In what has been our annual tradition, it’s another year and another batch of Advent Calendars. This year gives us a unique opportunity with the addition of the Marvel Advent Calendar, allowing all of us to focus on licensed Advent Calendars. Ace will be handling Star Wars (75307), Eric will take Harry Potter (76390), and Nick is taking on Marvel (76196) instead of City. We’ll be walking through them all, giving our little pictures and mini reviews, and keeping a running tally of the hits and misses for each day.

***

If you average all three calendars right now, it’s trending towards being lame and stupid. Could that be a reflection of our high standards? Or are we just bitter old men? Maybe both? Let’s see what today brings us. But first, the tallies:

  • Star Wars: 6 Hits / 2 Misses
  • Harry Potter: 2 Hits / 6 Misses
  • Marvel: 3 Hits / 5 Misses

LEGO Star Wars (Ace)

Since yesterday gave us a barehanded Tusken Raider, I thought today was going to be that modified ballista that you can’t help but see on printed over the advent box windows but I was wrong.

I guess this is supposed to be a Gaffi stick weapons cache? Except it’s less of a cache and more of a stick sticking out from the ground. Or at least that’s what I think the designer was going for. Is it supposed to be a rock? If any build screams “built from scraps off the ground” then this would be it. Maybe I got it all wrong, maybe it’s a micro-micro-scale representation of some sort of Tatooine building and that stick is like a watch tower or something. I know that sounds stupid, about as stupid as this build is.

LEGO Harry Potter (Eric)

Yesterday was a disappointment. But today…

Not bad, actually. This is the wall that opens into Diagon Alley. The two halves fit together really nicely, even supporting each other enough so you can angle or spread the wall as you see fit. It also took me more than 10 seconds to build which, after the last two days, is certainly an improvement.

LEGO Marvel Super Heroes (Nick)

If LEGO really wanted to jab the knife in, they would have put a little wreath and a flower around the “Tony has a heart” build

A Bothan on our Facebook page made a comment that this whole calendar seems to be a troll around them just rubbing in the state of the MCU. The calendar opened up with a character who is very dead in the current universe, and then followed that up with another dead character. The cheeseburger we inexplicably got featured into the funeral scene in Endgame as well (one of the few actually earned emotional beats of that movie – I should review it someday, but let’s just say my opinion is likely far different from the popular one… one of the main reasons I never finished my MCU reviews).

So here we are with a simple but decent Spidey-ish themed gift, one not wrapped in the Avengers Tower gift shop because it didn’t come with blue paper. On the other side, we get a single stud tile, presumably to represent the Arc Reactor, which is fine, on a display in the wrong shaped clear container. It was Square in Iron Man, and was out of the box during the memorial service and placed on a floating wreath.

I’m conflicted. Probably will call it a hit, but it feels pretty marginal on the Tony side. They should have just done it as a themed-gift like they did the Spider-Man one.

Previous Days

 

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

2 COMMENTS

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.