Castle meets Space

On reviewing and rebuilding duty today we have James Pegrum, a prolific builder famed for his British history series (his model of WWII code-breaking computer Colossus sits on display in Bletchley Park next to the real thing!) and his realistic Castle builds. At 2013's STEAM exhibit in Swindon, UK, he built the massive castle and grounds for The Land of Tigelfah group display and recently he's entered seven categories in CCC XI (the eleventh annual Colossal Castle Contest). Given these honourable credentials I thought it would be interesting, or perhaps horribly cruel, to send him 70806 Castle Cavalry.

This'll never fly, it's saloonacy

We have a LEGO® Movie set review and alternate build from Rod Gillies today. Under his Flickr pseudonym 2 Much Caffeine, Rod's well known for his steampunk builds and his microscale - in particular his elegant Star Wars microscale. Rod contributed to the recent LEGO Play Book but is also a published author of two steampunk novels.
Rod decided that the bizarrely-named 70812 Creative Ambush looked sufficiently steampunky for him to take on.

Putting the leg into LEGO

Our next LEGO® Movie set is one of the large ones; 70809 Lord Business' Evil Lair. It's a busy scene full of drama and confrontation (and of course silliness) so I feel it must be a climactic sequence from the film. As with most sets in the range, there's an abundance of minifigs but strangely only one bad guy, but hey who needs friends when you're ginormous?

Thrown together

A double-header today, as we have two reviewers that live together. Yvonne Doyle features in Megan Rothrock's new The LEGO Adventure Book Volume 2 and The LEGO Play Book and Peter Reid is co-author of LEGO Space: Building the Future. His Exo Suit model is going to be the next CUUSOO set to be released later this year. I assigned them 70800 Getaway Glider and 70807 MetalBeard's Duel and as things turned out, Yvonne did the official builds and Pete took on my challenge of building alternate models from the sets.

Laser therapy

Our next review of The LEGO® Movie theme is penned by Drew Maughan a.k.a. the infamous SilentMode. Drew's a multi-skilled AFOL (and human being) so you may know him from a variety of projects including his builds, his site of reviews and commentary silentmode.tv or his minifigure trading site swapfig.com, where you can get the figs you want by exchanging the ones you have. Swapfig recently succeeded in achieving a crowdfunding target so in between working on site improvements, Drew kindly found time to review 70801 Melting Room.

The good, the bad and the ugly

For the second post in this series about The LEGO® Movie sets, I'm reviewing 70802 Bad Cop's Pursuit. You get a flying police car, a ruined railway structure, two alligators, two minifigs - oh, and a frog. The ruined railway thingy made me feel a bit ho-hum about this set at first; it's one of those ugly things that just looks like a tacked-on play feature, which I could do without. However play features are critical for the target market, as is the establishment of a scenario kids can act out and given they're replicating a scene from a film here, that's especially important.

Recycl cycle recycled

Unless you've been living under a big ugly rock piece you'll know that The LEGO® Movie is released in the US on February 7 (see all countries' release dates here). The tie-in sets are already on shelves for some of us, and these weird and wonderful sets are going to be reviewed over the next couple of weeks here on New Elementary, with a little help from my friends! I've invited a few UK builders to bring their voices to some of the reviews and first up we have Tim Goddard a.k.a. Rogue Bantha, co-author of LEGO Space: Building the Future. He's also contributed to DK Publishing's The LEGO Ideas Book and The LEGO Play Book, and you can generally coo over his cool Spacey talents over on Rogue Bantha's Flickr page.

Life in plastic, it's fantastic

Of the 2014 sets that we know of - both officially, and leaked - it is the tie-in promotional sets for The LEGO Movie that have caused the biggest stir. Because they're bonkers. In a good way. Every set I see  just oozes mayhem, which bodes well for the actual movie! Definitely winning in the bonkers stakes is 70803 Cloud Cuckoo Palace. It's as though a bunch of Friends theme Designers ate too much contraband sugar then breathed in balloonfuls of helium and sang 'I'm a Barbie Girl' as they worked. (Again, I should clarify, this is a good thing.) I can't wait to see Unikitty in the movie - that's the brick-built adorable monstrosity at the top; a half-bred cat and unicorn apparently.