot.

In a nutshell, West had taken some photographs, and somewhere in the photo, a piece of the scenery had been replaced by a Lego substitute.  It was fun trying to spot what the ‘fake item(s) was / were before going off and finding the original.

Some were simple.  A man standing in a swimming baths had a Lego towel on the wall and a pair of Lego flipflops on the floor.  Others were more subtle.  A railway halt in the anonymous Mid-West had me scrutinising the picture for about five minutes before my wife pointed out the Lego railway tracks behind me.

One of the cleverest was a girl standing outside a 1950‘s style cinema.  She was wearing a little red dress which was being blown by the wind, and disintegrating as a result.  The entire dress, including the fragments, was made of Lego, and to reproduce it in the exhibition hall, hundreds of individual bricks were suspended on fine filament to replicate them being blown away.

The photo

The girl and dress in close up 

And the dress itself

And that was that.  My wallet didn’t make it through the gift shop unscathed, but on reflection, it got off quite lightly.

Looking back (several months now), I really enjoyed it.  Several people have commented that Sawaya’s work is quite simplistic, just using basic bricks, but I think it’s all the better for that.  Having the time and space to look around while it was quiet definitely contributed though - it would have been a different story in the height of the school holidays.

I believe ‘The Art Of The Brick’ is on tour still - if you get a chance to go, I’d recommend it. 

(All sculptures created by Nathan Sawaya - hopefully he doesn't mind me publishing a few pictures of his work.) 

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(1) I suspect that this is going to be a more commonly adopted attitude in future, as thanks to the fact that just about everyone (except me) these days has a smartphone with a fairly decent camera on it, everyone’s a photographer.  And you try and tell people they can’t come in without surrendering their phone, and there would be rioting in the streets.  

(2) Although it could equally be a striking sunset.

(3) I’m sure that has a proper name, but I don’t know what it is.

Small but perfectly formed. Review : Star Wars Microfighters

As well as Lego, I have an interest in all things Japanese. (1)  And for people with an interest in Japanese culture, the gateway can often be anime and manga. (2)

For those of us in the west, where comics bring to mind The Beano, and cartoons mean Tom & Jerry or The Flintstones, the Japanese style can seem quite strange.  Often figures seem quite deformed, with disproportionately large heads, noses so small to be almost non-existent and ridiculously large eyes.  

It’s just a style.

And within that style, is a sub-genre called ‘Chibi’.  This roughly translates as ‘small and cute’.  Often in a story there may be a scene where a character, who may already be quite cute, will suddenly appear in ‘chibi’ form.  They will have shrunk to maybe a third of their usual size, their head will now be considerably larger than the rest of their body, and their eyes will be enormous.

No, it doesn’t make a lot of sense if you’re not familiar with J-Culture, but trust me - it’s cute.

So what’s all this got to do with Lego?

Over the years, Star Wars has been a big seller for Lego.  Looking at the very excellent database at Brickset.com, there are over 400 sets listed in the SW theme.  Indeed, there have been seven different versions of the Millennium Falcon alone, ranging from a mini set in 2003 made up of a polybag-esque 87 parts, to possibly the most desired Lego set of all time, the 5195 part behemoth that is the Ultimate Collectors Series version released in 2007. (3)

The most recent addition to this exclusive list of Falcons is set number 75030.  This lives in a Star Wars subtheme known as Microfighters.  And these Microfighters are Lego’s equivalent of a chibi model.  Small enough to sit on the palm of your hand, yet with a full sized minifig pilot they are very cute indeed!

Last year, Lego released six models in the series.  They weren’t the first - there were five sets released, including a Landspeeder and a Slave-1 between 2012 and 2014.  They either slipped under my radar or arrived during my ‘dark ages’.

But the six new sets caught my eye.  Well, four of them did.  Two of them, the Clone Turbo Tank and the AAT are both from the prequel trilogy, and so hold rather less appeal for me than the four sets from the original trilogy. (4)

Those four are, to simplify things, two baddies and two goodies.  The baddies consist of the Star Destroyer and the Tie Interceptor, while the goodies are the X-Wing Fighter and the aforementioned Millennium Falcon.  They all retail for about £8.99, but it’s not difficult to find them all closer to the £6.50 mark.

At between 92 and 100 pieces, none of these were going to take long to build, so one afternoon I sat down with all four boxes and started putting together my fleet!

All the sets come with a manual and two bags of parts.  I started of with the grey wedge that is the Star Destroyer, although at this scale, if the star is any bigger than about 2” across, it would struggle.

It is at this point that I have to confess that the previous page-and-a-bit was written about four months ago, and I’ve just caught up with it.  So while I’d like to be able to regale you with interesting tales from the build of these dinky little sets, I am unable to by virtue of the fact that I can’t remember much about it.

What I do remember is that they were all pretty cool (although the Star Destroyer is as interesting a grey wedge can be, i.e. not very), and sat out on display for some time.

Here’s a few pictures by way of apology.

And while we’re talking about Star Wars, I may have mentioned that courtesy of the eagle-eyedness of THFourteen from Eurogamer, we were both able to pick up the Red Five UCS X-Wing at a bargaintastic 33% discount last November during one of Argos’ occasional 3-for-2 offers.

When I got back into Lego, I’d kind of got it into my head that I was going to build smaller sets to begin with and work up to the larger ones (5), but with a few days clear over the Christmas break, that went out of the window, and I spent a most enjoyable couple of long evenings building the X-Wing.

Awesome set.  Probably one that - on reflection - I would have paid full price for. (6)

Write up of that particular set coming soon.

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(1) Not all things, that would be daft.  I’m not interested in Japanese plumbing.  Or Japanese hairdryers.  But quite a lot of stuff.

(2) Anime are cartoons, manga are comics.  Despite their childish connotations, both have a wide audience across all age groups in Japan.  It’s quite common to see a salaryman, or office worker, reading, say, a Golf manga on the train to work.  Or a housewife reading a lonely hearts-style manga magazine.

(3)  I remember seeing it at the time.  Why didn’t I buy it?  Why?

(4) Or ‘the holy trinity’ as it’s known in our house.

(5) Which is why my first set, the 8070 Technic Supercar, is still unopened, despite having had it for nearly two and a half years.

(6) I paid £113 which was a bargain.  List price was £169.99.  It’s worth that.  However, last weekend, I went to Nathan Sawaya’s exhibition ‘The Art Of The Brick’.  The exhibition itself was excellent, but the prices of the Lego sets in the gift shop were outrageous.  That same X-Wing?  £260!!!  I can only hope they haven’t sold any at that price.