Category Archives: News

Stay current on the latest news and information about LEGO, from sales & deals to new set announcements. We also cover LEGO events and conventions all over the world.

LEGO announces 10196 Grand Carousel: 250 USD, due out July 1 [News]

LEGO announces an impressive carousel scheduled for release in July 2009. This 3,263 piece kit includes Power Function elements that add motion and music to the model. Check out the full description below:

#10196 Grand Carousel

Ages 16+. 3,263 pieces
Available July 1st 2009

It’s a wonderful day for a ride on the merry-go-round! This elegant and beautifully detailed LEGO model isn’t just for show – it really spins and plays music while the horses and swing boats move up and down! Built with intricate, lifelike ornaments and features, the Grand Carousel is a spectacular addition to any LEGO display or carousel collection. Includes 9 minifigures and LEGO Power Functions motor and sound brick. Measures over 12” (30 cm) x 12” (30 cm) x over 12” (30 cm).

Features and Benefits

Experience the romance of this merry-go-round decorated with brightly colored elements!

Features 9 minifigures including ride operator!

The platform rotates clockwise/counter clockwise and the music plays!

The swing boats and galloping jumper horses move up and down!

Lots of realistic details including reflective decals on the center pole, ornate ornamentation, fleur de lys, bejeweled horses and profiles of jesters!

The tent-like top is made of canvas!

The Grand Carousel measures over 12” (30 cm) x 12” (30 cm) x over 12” (30 cm).

Pricing
United States $ 249.99
United Kingdom £ 166.35
Central Europe € 229.99
Canada $ 349.99

The Brothers Brick is funded by our readers and the community. Articles may include affiliate links, and when you purchase products from those links, TBB may earn a commission that helps support the site.

Upcoming DK LEGO Pirates and Castle Brickmaster sets [News]

Pirate and Castle fans and collectors alike will delight in knowing that a new line called “Brickmaster” (not to be confused with BrickMaster) will release two new sets in these respective themes. These sets include 140 pieces and an idea book. Click on the pictures below for more information.

DK LEGO Castle Brickmaster:

DK LEGO Pirates Brickmaster:

Three new LEGO Stores opening soon in Texas, Maryland, North Carolina [News]

I’m super excited to announce the upcoming opening of three new LEGO retail stores in Frisco, TX, Annapolis, MD, and Raleigh, NC.

There are special events taking place at all three new stores during their “Grand Opening Weekend.”

Frisco, TX

Dates:
May 15 – 17, 2009
Times:
Friday, May 15: 11am – 7pm
Saturday, May 16: 10am – 6pm
Sunday, May 17: 11am – 6pm
Location:
Stonebriar Centre
2601 Preston Road
Frisco, TX 75034

Lower Level near Dillard’s
Exclusive: LEGO Bucking Bronco

For those in the Frisco, Texas area, I will be attending the grand opening in less than a week since it’s only five minutes from my house. I hope to see some of our readers there!

Annapolis, MD

Dates:
June 5 – 7, 2009
Times:
Friday, June 5: 11:00 a.m.
– 7:00 p.m.
Saturday, June 6: 10:00 a.m.
– 6:00 p.m.
Sunday, June 7: 11:00 a.m.
– 6:00 p.m.
Location:
Westfield Annapolis
Annapolis, MD

West Atrium near Stoney River
Steaks
Exclusive: LEGO Chessie Sea Monster

Raleigh, NC

Dates:
May 29 – 31, 2009
Times:
Friday, May 29: 11am
– 7pm
Saturday, May 30: 10am
– 6pm
Sunday, May 31: 11am
– 6pm
Location:
Crabtree Valley Mall
4325 Glenwood Ave
Raleigh, NC 27612

Promo Court
Exclusive: LEGO Lighthouse

LEGO has this to say about the events taking place at each grand opening:

Help a real LEGO Master Builder construct an 8-foot tall LEGO R2-D2™ during our 3-day Grand Opening Celebration weekend!

You’ll get a free LEGO® Star Wars™ Certificate of Achievement for helping, while supplies last! Visit the LEGO Store during the event to enter for a chance to win a $50 LEGO Store Gift Card! No purchase necessary to enter.

Plus:
On Saturday, be one of the first 300 customers to spend $35 in the LEGO Store and you’ll receive an exclusive, limited-edition LEGO set!

On Sunday, the first 300 customers to spend $35 in the LEGO Store will receive an exclusive, limited-edition LEGO Minifigure T-Shirt! Shirts are available in child’s sizes only.

Visit stores.LEGO.com for more details.

In addition, here’s a full list of upcoming stores:

Stonebriar Centre, Frisco, TX
Crabtree Valley Mall, Raleigh, NC
Westfield Annapolis, Annapolis, MD
Kenwood Towne Center, Cincinnati, OH
NorthPark Centre, Dallas, TX
Penn Square Mall, Oklahoma City, OK
Easton Town Center, Columbus, OH
MyZeil, Frankfurt, Germany

LEGO Castle Adventure exhibit headed to Arizona Science Center [News]

The Indianapolis Children’s Museum, working with Lego, has put together an incredible traveling exhibit, designed to educate children (and adults!) on the intricacies of Medieval Castle building and medieval life. Among the many activities are “jousting”, building castle walls, dressing up in medieval costumes, and firing a catapult.

It has already been booked for the next five years! The exhibit has left Indianapolis, but is on its way to the Arizona Science Center.

You can check out the schedule and see if its coming to a city near you!

Check out these pics by Blackbear88 in order to see the actual exhibit.

Welcome to The Brothers Brick 2.0! [News]

After a couple weekends of PHP and CSS coding, I’m pleased to announce the launch of the new look and feel for The Brothers Brick!

This new design has a brighter header graphic and more room for cool widgets to either side of our posts — like a scannable list of the most recent comments — along with smaller tweaks like better-organized categories and collapsible archives.

For those of you on the RSS feed, be sure to click through to see what you’re missing.

Troubleshooting

We’ve tested our changes on Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer on both PC and Mac, but let us know if you have any issues.

One of the most common issues appears when you load the new version of Brothers-Brick.com for the first time. You’ll know it when you see it (right).

Just clear your browser’s cache and it should appear normally.

One day left to get free LEGO Star Wars poster and win a free UCS Falcon [News]

This is time-sensitive enough that I figured it was worth a reminder. The free LEGO Star Wars minifig poster promotion ends at midnight Eastern tomorrow, along with your chance to win a free Falcon.

It’s not clear how long the $125 discount on 10179 Ultimate Collector’s Millennium Falcon™ will last either.

Again, this is unfortunately limited to the US and Canada~~, but those of you elsewhere can download the high-res LEGO Star Wars minifig poster from Flickr~~.

V&A Steamworks’ stovepipe hats make steampunk minifigs awesome [Review]

Guy Himber (V&A Steamworks) recently began applying his special effects artistry to his LEGO hobby by producing custom stovepipe hats.

The hats are like hilariously exaggerated versions of the official LEGO top hats, and are absolutely perfect for steampunk and Victorian fantasy minifigs.

Guy was kind enough to send along a couple of the hats for us to review, and they’re made extremely well. I put one on a minifig and couldn’t stop laughing for five minutes.

The hats are beautifully machined from Delrin plastic and have that perfect “LEGO fit” — they slide onto the minifig’s head without effort, hold well, and come off easily with that satisfying “pop!” you expect from official LEGO headgear.

The V&A Steamworks Stovepipe Hat is currently available in brown, black, and white. Click the lineup photo above for pricing info and how to order.

(The Brothers Brick has a small backlog of custom accessories to review, including all the new BrickArms items, HAZEL’s accessories from CustomMinifig.co.uk, minifig stands from Minifig World, new accessories from Arealight, and more. Please bear with us as we get caught up.)

$125 off 10179 UCS Millenium Falcon, and enter to win one for free! [News]

The big announcement at midnight Eastern (that’s now!) isn’t just the free LEGO Star Wars minifig poster we announced a few hours ago.

10179 Ultimate Collector’s Millennium Falcon™ is being discounted by 25%, or 125 USD for a limited time.

Even better, on May 3 and May 4, you can enter to win a first-edition UCS Falcon! Head on over to Shop.LEGO.com/MayTheForce in one minute for more info.

May the Force be with You™! Celebrate 10 Years of LEGO® Star Wars™

UPDATE: Unfortunately, the information we received about the Millennium Falcon discount and free poster didn’t indicate it was specific to the US & Canada. Sadly for our readers elsewhere, that appears to be the case.

Celebrate 10 years of LEGO Star Wars with a free limited-edition poster from the LEGO Shop [News]

Celebrate 10 Years of LEGO® Star Wars™ at 12:01 AM EDT tonight by getting a free limited-edition poster with any purchase on May 3rd and 4th (while supplies last).

The poster features 160 minfigs from the past 10 years. Don’t forget to check out the LEGO Shop online at 12:01 AM EDT on May 3rd to place an order and get your free poster.

Good luck, and may the Force be with You!

UPDATE 1: By popular demand, I’ve uploaded a high-res version of the LEGO Star Wars minifig poster to Flickr.

UPDATE 2: Unfortunately, the information we received about the Millennium Falcon discount and free poster didn’t indicate it was specific to the US & Canada. Sadly for our readers elsewhere, that appears to be the case.

The Classic Castle Battles Contest has begun!

Every year, I host a Medieval Battles Contest at Classic Castle Forums and now is the time!

So get out there and build the biggest, baddest battle you can!

There will be prizes for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places….so you have a pretty good chance. Get cracking!

(The picture is of the winning battle scene from the first year of the contest…Jens was the builder)

LEGO wants to hear from you! [News]

The LEGO Group would like to hear from LEGO fans like readers of The Brothers Brick in a new online survey.

Read on for more information, including results from the December 2008 survey.

Note: For our American readers, note that commas and apostrophes are reversed in numbers. For example, 2,4=2.4 and 1.000=1,000. I’ve also added links in a few places.

As Adult or Teenage Fans of LEGO, you bring an important perspective to the LEGO Group. We respect your creativity and passion for the LEGO brand.

In December 2008, we did an online survey to learn more about the global AFOL (defined as ages 20+) and TFOL (defined as ages 13-19) communities and for your information, we have listed the key findings below. Now we ask you to take this survey again. It include some of the same questions, but also a set of new questions for you. These surveys will be conducted on a quarterly basis this year.

Please take a few moments to complete this short online survey to let us know your opinion on how we are doing.

You might notice that the link refers to the LEGO Kids Inner Circle; this is because Satmetrix, which hosts that site, is also supporting our efforts to track AFOL/TFOL opinions. Rest assured that this survey is for AFOL’s and TFOLs only.

Here are some of the key findings from the December 2008 survey:

The survey was completed by 6.500 (!) AFOLs and TFOLs. 19% of respondents were TFOLs, 81% was AFOLs. 94% were male, 4% female and 2% did not want to share gender.

When asked about likeliness to recommend LEGO products and services to friends and family, AFOLs are more likely to recommend than TFOLs. When asked what the LEGO Group can do to improve willingness to recommend, most frequent answers was, “better pricing”, “re-release classic sets”, “less custom made pieces” and “no more stickers, print on bricks”. This feedback has been communicated to relevant business units within the LEGO Group.

47% of AFOLs/TFOLs are NOT members of a LEGO User group. Among those who are members of LEGO User Groups, they are in average members of 2,4 LUGs.

In average AFOLs and TFOLs are spending in the area of USD 1.000/EUR 700 on LEGO product annually. 20% of this is spent on second hand purchases.

Favorite websites include Peeron, LEGO.com, The Brothers Brick, shop.LEGO.com, Eurobricks, Brickshelf, Bricklink and Flickr.

Thank you,
The LEGO Community Team

Take the Survey

Gary McIntire brings Legoland to Mythbusters

Legoland’s master builder and all-around great LEGO community guy Gary McIntire has helped out the Mythbusters crew with a LEGO related myth. Check out the press release:

LEGOLAND® California Model Builder Helps “Mythbusters” Dispell Myth!

Popular Discovery Channel Show Highlights Family Theme Park in Upcoming Episode

CARLSBAD, Calif. (April 28, 2009) – “Mythbusters” reached out to a Master Model Builder at LEGOLAND® California to help dispel a myth regarding a giant LEGO® ball on an upcoming episode of the popular international show airing April 29, 2009 on the Discovery Channel.

“It was an honor to be included in the project,” said LEGOLAND Master Model Builder Gary McIntire. “I have always been a huge fan of the show so for them to come and ask for my help was really a proud moment in my career!”

Show hosts Kari Byron, Tory Belleci and Grant Imahara trekked down to Carlsbad, California from the show’s home base in San Francisco to use McIntire’s expertise on how to build a nearly 10-foot LEGO sphere.

The myth originated with a YouTube video in which Indiana Jones fans reenacted the famous boulder chase scene from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” with the “boulder” being made of five-million LEGO bricks. The boulder is rolled down a steep street in San Francisco, crashes into a car, and remains somewhat intact. The “Mythbusters” team set out to discover if a boulder of that size could really be made entirely of LEGO bricks and still roll so smoothly down a steep hill without breaking apart into millions of pieces. In order to debunk the myth, McIntire and 20 others worked on building the ball using nearly one million LEGO bricks over the course of nearly two weeks.

“We have more than 15,000 LEGO models here at LEGOLAND California,” said McIntire, “and this is by far the singularly largest creation I’ve ever helped to build!”

The “Mythbusters” team spent a day at LEGOLAND California researching models similar to the one they needed to build studying sphere shapes such as the head of the giant 17-foot-tall pharaoh in the Park’s newest area, Land of Adventure and the dome of the Griffith Observatory in Miniland U.S.A.

To discover the results, tune into the Discovery Channel April 29, 2009. Please consult your local TV guide for channel and times in your area.

I was hanging out with Gary this weekend (all this travel has been keeping me from blogging) and he’s really excited about this episode. He said to keep an eye out for a time-lapse video of his hands building the Mythbusters logo. I’ll definitely be tuning in tonight to watch.