That's most of the caveats out the way; now look at this picture and tell me what you can spot? I think I know what I see. New element. Oooooo. I'd love to know if I'm right.
The box is mostly made of what I think is Medium Lavender, and I'm pretty certain those are some 1X4 Bricks in there - which are not listed anywhere as yet appearing in sets. It feels odd for an element to appear in promotional builds before actual sets. TLG don't just make new elements willy-nilly, certainly not just for a polybag that is available for a couple of hours on one continent. I would make a guess that this new element was included in a set 'first' in terms of TLG's development timelines, and the shorter development time required to make a wee model like this means that in the end it got released earlier than the set.
So will Medium Lavender Brick 1X4 be in any of the remaining Friends sets for this year? Possibly 41016 LEGO® Friends Advent Calendar
, but these sets don't usually have much in the way of basic bricks. There are also some new foil packs coming but I can't see it in any of the available pics of those - although I do suspect 41025 Puppy's Playhouse will contain a Medium Lavender Brick 1X3! Cool. So, it's possible that this is the only chance to get Brick 1X4 until the 2014 Friends sets.Admittedly, probably not many of you out there are hanging on tenterhooks for the appearance of the Medium Lavender Brick 1X4, and I may well be just plain incorrect in guessing that's what it is anyway... so don't go changing your big plans to visit Aunty Madge tomorrow or anything. But it would be amiss of me not to mention it and ask that if you do attend the event, I want to see pics of this new element!
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Aw, and here I thought you were going to talk about the red bits on the corners, which look too smooth to be 1x1 round plates and too bulbous to be 1x1 round tiles.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, as for the idea of a piece first seeing release in a promotional set, I've got a perfect example sitting right in front of me. In 2011, TRU in the US had a Cars 2 promotion, where you could build a rather clunky looking Rod "Torque" Redline. The instructions show a pair of blue cheese wedges on the front edge of the hood, but the actual build session used a blue double-cheese at least a month before it started showing up in the rural police sets. Actually, it gets even weirder than that. The photo of the completed model on the front of the instructions shows two single cheeses, but all of the CGI instruction steps and the part list on the back show the double-cheese. So, this is a change that was made possible after the model was designed and handed over to Marketing for photography, but before the instruction sheet was finalized and printed for distribution.
I guessed they were ladybirds?
DeleteThat's a great example, Purple Dave. Would have been so exciting getting double cheese unexpectedly like that.
Given the news that the box is NOT Medium Lavender, maybe this post needs to become a chat about production disparities :O)
Yes, and no. It was great to finally get one, but it kinda sucked to only get _one_, given that there were no retail sets on the market that included it, and I pretty much had to wait to get more. See, I use an abundance of cheese wedges on my cars, and I'd been in the process of converting over any side-by-side cheeses to double cheese as they became available in the necessary colors (mostly black/white/red/yellow/blue/orange for bodies). Blue and orange were the last two to show up, so basically what that meant was that I knew they existed in large quantities...but I couldn't get my hands on them. A few other parts that also got swapped were 1x3 tiles and 2x4 tiles, again, as they became available in the six body colors. I'm still waiting on a couple double-cheeses for dashboards (reddish-brown and dark-green are all I can think of off the top of my head), but now I'm mostly interested in seeing some of the other gaps get filled (1x1 round tiles) or new colors being made available (dark-purple car doors, medium blue fenders...).
DeleteI feel the pain. I'm wanting to MOC for my post examples as opposed to tablescrapping, but obtaining desirable quantities of new elements often proves too tricky (or expensive).
DeleteRe 1X1 round tiles - did you see Bright Orange [TLG name] is out?
News just in from Facebook New Elementary reader, Scott from Atlanta: the box is actually Dark Pink.
ReplyDelete*sigh*
Someone please have a word with the calendar graphic designers. ;O) I hope no-one cancelled Aunty Madge
I think the colors are as follows: dark purple, bright pink, medium lavender (for the bottom half), and bright light orange. The white looks looks white, so i'm pulling for medium lavender (all color names are from bricklink).
ReplyDeleteThat's what I thought as well, but Scott who attended says sadly the Medium Lavender is Dark Pink! So either the official image is a really bad colour correction job, or they changed the colour after photography. Not unheard of.
DeleteOn the plus side, I already had the MOCs built. I just wanted to upgrade them with double-cheeses, 2x4 tiles, and 1x3 tiles to clean up the surfaces a bit. The down side was that I had built a fair number of cars by then, so I needed quite a few of certain parts when they first came out, and BL stock took a while to build up.
ReplyDeleteAs for the 1x1 round tile, you mean regular orange? Well, with white and blue that's three of the six body colors I use for cars. Now I just need red/yellow/black, plus maybe dark-purple, trans-purple, dark-bley, trans-bright-green, trans-neon-green, trans-neon-orange, GitD, and the flourescent shade of trans-light/medium-blue (the one that most people don't even know will glow under blacklight).
Yes regular Orange is out just now in Dolphin Cruiser; only two per set. Glad it's one of your preferred colours.
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