Sometimes, it feels like LEGO is all about the remakes, but when you take a step back from the rabid fan base ledge (a locale that I keep an apartment at), it’s the kind of thing that makes sense in a licensed theme like Star Wars. The reality is that there is a finite amount of things they can make, and even when there are certain ships or vehicles that get the short stick, the reality is that the majority of their customers, kids, never had a chance to own the earlier version of a particular set or ship. Unless it’s a Jedi Starfighter, since it feels like they release ten of them a year.
And no matter how we old farts feel about the PT, younger audiences, and, honestly, even adults that are in their 20s by now, identify with those movies just as much as we identify with the original movies. I have a (somewhat notorious) history of ripping on Episode I in some of my reviews, because that movie just stunk out loud, but one thing you can really say about it, much more than II or III, is that the vehicles that came from it were quite a bit more memorable than some of the later stuff. The AAT, Pod Racers, Naboo Fighters, Vulture Droids, and the Gungan Sub were all visually distinct and interesting vehicles.
Yet none of those sets ever got me quite as much as the MTT (Multi-Troop Transport, though since it carried droids, maybe it was a Multi-Toaster Transport). Part of that is because it was one of the most notable parts of the trailer that built up all the excitement going in to Episode I (before those hopes were just destroyed)… the doors opening, droids going down, and the sound of them standing up was shudder-worthy back in the day. Yet more than that, 2007’s 7662 Trade Federation MTT of this particular vehicle was just a fantastic build. It was itself a remake of the original 1999 set, and LEGO came a lot way between that official wave and the middle of the 00s, and it delivered some serious bang at $99 by delivering 1330 parts (including a mess of brown slopes) and 21 Battle Droids.
I actually own a few of the 2007 version after stumbling on a great clearance sale, and it’s one of the sets that I keep perpetually built and sitting on a shelf. It was going to be hard for LEGO to actually top that build, but they’ve been able to surprise me before on some remakes.
The chances of that took a pretty huge hit when the first images of this set, and the pricing details, first surfaced. It was a TRU exclusive, which meant it likely had the TRU markup (though right now it’s SRP on their website… YMMV in stores). The price was $10 less, which is actually a bigger gap when you look at general inflation of LEGO price points ($89 now is basically the $69 price point then… while that $99 in 2007 is a $130 set now), but worse, when you looked at the set, it just looked all sorts of wrong. Small, ugly, and seemingly a step back, the set was going to have the deck stacked against it for anyone who owned (and loved) the previous version.
