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As you are well aware by now, we’ve been beating the drum this week about LEGO Atlantis: The Movie, airing tomorrow night on the Cartoon Network here in the US. Why? because it seems like nobody else is, least of all LEGO or the Cartoon Network. No, we are not being paid to or being given any incentives, this is all our own doing – we are fans of the Atlantis theme and it’s driving us bonkers that the cartoon/movie is being downplayed or not given much support.

As we mentioned last week, LEGO has updated their Atlantis Movie Site with what look to be teaser trailers, including mention of 3D, as well as wallpapers and the like from what looks to be the movie, and if you’ve been to LEGO.com this week, you may have even seen a brief animation, but there is no indication that it’s from a 30-minute movie/cartoon airing tomorrow night. Update: There is a release that popped up, but still not much on www.LEGO.com.

If you do a search on CartoonNetwork.com for “Atlantis”, nothing comes up. You can find the show times tomorrow by browsing to the listings, but even just a search of “Lego” only turns up Ben 10 related information.

The first time we mentioned this was at the end of December when we came across a LEGO Store calendar in-store for the month of January. We then posted some more information about the Atlantis movie including showtimes, the movie clips, wallpapers, and our speculation.

We mention all of this because it’s almost like it’s supposed to be top secret. We were given permission by LEGO to post some advertising material from LEGO discussing how big Atlantis is to LEGO:

Atlantis is a great new theme based in the story of underwater adventurers battling the deep sea creature guardians of the lost city of Atlantis through use of versatile and intricate underwater vehicles. Each set comes with a collectible key that within the story lines helps the underwater adventures unlock the gate to the lost city. LEGO has taken many cues from the extremely strong Power Miner’s marketing effort and applied them to this line. Most importantly, is the largest ever LEGO.com base of supporting interactive content with a large 3-D tie in.

I don’t know why it’s being treated as something that’s secret. The Atlantis campaign appears to tightly scripted and well run, and as the bit from above mentions, they modeled it on the successful Power Miners campaign. This information was widely available a few weeks ago to the public, and by last week, it was showing up on TVGuide.com as well as many other schedule providers. I was able to program it through my DVR over a week ago.

This isn’t some super secret set information that was leaked early, this movie/cartoon is a part of an expensive campaign done on the part of The LEGO Group to promote Atlantis!

It’s incredibly odd.

And now for some screenshots from the trailers – we held off until tonight to post these to maybe help generate interest and help people remember that the movie/cartoon is tomorrow night. I’m deliberately not posting anything related to the plot, just some screenshots of the some of the sets we’ve already seen:

Neptune Carrier – it’s huge.
(Neptune Carrier review)

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