No, us neither. All we can say is that a brick-built dust-cloud behind a single Technic 42054 Claas Xerion tyre looks so cool we could’t not post this, even though we have absolutely no idea what’s going on. Ask Julius Kanand via Flickr.
This is the brand new LEGO Creator 10302 Transformers Optimus Prime set, and The Lego Car Blog Elves are wildly excited.
Constructed from just over 1,500 pieces and measuring 35cm tall in robot mode, 10302 will arrive in stores in June of this year aimed at ages 18+ (which is just a LEGO marketing ploy to make it more acceptable for adults (or rather, more acceptable to their partners) to spend £150 on a toy…)
And yes, we did say ‘robot mode’, because as with every good Transformers toy, 10302 can transform between a vehicle and a robot, in which guise it has nineteen points of articulation.
10302 also features a few of Optimus Prime’s accessories, including his Ion Blaster, Autobot Matrix of Leadership, Energon axe, and Energon cube. Although we have absolutely no idea what any of those things are or do.
The Creator 10302 Transformers Optimus Prime set becomes the latest product within LEGO’s expanding licensed movie vehicle line-up, following the Aston Martin DB5 ‘007 Goldfinger‘, 42111 Fast & Furious Dom’s Dodge Charger, 21108 Ghostbusters Ecto-1, and the fantastic 10300 Back to the Future Time Machine amongst others.
It also probably fights it out with the aforementioned Dodge Charger for being the coolest vehicle from the worst movie, but we won’t hold that against it.
The new LEGO Creator 10302 Transformers Optimus Prime set is expected to cost around $170/£150, and if you’re as big a fan of explosions, giant space robots, explosions, Megan Fox, and explosions as TLCB Elves are, you can get your hands on it from June this year.
Loaded like a freight train
Flyin’ like an aeroplane
Feelin’ like a space brain
One more time tonight
No, we don’t know what Axl Rose was singing about either, but seeing as we also don’t know about sci-fi it seemed like a good fit.
There’s more to see of Oscar Cederwall’s fabulous floating freight train at his Flickr photostream, and you can listen to Guns N’ Roses singing about, er… something possibly train-related by clicking here.
Confession time; this TLCB Writer has never seen, read, nor understood ‘Manga’. However TLCB has featured this apparently iconic Manga motorcycle several times over the years, and today ‘Kaneda’s bike’ from the Manga series ‘Akira’ arrives on these pages in mini-figure form courtesy of Dan Ko of Flickr. Dan’s bike complete with cleverly photoshopped decals and cunning techniques can be seen at his photostream – click the link above for more Manga motorcycle.
Uh oh – cyberpunk! A genre about which we know less than your Mom does about portion control.
Still, despite this incompetence, we absolutely love this scene by Flickr’s Slick_Brick, which is packed with so much brilliant detail even TLCB Staff have stopped to take a look. And usually that only happens for some obscure car from 1976.
See if you can spot; the jet bike, the tracked robot helper, the pot plant, and the ingenious dog water bowl with the rest of TLCB Team at Slick’s photostream.
A fallen AT-AT, T-47 Airspeeders overhead, and somewhere Luke Skywalker is making a sleeping bag out of a Tauntaun carcass. It’s the Battle of Hoth, a Star Wars fight between the Dark Side and Jedis or something, of which we know nothing besides what Wookiepedia told us.
Still, TLCB’s usual sci-fi incompetence aside, this micro-scale scene by Flickr’s Pasq67 is fantastic, and sure to excite fans of George Lucus’ overlong space saga. If you’re one of them you can take a look at all the details via Pasq67’s ‘Micro AT-AT’ album via think above. You nerd.
It’s well documented that TLCB isn’t madly in love with Star Wars, but even ardent fans of the franchise must admit Han Solo is funny. Insert your own teenage joke.
Anyway, when Han wasn’t Soloing he did get to drive (fly?) some cool stuff, such as this marvellous M68 Landspeeder from the move ‘Solo – A Star Wars Story’, as recreated brilliantly in brick form by Aliencat! of Flickr.
Constructed in LEGO’s ‘Ultimate Collector Series’ style, Aliencat’s Landspeeder includes extensive greebling, racy checkered seats, and excellent presentation, and there’s much more to see at his ‘UCS Han Solo’s M68 Landspeeder’ album.
Click the link above to beat your bishop, burp your worm, audition your hand puppet, ooze your noodle, badger the witness, and blow your own horn. Sorry, we’re done now.
This is it. The single coolest LEGO set ever made… it’s the brand new Creator Expert 10300 ‘Back to the Future’ Time Machine!
In partnership with Amblin Entertainment and Universal Pictures (but notably not the DeLorean Motor Company, probably because they went bankrupt before the first ‘Back to the Future’ movie was released, and most people don’t know the DeLorean was a real (and rubbish) car anyway…), LEGO have brought the most famous movie car of them all to life in brick form.
Constructed from nearly 1,900 pieces, 10300 measures 35cm long and features a mini-figure Doc Brown and Marty McFly, hoverboard, radioactive plutonium / a banana for flux-capacitor fuelling, and a light-up flux-capacitor too, putting LEGO’s new light-up part to much better use than on its debut on the 42127 The Batman Batmobile set.
And that’s not all, because 10300 allows builders to time travel between all three ‘Back to the Future’ movies, with a variety of accessories that capture the Time Machine’s various amendments and evolutions during the trilogy.
These include the hook used for lightening strike power in Part 1, the hover system (“Where we’re going we don’t need roads!”) enabling flight in Part II, and the more rustic western modifications that ensured Marty could get home in Part III, before the Time Machine met its destruction in front of a locomotive.
The ‘Back to the Future’ Time Machine set looks like an absolute triumph, and if you’re as excited as we are you can hit 88mph for yourself when 10300 reaches stores in April for around $170 / £140.
Coolest. LEGO. Set. Ever!
This ‘Smooth Coupe’ was discovered by one of our Elves on Flickr today, coming from Slick_Brick, making their TLCB debut. An opening cockpit, two mini-figures and some nifty ‘SNOT’ all feature, and you can slide over to see more via the link.
The news from Ukraine is heartbreaking. Almost eight decades of peace in Europe has ended, and the human cost is going to be enormous.
We’ve pilloried Putin before (and received threats as a result), but the mask is off now, and what lies beneath it is monstrous.
As such we hope blue and yellow vehicles might feature here a bit more prominently for a while following our recent call, which Flickr’s Frost has answered, rounding off Febrovery with his final lunar rover looking wonderful in Ukrainian colours.
So that’s it for Febrovery 2022, but sadly not Putin’s ‘Special Military Operation’, which – thanks to the heroism of those defending Ukraine – looks far from being over. If you’re one of the 5,000 TLCB readers from Ukraine, or indeed one of the 17,000 from Russia and are as dismayed as the rest of us, a special welcome to these pages to you.
If you’re looking to help the situation in Ukraine but don’t know how, check out the Red Cross Ukraine Crisis Appeal and the UN Refugee Agency Appeal where donations are now open.
Most LEGO pieces can be used in almost infinite ways. It’s the very purpose of LEGO. However there are a few parts that seem to be defiantly single-use. The Primo ride-on elephant. Anything from the awful Galidor range. And the wearable Bionicle mask.
Designed so that kids could pretend to be defending Mata-Nui or something, the mid-00’s were clearly a difficult time for LEGO. And yet out of adversity comes triumph, in the form of Scott Wilhelm‘s magnificent ‘Mobile Reactor Transport’.
Wearing the life-size Toa face like a tortoise wears its shell, the until-now-pointless-part looks purpose-made for Scott’s half-track rover. Delightful greebling is visible through the mask’s orifices and there’s more to see of the build, including the epically inventive parts usage, at Scott’s photostream.
Click the link above to see what’s under the mask.
2022’s Febrovery is drawing to a close, in which Lego builders from around the world have united in their creation of other-worldly transports. Today we round out the roverest of months with four intriguing space-based builds, each of which has deployed a few of LEGO’s more unusual pieces in the pursuit of roving brilliance.
First up is Robert Heim‘s ‘Spaceport Fire Rover’, which features so many LEGO pieces of which we know nothing it’s making us doubt we can do this job. The wheels look like cupcake cases and the rotating cockpit appears as if it’s made from a kid’s sand bucket. We have absolutely no idea what sets they’re all from, but you can find out more at Robert’s photostream via the link.
Next we have martin.with.bricks‘ impressive eight-wheeled rover, which actually looks rather like something we could well see in our lifetime. A determined-looking mini-figure sits at the controls inside the same clear buckety-brick cockpit, whilst a minimalist brick-built lunar surface passes beneath the tyres. Centre articulation and an opening rear hatch add to the fun and you can see more of Martin’s rover on Flickr at the link above.
No longer used as the cockpit, but still featuring prominently in the design, Frost‘s colourful ‘Biotron Corp Spaceplant Relocation Rover’ utilises the same transparent buckets, this time for some sort of lunar re-wilding project. A trans-lime half-dome continues the funky cockpitting however, and there’s more to see of Frost’s space-based conservation via the link above.
Today’s final Febrovery creation takes a rather more utilitarian approach, and is very possibly the reason that Frost’s ‘Spaceplant Relocation Rover’ above is required. Andreas Lenander‘s ‘Dome-rover’ is smoothing its way across a lovely brick-built moon-scape, thanks to some genius tracks and a wonderfully pink classic spaceman sealed within a transparent orb. Andreas has used said orb in other cunning ways during Febrovery ’22 too, and there’s more to see of this and his other Febrovery builds at his photostream via the link above.
And that completes our Febrovery 2022 round-up, which took on quite a transparent theme this year. Febrovery will be back in 2023, but until then there is still a whole month to go in TLCB and Bricknerd’s ‘Festival of Mundanity’ competition, in which we’re looking for vehicles that are rather more earth-bound. What better way to move on from other-wordly oddness than a white Toyota Corolla looking for a parking space…
Flickr’s Febrovery build-a-thon is drawing to a close. There have been some wonderful entries so far which we have… er, missed completely, seeing as a) we don’t understand sci-fi and b) we’re interested in things far more mundane at the moment…
Had we not blogged this one though, TLCB Elves would’ve started a riot, as it’s really not mundane at all. Frost (aka TFDesigns) owns the mind behind this glorious rover-based muscle car homage, which is fitted with some of the most splendid wheels we’ve ever seen.
Racing stripes and a giant wing complete the Elven excitement, and there’s more to see of his marvellous moon-based muscle car at his photostream. Take a look via the link above, and we’ll be back with some things far more mundane tomorrow…
Fiat, like many of motoring’s earliest names, began as much as an aircraft manufacturer as an automotive one. By 1969 though, the aircraft division had been separated from Fiat’s vehicle group, which – as anyone who has owned a 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, or even 2000s Fiat will testify – was probably a very good thing indeed. Fiat electrics at 30,000ft don’t bear thinking about…
Bravely returning Fiat to the clouds however is Brick Spirou, who has modified the official LEGO 10271 Fiat 500 set into something rather more airborne. Four funky repulser engines equip Brick’s Fiat for the skies, whilst the giant engine-lid-mounted rear wing is presumably mounted upside-down for lift rather than downforce.
There’s more of Brick Spirou’s 10271 Fiat 500 hovercar to see on Flickr via the link above, plus you can click here for a bonus LEGO set that has also received the hovercar treatment.
The Festival of Mundanity Competition is beginning to receive some wonderfully dull entries. This flying Porsche 911 Turbo is not one of them. Suggested by a reader and built by BobDeQuatre, this futuristic Porsche is based on the official LEGO 10295 Porsche 911 set, only with a few choice modifications.
These apparently include “two anti-grav generators, and a powerful VV hydrogen repulsor motor, integrated into the old bodywork without disrupting the lines. The interior features very old accessories like the strange levers between the two seats, but also top notch controls”.
Which makes for a vehicle that we really hope becomes a reality one day. Until then you can join us in dreaming at Bob’s ‘Porsche 911 Turbo VV’ Flickr album or at the Eurobricks forum here.
