When carrots attack

Somewhat delayed by life in general, here at last is my final review completing the first wave of The LEGO® Movie sets; 70813 Rescue Reinforcements. You get a lot in this set (it has the greatest piece count of this first wave) and the completed build consists of a Micro Manager, a chunky mech made from a fire truck and a kooky helicopter made from a windmill. You don't get to see the 'original' forms of these as the set doesn't have the alternate instructions to build them. Nor did I spot them in the film itself - only the transformed versions - but perhaps like so much else in the film it was a case of blink and you'll miss it.

Lime in the Cuckoo Nut

I discussed 70803 Cloud Cuckoo Palace back when pictures were first released, and given it's a fairly simple and flat build, I haven't too much more to say now that I have the actual set in hand. But things did take an unexpected creative turn when I mailed one of its elements, which comes in Lime [BL]/Bright Yellowish-Green [TLG] for the first time, over to spacey chap Peter Reid. He's perhaps most famous for designing the Exo Suit which will be developed by TLG to become the next CUUSOO set, but another trademark build of Pete's is his MkIII M364 Turtle. Let's hand over to Pete to explain what this new element meant to him.

Ultimate alternate

Just a quick note. In recent posts, fellow builders have been reworking sets from The LEGO® Movie to create alternate models. Perhaps you've considered giving it a try yourself...
well here's some further inspiration for you!

ReBrick, the MOC bookmarking site run by TLG, are running a competition with some rather unique LEGO Movie prizes. To enter you must build an alternate model using only the pieces from one official set of your choice. It's for 16 year-olds and over and closes at the end of March.

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Hey, this seems like a good chance to remind ourselves of the alternate models we've come up with here at New Elementary over the last month!

6-in-3-in-1

Following James Pegrum's look at 70806 Castle Cavalry, today I'm reviewing all three of the other "2-in-1" sets from The LEGO® Movie series; 70805 Trash Chomper, 70811 The Flying Flusher and 70804 Ice Cream Machine.

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.