@Jai – The offensive thing is that Knight’s Kingdom II was made at all. ;) KKII is the new Fright Knights, the theme everyone loves to hate, myself included. The first Knights Kingdom was never much of a problem…not great but not a failure. Though, to be honest, you can always find “anti-fans” for any theme or subtheme.

http://www.bricklink.com/browseList.asp?pg=3&itemType=S&catString=9&sortBy=Y&sortAsc=A

Also your comments about Castle and Space are ignorant. There have been Castle sets released nearly continuously since the 80s. There have been new castle sets every year since 1983, with the exception of 1999. I’m not an expert on Space, but I know there have been Space themes after 1996. You might not have liked them, but they did exist. You might consider checking your facts. Just because the themes weren’t called “Castle” and “Space” doesn’t mean the themes didn’t exist.

While City/World City/Town/City Center has been around for decades with new sets almost every year (I think the only year is 2002 because they made the switch in styles) since when was Castle a big deal? They went years and years without a Castle theme. Space died in 1996, and there wasn’t Life on Mars until 2001, then Mars Mission in 2007-2008 and now Space Police in 2009, so because they have had Space for the last three years it’s considered a Classic?

Of course Pirates is “just taking a break”, a break that will be over a decade like the last time.

Alldarker might be right, and I really hope he isn’t, that the new Disney Pirate movie might bring the theme back with fleshies. Pretty soon LEGO will stop making yellow minifigures all together.

It does seem like Lego is quick to pull the plug on lines, but remember, this has been going on for quite a while. Remember Rock Raiders? Insectoids? Even some of the better lines, such as RoboForce, were discontinued after one season. There are examples older yet even that I have not listed here.

Right now, I’m starting to think that Lego brought back the Pirates theme for one season *just* to shut up the AFOLs, and didn’t put a whole lot of thought into it as a result.

Not because it’s going away (On hiatus), exactly… but because the new line was practically ALL a heavy retreading of old ground. I didn’t like that — at least, it was not interesting to me. The very few new things about it WERE almost all notably appealing, and as everyone’s said, the relaunched line just had a minimum number of sets that did not do anything to round out the theme. It’s possible that the mothballing is due to the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, but that would also make me sad because I do NOT want pirate fleshies. I just want the theme to come back with some better ideas than “pirate ship set, small castaway set, raft octopus set, and small military outpost set”. Taking inspiration from the PotC movies would be a good thing. Maybe we’d get “rowdy town set, actual sea monsters set, island natives (Islanders again, hooray! Heheh) set, civilized town attacked by pirates set, military fortress (A “retread”, but a good idea) set, military vessel set”, etc.

@Tolwyn: I understand your point and agree with it to a point. To that end, though, I would like to see them make a swing one way or the other with Pirates. Either make the series bigger, better, shinier on its own with real characters and storylines, or swing a little closer to the castle/fantasy side of things (we did get a Mermaid this time). Like I said above, more sets with better variety (which can be applied to any line, of course) would mean more appeal. Then agian, if it had better appeal now, it wouldn’t be taking a break.

Then again, maybe alldarker has a point.

I liked the old pirates better.

I don’t know what an “Evergreen” line means (Christmas?). I think this is why the Agents sets work so well. They work with other sets. They work with Aqua Radiers, houses, Town/City. They integrate well. Pirates is stand-alone (yes, you can say Star Wars does as well, but lets face it… Star Wars is a better-selling franchise for lego).