Catching up on my backlog of product news are the advent calendars for 2010. The City Advent Calendar has a focus on miniature toys and includes an almost naked Santa in a shower, lolwut? The Castle Advent Calendar has a nice array of minifigs and selection of castle accessories. I don’t know anything about their availability across different countries, but I hope they’ll be broadly available.
It is safe to assume that since there are two advent calendars one will hold amazing and difficult to find figures that look remarkable and would warm my heart to open and play with that will not be available to me without a massive write-in campaign and even then I will have to jump through hoops for the most limited availability. The other calendar will be full of figures/pieces that are uninspired and widely found designed with minimal creativity. The other calendar will be stacked high on shelves locally well into next year, blocking space that could be used to stock product I would actually spend money on.
I don’t know what’s more bizarre–that LEGO put a showering Santa in an advent calendar or that their decision to depict Santa taking a shower wearing a thong. What will this teach children about proper showering?
seems to me that he’s not santa but a member of the polar bear club.
even more bizarre is the “mom” minifig in the living room with a giant sausage. wtf?
Just a heads up to you. If I understand them correctly, the Flickr TOS state that the photo links have to direct you to the photo page in your stream. Not a big deal for most blogs, but this one is widely read enough for someone else to notice.
Are you kidding me “Creative Anarchy”? WAHH QQ a little more. Christ almighty the lego company doesn’t make policy based on your prissy little sensitive needs.
No but historically in terms of Advent Calenders they make decisions that frustrate consumers and cause written pettitions. Theoretically their policy is based on making money, seems logical enough. However the Advent callendars haven’t made a penny off me because of my unreasonable insistance that a company go to absolutely base minimal effort to make its products or services available to me as a consumer. Put your product on a shelf within 200 miles, have a website that sells it, put it in a catalogue. I’m not singling Lego out, there have been dozens of companies that have offered products I want that I don’t buy because they’ve simply made the effort to get them complete bullshit. It’s definately some amount of Wahh but a much greater degree of WTF. The Lego Group are skilled marketers in just about every other venue, They have a monsterous distribution network and a huge sales website, yet it seems that one time of the year we US fans all dread. We often whine that distribution of lego sets isn’t quite a world-wide affair but I think it’s reasonable to feel a bit WAHH about getting a short end of the stick at Christmas.
Umm, MV, that’s a baguette…
*apologies for double post in advance*
Oh, nevermind. I thought you referred to the deeplinked Flickr pic, but you referred to the box art. Indeed, WTF?
“No but historically in terms of Advent Calenders they make decisions that frustrate consumers and cause written pettitions.”
I will just point out that the only customers frustrated by Lego were indeed the American customers.
And it’s not like Lego thinks, hey, let’s annoy the fuck out of the American fans by not releasing something in their country, while we annoy the rest of the fans by releasing other sets a few months later. These decisions are usually taken with great consideration, and aren’t meant to piss you off.
Oh no, I’m not claiming that the US is the only country that suffers through distribution woes. From what I understand Austrailia really has to fight tooth and nail to get the sets that collectors are interrested in. It’s just that topically the Advent Calendars are an annual headache for us to the point of it seeming almost programatic to me. In the grand scheme of things shafted for advent callendars isn’t such a big deal to me personally. Like I said I’m more pissed that last year for two months a few cubic feet of shelf space was taken up by City Advent callendars that didn’t sell while product that I would have bought wasn’t orderred.