Season’s of Spam 2024: Advent’s Galore Final Thoughts

This has been a quiet year for the site… for some documented reasons for some that will probably be documented later on in this whole thing. But we’ve all been looking forward to doing the Advents, our yearly tradition that still happens to be a thing despite the fact that the internet is dead and it’s just bots talking to bots now. Beep boop.

Originally, we were going to mix it up this year but… things didn’t work out. Scalpers went hard in Dallas and the Star Wars Advent disappeared within a few days and never came back in stock, so Nick’s plan to do the Star Wars calendar fell through. We’re going to go with it just being the universe punishing him by making him do the Marvel Advent yet again. Something that just might finish him off this time.

We’re also going to do the newer tradition of going with non-LEGO calendars, because Advents are the new socks are the new ugly sweaters are the new yearly ornaments. Okay, that joke got away, but the point is that everything has an advent now.

Even Rocks.

That’s a hint, LEGO… bring back Rock Raiders. The world needs them now more than ever.

The final tally was…

• Star Wars: 11 Hits / 1 Misses UPDATE
• Disney: 20 Hits / 4 Misses
• Marvel: 7 Hits / 17 Misses

Ace: Star Wars and Disney Thoughts

This year’s Star Wars calendar was just stellar. Final score ended up being 16-8. If my memory is correct, in past year’s they were always right around the 50% mark. One of reasons it scored so high was the fact that there were no weapon racks, or builds that entirely depended on another day for context, functionality, or completeness. This is how calendars should be. Each day should be a treat on its own. I hold the opposite opinion of Eric in this regard but that’s okay. I can’t remember if the Harry Potter calendars he used to do had multi-day builds like Star Wars did.

There were five minifigs included in this year’s calendar, two of which are unique in the form of ugly Christmas sweater minifigs. They are bangers. The others I wasn’t too thrilled with as I don’t feel like I am the target audience for whatever piece of media they were sourced from but they were fine.

The ships and vehicles were mostly great. A few them I had a hard time recognizing but thanks our #lego discord channel they were easily identified. Again, that is just an unfortunate byproduct of not being in the target demographic and/or not consuming every piece of Star Wars media. I can’t really fault LEGO for wanting to include the more obscure models but if ever there was a choice between including something from the core set of movies or from a kids show on a streaming platform, I would think the choice would be obvious.

My favorite build of the Star Wars calendar has to be hands down the Millennium Falcon from day 9. I never get tired of this ship. I recently rewatched the original trilogy and seeing it in action is so satisfying. This micro model is pretty great and I am tempted to throw a binocular element or rollerskate on top for the gunner station.

It was a little difficult picking my least favorite build only because for this year’s calendar when it hit a lot it really hit a low. I’d have to give the honors to this thing. Apparently it’s the Crimson Firehawk from the Young Jedi Adventures cartoon. There is an official set that was a 4+ set but even that wasn’t pleasing to the eye either. It’s just atrocious all around.

Onto Disney…

The Disney calendar was an impulse buy for me at Costco. I wasn’t aware that Eric was planning on reviewing the Disney one until it was too late. Had I known I would have covered the Harry Potter one. One of my kids opted for the HP calendar this year so maybe I’ll just do a brief write up on that in the next couple of days. I didn’t keep an official tally for the Disney calendar, but going back and tallying the score, it ended up at 13 thumbs up and 11 thumbs down. I feel like I was being overly generous though as some of the castle builds i think I was being too kind.

This calendar was chock full of paired builds, with some themes going over three days. The paired builds mostly consisted of a princess baby minidoll and the environment from which they came. All of the environment builds were built similarly consisting of some design elements and an arch. If you place them next to each, you would understandably come to the conclusion that the princess should be placed under the arch.

But the baby minidoll was simply too large both in height, and depth, and sometimes even width. Mirabel above is a prime example. The above photo makes it look like she actually fits right in front but that is not really the case.

She is leaning forward slightly because her hair element is so large. Mirabel was the one princess that looked the most normal when trying to place her in her environment. I’ve had varying degrees of success with the other franchises.

Moana came second but because of the micro scale hut element, she had to be turned sideways in order to make contact with the stud for her feet.

Elsa and her ice castle also had to be placed sideways and is also slightly tilted.

Tiana couldn’t even be placed on the bottom floor.

Ariel was also turned and slightly angled.

One of the other main issues I had with these little castle builds is that even if the princess mini doll could fit under the arch, it wouldn’t have been centered because the arch width was two studs and the baby minidoll required just a single stud. So the princess placement would be off either slightly to the left or to the right. A jumper plate would have mitigated this and settled my OCD by correctly placing the minifig dead center between the two arch supports. But this is an entirely moot point since the princess couldn’t fit under the arch to begin with.

The last four days of the build ended up becoming Cinderella’s castle complete with not only an arch but two arches. And one of those arches has a balcony. Seems nice but again, the multi day nature of the build just sapped any enthusiasm out of me. And plus, and this might be the biggest knock against this castle, there was no Cinderella baby minidoll.

I was going to try and solo whatever basic game LEGO tried to shoehorn into the Disney calendar but decided against it. The negatives I outlined above has already left such a sour taste in my mouth that putting in the additional effort was just not worth my time. LEGO already got my money from me by buying this set, I don’t feel like any additional effort for this review is worth my time or yours.

Between the two calendars, Star Wars was the clear winner. Complete builds, no multi-day nonsense, and a nice variety of vehicles and minifigs. Disney could have also had a great advent calendar if they removed the whole arch design requirement and made better micro castles that were akin to Vader’s Castle from the Star Wars castle. Kinda funny that the Star Wars calendar had a better castle build than anything from the Disney one.

Eric: Disney and Hot Sauces Thoughts

This is, I think, my sixth year doing these advent calendars for FBTB, and my first year branching off of Harry Potter. I chose the Disney calendar, though next year, I may not. Here are the pros and cons:

PROS:

• It’s not as predictable as Harry Potter.
• A wide range of colors and pieces: lime green, white, bright pink, etc.
• The castle vignettes are legitimately cool and pack a nice amount of detail into a handful of pieces.

CONS:

• The minidolls (or whatever they are) are extremely ugly.
• Some of the builds feel out-of-place or like fillers.
• LEGO is determined to include some dumb spinning game in all these calendars.
• We got a Christmas tree. Again. It’s terrible. Again.

My overall impressions, then? Well…it was fine. Looking at Nick’s and Ace’s calendars, I think mine was the only one that had ZERO to do with Christmas (save for the shoehorned Christmas tree). That’s not great. I am not into Disney, so it’s hard to justify a price tag that sits equal with Star Wars, Marvel, and Harry Potter. If you or your kid like Disney more than the other properties, go for it. If they just want to do ANY advent calendar, I’d go with the LEGO City or LEGO Friends calendars. Save $15. But expect a boring Christmas tree model. It always shows up, no matter the calendar.

As for the hot sauces…they sucked. I got two hot sauce calendars from World Market: 12 Days of Hot Sauce and Culinary Passport Hot Sauce Collection. I should have known better, because these calendars usually are extremely distilled and not spicy, and that sure is what I encountered. A real disappointment compared to the genuine pain from the hot sauces in 2022.

I am already working on next year’s hot sauces and, believe me, each and every one of them will be HOT.

FINAL SCORES:

LEGO Disney Advent Calendar: 20 Hits / 4 Misses

HOT SAUCES: ALL BAD

Nick: Marvel and Rocks and Dice Thoughts

The Marvel calendar has become a running joke around here, and the rumor mill has it that this will be its last year, with another theme taking over. Why can’t we get a good DC or Batman calendar on the rotation, LEGO? You could charge $100 for a minifigure heavy Batman calendar and I would happily lap it up.

We only got 5 full minifigures in the set, and only one of them is truly unique. And the one that was unique was just half-assed with those terrible gray legs.

So many of the builds were Spider-Man themed but… not great. Either two small, spread across multiple days, or worse… just boring. The stuff that wasn’t was fine, but again, so much of it was lazy or forgettable.

Even when this calendar tries, it so often misses, like putting Gwen in front of a toy drum set that doesn’t have enough parts. Or, it’s biggest sin…

… giving us a not-Santa with the Goblin. Just putting the regular goblin on this terrible glider, and not theming the bag or pumpkin is a great picture of the laziness of this calendar.

This is the sum-total of dice that you get in this calendar, which isn’t a terrible amount of dice, but it also shows how much Chessex has sort of stagnated in their dice as of late. I’ve got… a few (hundred, maybe thousand) dice around, and the older I’ve gotten, the less I like gimmicky dice and instead focus on things like how nice they look and how usable they are. Contrast between the number and dice is the most important to me.

The best of the sets we got spread out were the blue and white, and hit all of the spots I want in dice. These are going to go into the bag with other good sets to be used for D&D games and the like.

The second best set, probably won’t be in a regular rotation for me, but I’ll go into my loaner dice that I keep around for other players or give away to new people.

The worst of the three full size sets, I just don’t like the look of these. They’re too inconsistent in look, and not colors I’d normally use. They’ll go in the dice dungeon, which is a large bag of dice that I put in a storage box somewhere and forget about until I open the box and look for something else.

The rock calendar was a fun little idea, but I’ll be honest, the final output of it was fairly unimpressive. About a third of them were nice, pretty stones, but so many weren’t clear what they were or weren’t even on the list of rocks that were supposed to be with it.

I did have fun imagining what Rock Raiders 2026 would be like, though, so I guess the $15 I spent on this were worth it. And my kids will get a whole bunch of rocks to put into collections of other rocks.