Having never attended this event before, the Brothers Brick were unprepared for the mass chaos that greeted them upon arriving at the Javits Convention Center in New York at 0650 this morning…
Upon being escorted to the LEGO booth – a formidable high-walled yellow fortress in the middle of the showroom floor – scores of LEGO-related members of the press (including yours truly) descended upon the 2015 LEGO line, jostling for position and attempting to take photos of over 300 soon-to-be-released (or recently-released) sets. The focus of the show has already been revealed here – the new UCS TIE Fighter – but LEGO did have a few other surprises in store. After talking to LEGO lead designer (and friend of the blog) Erik Varszegi and being introduced to LEGO master model builder Paul Chrzan, we tried to focus on some of the most interesting new stuff: carbon fiber bricks, Jurassic World, Scooby-Doo …and Ant-Man!
The only disappointing part of the $19.99 Ant-Man set (to be released in June) is that it doesn’t come with micro versions of the three minifigs …but it’s definitely a really fun set.
We’ll probably post an entire sequence of Scooby-Doo photos later, but here’s something that will bring readers of a certain age back to their childhood …the Headless Horseman, depicted – as God intended – with a pumpkin where his head should be:
The Jurassic World sets will be out in May and follow in the footsteps of the many LEGO dinosaur-related lines of the past.
The carbon-fiber bricks were the most unexpected part of the show for your correspondent. This year’s Agents sets will include special bricks that are 90% ABS and 10% carbon fiber, which makes them interactive with a special LEGO app on tablet devices. These bricks react with the app in some really cool ways, as demonstrated for the Brothers Brick by LEGO’s Fraser Lovatt. Here’s a shot of the app in action, along with a view of the new bricks. For now, the only piece they’re making with the carbon fiber mixture is a 1×1 black brick with a special protuberance on one side and a stud on the opposite side.
In other news, the new Mixels sets don’t seem to have any new parts, but they definitely have a lot of pieces in new colors.
Last and certainly least, Galidor is back! Okay, it isn’t quite Galidor, but it does feel that way. See for yourself.
There’s much more to come, but for now, we’ll leave you with some of the hard-hitting journalism that the Brothers Brick is known for… It turns out that Erik and Paul had to be at the booth at 0600 this morning, and it’s a good thing they were on time; the overhead LEGO signage had a velcro failure overnight, destroying much of their work. They had to hurry to fix everything before we showed up, finishing minutes before we stormed the walls. You won’t get scoops like that anywhere else on the web – and upon reflection, you’re probably glad about that.
After Erik and Paul had recovered, we managed to talk to them briefly about their careers with LEGO:
