Welcome to Day 7 of our LEGO Advent Calendar countdown. Each day, we’ll reveal the three mini-builds from the LEGO Star Wars, LEGO Friends, and LEGO City 2018 advent calendars along with commentary from The Brothers Brick team.
If you’re opening one (or more) of these advent calendars along with us, we’ve made sure the pictures and commentary on each day’s models will be behind a jump so we don’t accidentally ruin the surprise. Will Day 7 make an impression?
For Day 7, we have a Naboo Starfighter from Star Wars, a camera ornament from Friends, and a girl with a shovel from City.
Dave: Star Wars has a great little Naboo Starfighter as seen in The Phantom Menace. I would give it more credit if it weren’t a 100% replica of the exact same build in the 2012 LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar though… Oddly enough it appeared on the same Day 7 in that advent too.
The Friends camera is a nice homage to the camera in 41346 Friendship Box. The instructions were a bit hard to follow though, since some parts were hidden in the construction and not evident on the small door-panel. I guess that is the trade-off with having bigger, better builds–making you think a bit with the instructions.
For City, we have a mystery. At first glance, the shoveling girl looks like she has the same scarf-clad torso that has come with nearly any winter-themed set the last decade, but on close inspection, the design has been subtly updated to be less curvy and the fringe on the scarf has been removed, showing some buttons. So while technically this is an exclusive torso for the advent calendar, I bet most people wont even notice.
Rod: The camera is a nice little design. I like the Naboo Starfighter too. I don’t think I got the 2012 version with Darth Santa.
Nick: Let’s try recycling content! That’s a good trick!
Edwinder: That Naboo Fighter is strangely familiar! I’m not feeling much on the camera. I guess that’s what the City minifigure is tasked to do today. Bury them both!
Andrew: Sure, that Naboo Starfighter is great, but it’s identical to the one from 2012. The camera is fun with some parts in cool colors, but the City snow shoveler is very generic indeed. Following the stunning Cloud City and stocking from yesterday, this batch is a bit of a disappointment.
Bre: For adult fans, of course these are pretty boring. But from the perspective of kids–the intended audience for these–they’re rad. These are the kind of builds and minifigs that kids are looking for.
Chris: I like the Naboo Starfighter, though I suppose it’s too much to hope for that they’d do it in chrome like they did in the 10026 UCS version.
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Hmm, that torso, yeah. It seems Lego’s own listings on Brickset is incorrect, and that the design change is placed at 2015 instead of this year (?…)
I can understand the redesign, though. Considering that Lego has used the torso recurringly for little Girls (7 times out of 13 on Bricklink, plus an additional one which also has a lipstick face and might be chibi-sized), the accentuated bosom and waistline of the former design feels a little too genderized and sexualized…
@Chris:
No, chrome is probably right out. In order to do that, I believe they’d need to cut four new molds because I don’t recall any of those four light-bley parts ever shipping in chrome before. If they just pull those parts from existing stock and chrome them, the clutch will be way too powerful and it’ll risk splitting parts open and be very hard for kids to disassemble, so chrome parts need to have special molds where when the chrome layer adds material to the surface, the final post-chrome dimensions match those of a standard opaque ABS version of the same part.
But if you _really_ want one, there are those who sell custom chromed parts on Bricklink.