Hands on with the Harry Potter 75954 Hogwarts Great Hall at New York Toy Fair 2018 [News]

Yesterday, news that LEGO Harry Potter is coming back took the world by storm. Today we got our first in-person look at 75954 Hogwarts Great Hall at the New York Toy Fair and here are our first impressions. The set includes 878 pieces and will retail for $100 starting in August.

As you’ll see in the photos and video, the set includes numerous prototype parts. As LEGO has done in years past, very early LEGO set prototypes include 3D-printed parts as placeholders for the planned new molds.

Hogwarts Castle

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is a sprawling location hidden somewhere in the British countryside. For this LEGO set, the castle is represented mainly by the Great Hall and the Headmaster’s Tower.

New Harry Potter minifigures

Each of the new Harry Potter minifigures has been redesigned, including Harry himself, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, Draco Malfoy, Susan Bones, Professor McGonagall, Professor Quirrell (with dual Lord Voldemort face), Hagrid, Albus Dumbledore, and Nearly Headless Nick.

Professor McGonagall’s skirt piece uses a new, curved slope that is the proper height for minifigures, versus the older (existing) slope piece pressed into service with 1980’s era LEGO Castle princesses.

With Quirrel and Scabbars (Peter Pettigrew in animagus rat form) part of the assortment of characters in the set, it’s clear that this LEGO set depicts Harry Potter’s early years at Hogwarts. When the very first Harry Potter set was released in 2001, LEGO had not yet produced “shorty” legs, which were released the next year with the first LEGO Star Wars ewoks. Having set the precedent with the first sets, LEGO was thus committed to depicting the young children of the Harry Potter universe at adult height. With what is effectively a reboot rather than a continuation of the Harry Potter LEGO theme, it’s interesting to see that LEGO has chosen to give the children short legs this time around.

Hagrid the half-giant gamekeeper is also built from completely new molds, with a unique great coat torso that attaches to short legs. Hagrid’s hair and beard piece is also new, and he carries a new lantern accessory.

Speaking of accessories, the wizards and witches of the Harry Potter world no longer need to wave wooden lightsaber blades around in order to effect spells. The new wand piece appears to come in several colors, including the expected brown and black.

The Sorting Hat also gets a new mold, compared to the standard wizard’s hat with printed details previously.

Buildable creatures include the Basilisk and Fawkes the phoenix, plus new Hedwig and Scabbers figures.

New parts

The new parts include arches, magic wands (no more waving around a wooden lightsaber blade!), lantern, cones, the Sorting Hat, several different animals, 1×1 “double cheese” rooftop pieces, and many more. Check out the gallery of photos below to see all the new LEGO parts in this upcoming set. What’s your favorite new part?

Important: As we mentioned earlier, many of the planned new parts are at the 3D-printed prototype stage. Let’s not start bemoaning the precipitous decline in LEGO’s manufacturing quality based on these photos of pre-production prototypes.


Check out the rest of our Toy Fair New York 2018 coverage:

11 comments on “Hands on with the Harry Potter 75954 Hogwarts Great Hall at New York Toy Fair 2018 [News]

  1. Johnny Johnson

    Holy crap, so many new parts.

    I’m terribly excited about the new dress mold! I’d love to know if it has leg-style pegs on top, instead of the (Old-style dress piece) studs that don’t stay in solidly. The new wands are also great!

    Why did they go with short legs on Hagrid, instead of overcoat-printed normal legs? Kinda bizarre.

  2. Felicia Barker

    Aw, I rather like the old lightsaber blade wands. There’s a level of abstraction that’s quite aesthetically pleasing, and they had it in a way these new ones don’t really for me.

  3. Armin Petschelt

    Those 1×1 arch pieces used to build the short wall around the entrance don’t appear in official images! There they are replaced by 1×1 bricks.

  4. Julie

    Do they allow pictures of the Voldemort face on the back of Quirrell’s head? I haven’t found that anywhere. Also, what are the little black wheel pieces at the bottom near the tables? Looks like a mechanism.

    Very excited about the set! Thanks for the photos!

  5. Håkan

    @Julie

    Oh yeah, the black cogwheels. I think the idea is to simulate wizard fights between the wizards on the tables in the back, and by turning the cogwheels, you can make the table and minifigs tipping, or something. (Although I’d assume that would make both minifigs tumble over, though.)

  6. Purple Dave

    @Felicia:
    The new wand has a huge advantage in that it can be posed, as you can see in one of the pictures. The handle is cut in such a way that the wand can point straight out from the hand. The downside is you could attach effects to a lightsabert blade (or more ideally, a 3L lightsaber blade, since 4L looks gigantic for either wands or actual lightsaber blades), and with all the new effects they just released for DC Superheroes, they just missed a huge opportunity.

    @Armin:
    The two mini-arches and half-cones are all rapid prototypes. They pour either powder or liquid into a vat and use lasers to fuse it together in layers. The parts look like garbage, but you only need a CAD file and some free time and you can turn out a few parts, vs needing an expensive mold that will take several days to cut and is difficult to make changes to. The upside is they can spit out some of these parts at the last minute, if they don’t have time to send actual molded parts to NYTF. The half-cones were probably painted, and the mini-arches will probably end up in tan (sometimes they don’t have time to paint them). The double-sided cheese slopes were probably produced in orange for something else, or those were test shots off the mold, because they don’t show the terracing you’d see on a rapid prototype, and white seems to be the standard color for rapid prototypes. Those are orange underneath. The earliest use of rapid prototypes for LEGO sets that I know of were the first Snowtrooper helmets about 15 years ago.

    @Håkan:
    I think the idea is two kids turn the double-bevel gears at the same time, and whichever causes its table to collapse first signals the loser of the duel.

  7. Purple Dave

    @Johnny:
    Brickfan has a video showing the loose skirt piece. Yes, it has the same pegs as regular minifig hips and short legs. The sad thing is, all older minifigs are stuck with the 2x2x2 slope if they have a printed skirt, and that design sucks. I have Splinter, Magpie, and Wiz-Bat that I can think of that I’d love to update to this design, but they all have printed slopes.

    For Hagrid, I think it’s two-fold. One is that the rigid plastic coat means he can’t really bend his legs anyways, and the other is that with his height the regular minifig legs are still too short. I think the long legs from Woody and Jessie would be more accurate for his stature.

  8. Zilberfrid

    As for the smaller skirt, I have taken to just adding a single 1×1 plate under legs. This way I can differentiate between different heights, males and females are the same size, and the ridiculous minifig scale is a bit better.

  9. Del Spenst

    One of the designers replied to a topic on Eurobricks that the model at the toy fair was an early prototype and not reflective of the final product. I suspect that we will not see some of these new parts, such as the small half arches, in the final product.

  10. Alex Hitchen

    Anyone else noticed that Dumbledore is in sand blue here with shorter hair (more similar to how he appears in the third film) when in the original images kefo released hes in dark red with longer hair? Maube that’s the dumbledore they’ll be using for the D2C castle that’ll represent scenes from later films

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