So another year, and mostly the same format: Ace handling Star Wars, Eric looking at Harry Potter, and in a shocking turn of events, Nick not having to deal with a Marvel calendar dedicated to causing physical pain – he’ll be handling City this year because while his kids may be into Minecraft he decidedly is not (and also that thing was impossible to find in his area). As always, there will be some extra special bonuses, a lot of cheeky writing, tons of typos and things we miss that someone will demand we go and hire an editor to fix.
We will not do that.
Ace (Star Wars) – 1 Hit / 2 Misses
Eric (Harry Potter) – 2 Hits / 0 Misses / 1 Harry Potter
Nick (City) – 2 Hits / 1 Miss
Nick (Star Wars) – 0 Hits / 3 Misses
Ace – Star Wars
I’m pretty sure this is a pit droid of some kind. Not sure if it’s some sort of stylized named droid or something that is slightly different than every other pit droid that makes it stand out or special. I wouldn’t surprised if Star Wars did that. But I might be overthinking it a bit. Just a regular old pit droid here. Nothing to see. Move along, move along.
I feel like a pit droid has been a staple of LEGO Star Wars calendars since the dawn of time. I can’t thumb my nose at today’s build. It was buildable after all. And it’s nice and chonky. So a thumbs up today. We’re even steven now on the Ace scale for the calendar so far. And I probably just jinxed it…
Eric – Harry Potter
Excuse the bad photo. I got rid of my Google Pixel this year after being radicalized by the book Stolen Focus (seriously, go read it. It’s wonderful). So now I use a Unihertz Jelly Star which is about the size of a credit card…hence the blurry photos. I’m doing my best here! Just pretend you’re on Flickr in 2009.
Anyway, Day 4 nets our second minifig of eight (my goodness). It’s Ravenclaw student Cho Chang, with a slightly different sweater than Harry’s, this time with a Pixie instead of an owl. The pattern on the sweater is otherwise the same, but it still looks great!
I am not a fan of the face printing here. Seems like her mouth is too low, and without a nose to fill in the middle it looks really awkward. Could be better, especially since there’s already been a great Cho minifig.
Nick – City
Day 3 gave us our first miss with the City calendar, and day four is… I don’t really know. This is a cool little scooter, and things like this are generally harder to get. It strikes me as a great little Christmas gift type thing to play with, but I really wish it would have come with a bow or something you could have stuck on it. Still, even though it’s simple, it fits with the other things but is also complex enough to stand on its own. So a hit, even if just barely.
Yes Ace, it’s a pit droid… which has featured in a Episode I, but also Mandalorian and Book of Boba Fett. This is going to be nit-picky, but I assume given the other things we’ve seen is that these are sequel-era Pit Droids… which have always been shown as tan. I know I shouldn’t get my hopes up, but they could give us a Peli Motto in a Christmas sweater in this catalog and all would be forgiven. She loves droids and would be great. Anyway… back to this guy. It just doesn’t do it for me because it’s way off on proportions. Pit droids are skinny little guys that can collapse into a ball if you boop them on the nose. This is one that hit the oil baths a bit too hard and just snacks on RAM chips all day (something I can relate to, TBH). Even though it’s a complex build, if you took the little dish off the top, you’d have no idea what this was, so calling it a miss.
Our puntastic mini brands continues, and we get our Pink Flamingo perfume/lotion/something. It’s cute, like they’ve all been, and the actual quality of these continues to be outstanding. Hard to capture here, but they’re all solidly built and proportioned out with materials that feel like what they represent. Which is very cool.
