Everybody knew it already, and just a few days ago it was made official by Warner Brothers and LEGO in a joint press release:
Warner Bros. Consumer Products (WBCP) announced today an extension of its successful partnership with leading toy manufacturer, The LEGO Group, to bring the magical world of Harry Potter to fans everywhere. Under the agreement, The LEGO Group is creatively tapping into the Harry Potter magic to develop spell-binding construction sets and a board game inspired by the property in anticipation of the November 19 theatrical release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I, as well as the upcoming release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 in 2011.
“We have enjoyed a longstanding, successful partnership with The LEGO Group around Harry Potter and we are delighted to continue this relationship as we approach the release of the seventh film,” said Karen McTier, executive vice president, domestic licensing and worldwide marketing, Warner Bros. Consumer Products. “Fans of the franchise will be excited to discover the wonderfully original LEGO products inspired by the beloved stories and characters.”
“The world of Harry Potter has inspired some of our most successful products and we are thrilled to continue creating imaginative play opportunities for fans everywhere,” said Jill Wilfert, vice president, global licensing for LEGO Group. “The magical stories brought to life in the films give us the potential for an incredible array of offerings, the best of which are represented in our upcoming lines.”
We now have photos of the sets that were shown at Toy Fair 2010 in New York from Figures.com. I had expected they would have shown up officially at the London Toy Fair. Huw at Brickset who saw some of those sets in London had predicted that they would be well received and I believe they will be as well, if the pictures are a good indication.
The group pool at flickr for Brickvention 2010 is now active and being updated.
Brickvention is a LEGO-oriented convention and exhibition held every year in Australia. This year’s event took place January 23rd and January 24th in Melbourne. There were hundreds of models/sets/MOCs from all around Australia, along with demonstrations and games.
Huw over at Brickset attended the London Toy Fair today to look at LEGO’s upcoming offerings. No photography was allowed unfortunately. Huw made plenty of observations on the displayed sets.
A few notes on Huw’s observations:
* The Harry Potter launches towards the end of this year will be well-received, and The Burrows sounds like it’s what a lot of us were hoping for. I’m surprised at the number of new minifigs – two dozen or so.
* City Trains sounds very promising
* The Prince of Persia theme sounds awesome as well
* Hero Factory will probably be a suitable replacement for Bionicle
* Technic’s launches in August sound solid
* Also the collectible minifigs sound as good as they look. I’m not too happy that some will be rarer than others.
What I’m most excited about is this:
The three summer Atlantis sets look interesting: there’s another creature, a lobster I think, an underwater base and the ‘portal of Atlantis’. The pictures shown elsewhere of these are only a small part of them.
A quick note: I was mistaken yesterday, LEGO did do some promotion of the movie on the Atlantis.LEGO.com site, but I still believe more should have been done on LEGO.com as well as the Cartoon Network website. That’s just me.
If you’ve been following the Atlantis Theme, nothing in the movie should be a surprise. I’m going to post a short review, then some notes from the movie, and then a full synopsis of the movie (all in this post). If you don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading after the short review in the paragraph after this.
My overall impression is that it was very well done. The animation was good, the voice talent was good. As an AFOL, I wasn’t cringing at anything (and they even referrenced AFOLs at the end of the movie), it was enjoyable, and I could see kids really liking it. It showcased every single one of the existing LEGO Atlantis sets except for the 8079 Shadow Snapper. It also showed or hinted at a few large sets that we know about, but that aren’t yet available for purchase (later this year). It also showed something that… I don’t want to spoil the movie, so I’ll post it at the bottom, but let’s just say that it could either turn into a huge theme on its own, or be a sub-theme of Atlantis. It used almost all of the content from the Atlantis.LEGO.com website with the exception of the backstory around Dr. Artimus Rhodes and his great-granddaughter Professor Samantha Artesia Rhodes. This was probably due to the time constraints of a half-hour movie. It will be interesting to see if the LEGO Brickmaster Atlantis book fills in any gaps. It used all of the minifigs we’ve seen in the Atlantis sets, and everything but the Neptune Carrier was scaled appropriately.
STOP READING HERE IF YOU DON’T WANT TO HAVE THE MOVIE SPOILED!!
Having heard that quite a few new 2010 LEGO sets are popping up at Toys R Us and LEGOlands, I paid a visit to the Toys R Us in South Austin earlier today to have a look, and it was surprising.
We bought and are going to review in the next few days:
7592 Construct-a-Buzz (Toy Story)
7594 Woody’s Roundup (Toy Story)
8057 Wreck Raider (Atlantis)
8072 Sea Jet (Atlantis)
8073 Manta Warrior (Atlantis)
8083 Rebel Trooper Battle Pack (Star Wars)
8084 Snowtrooper Battle Pack (Star Wars)
First impressions: The Star Wars battle packs seem a bit high for the price, but the minifigs are awesome. The 8072 and 8073 were impulse kits priced at under $4. The Sea Jet in particular is great. The Wreck Raider is very neat for being under $12 – it comes with a Sharkman minifig and is the cheapest way to get one at this point. The Toy Story sets are also pretty nice, we were not after sets to review, but sets we wanted to keep around.
We also saw:
3187 Seaplane (City)
5891 Apple Tree House (Creator)
5898 Cars Building Set (Bricks and More)
5899 House Building Set (Bricks and More)
7206 Fire Helicopter (City)
7567 Traveler (City)
7595 Army Men on Patrol (Toy Story)
8059 Seabed Scavenger
8061 Gateway of the Squid (Atlantis)
8075 Neptune Carrier (Atlantis)
8085 Freeco Speeder (Star Wars)
8086 Droid Tri-Fighter (Star Wars)
8087 Tie Defender (Star Wars)
8088 Arc 170 Starfighter (Star Wars)
8519 Big Chill (Ben 10 from Cartoon Network)
There were probably Racers and some other sets we missed, but it was an impressive amount of new sets coming out all at once. It makes a lot more sense about Toys R Us trying to clear the shelves with a lot of good sales recently (Buy 1/Get 1 50% off, etc.).
A new Christmas-themed stop-motion LEGO short/movie has shown up on YouTube. It’s set to “A Pirate Christmas”, a song from the “From the Seas to the Streets” album from Captain Dan & The Scurvy Crew.
This week some Target retail stores in the US have three sets that normally sell for $29.99 on sale for $19.
The sets are:
5972 Space Police Container Heist (282 pieces)
8036 Star Wars Clone Wars Separatists Shuttle (259 pieces)
8960 Power Miners Thunder Driller (235 pieces)
The ads also mention that other selected LEGO Star Wars, Power Miners, and Space Police sets are on sale, however there is no mention of exactly which ones are on sale, at least in the flyer and on the Target.com website. It’s probably either a regional or store-by-store basis depending on what’s in stock.
On a related note, I noticed that Sears is carrying more LEGO sets. Keep in mind that it maybe a seasonal thing because of the holidays, but I saw several Star Wars sets, some Pirates sets, plus Power Miners, Bionicle, Space Police, Castle, and City.
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