Explorer-ing… Spiders – LEGO Explorer Magazine, November 2022

The weird logic of magazine publishers eludes me. The latest issue of the LEGO Explorer magazine is clearly very Halloween-centric, yet at the same time it came out a week to late here in Germany. See the problem? I honestly don’t get why they don’t give themselves more of a safety margin. Even if this may work for the UK version, which comes one week earlier, it just doesn’t make much sense here. The only consolation is that Halloween is nowhere near as important a holiday around these parts, so not too many will be disappointed. Still, it’s an unnecessary oversight/ lapse of foresight.

In keeping with the scary theme this one is all about spiders (mostly). This will really creep out a lot of people and while I have grown to appreciate these eight-legged freaks and even find some of them quite beautiful, I’m also as arachnophobic as the next guy. I can handle “cute” jumping spiders or small ghost spiders, but I’m really put off by most bigger species. I’m actually pretty glad that in our part of the world we don’t have to put up with Tarantulas, Banana Spiders or Black Widows (usually).

The comic takes a spin on the “mad scientist creating monsters” trope and things of course go terribly wrong. Unfortunately the potential is not fully exploited and overall the comic is a bit tame.

The poster features more creatures that give some people the heebie-jeebies such as snakes, crocodiles and several underwater creatures like a Spider Crab or the angler fish from the Deep Sea Creatures (31088) set.

The back cover has a neat little extra in the form of a door hanger, but as noted in my intro it comes a bit too late for really counting as a Halloween gimmick.

The extra is a really quite disgusting spider with big fangs, long legs and a sizeable “butt”. This is nice and to make it even more realistic they even went out of their way to include all eight legs despite the small scale. The legs are Black, the underbelly is Reddish Brown and the back Dark Brown. My cheap camera and the inadequate kitchen table lighting on an overcast day just make everything look dark.

The narrow focus of the magazine makes this a good one for me. There isn’t too much sidetracking and everything is consistently based around monsters and Halloween. Regrettably the issue does not contain a preview for the next one, so I’m not sure if this is the last one we got. I’d hate this to be a case of “Another one bites the dust.”. Recognizably the mag is struggling to attract buyers, but I’d hate to see it go just because not enough people purchase it. On the other hand they’re still offering subscriptions, so I’m a bit confused on the matter. Perhaps it will relaunch in a different form next year? We’ll have to see, I guess!

Blue Bike Chase – LEGO City Magazine, November 2022

Three times in a row! That’s how Blue Ocean got under my skin by including something actual useful in the LEGO City magazine after I announced my abstinence from this publication. So what’s it for this month? Let’s find out!

The comic is another police chase story, only this time on a bicycle. It’s also spiced up (no pun intended) with some Halloween-themed stuff and the evil-doers exploiting the situation by doing their mischief during the spooky night.

Unfortunately the special holiday is not really put to good use with the emphasis being on the rather mundane police action (and the gangsters not even dressing up for the occasion), so the panels are a bit boring at times in the sense that there’s a lot of “blue night”, but no crazy ghosts, werewolves, vampires or other such creatures.

The posters reflect the story as well, but are equally a bit too ordinary and lacking an original twist.

The extra that tempted me into buying this issue is of course the Dark Blue BMX bike/ mountain bike frame. This particular bicycle type is still pretty rare and while I have one in Dark Azure from the Hidden Side Newbury Subway (70430)  (oddly enough, I never reviewed it here) and also the Light Bluish Grey one from the Jurassic World Blue & Beta Velociraptor Capture (76946) (too small to make a review worthwhile), it’s always good to have more options at hand. The minifigures are a so-so affair. The positive thing is that the female police officer has a dirtied up face, but her uniform doesn’t reflect the same. It’s just a standard torso and pants. The same could be said for the thief who really is just “Bad guy no. 3” in a standard outfit.

To get back to my opening statement: No, my streak won’t go up to four in a row. I definitely won’t be buying the next issue because I have no interest in the extra, which is going to be an ugly forklift with no “special” parts for my collection that would warrant spending the cash. This one is okay if you want a simple way of obtaining the bike vs. buying an overpriced set, but otherwise it doesn’t really offer much that would get me excited.

Final Bow – LEGO Hidden Side Magazine, November/ December 2020

The inevitable is here and yes, this is going to be the final article on the LEGO Hidden Side magazine because the series as a whole has been cancelled. I’ve been working on an editorial on the many reasons why the series failed, but it’s not quite ready yet, so for now let’s focus on what the November/ December issue has in store.

It was actually released on Saturday, which was Halloween this year. This should have been a fitting coincidence, but someone forgot that this also doubles as Reformation Day in remembrance of Luther‘s publishing his theses and starting the Protestant movement. It’s a public holiday in several states in Germany with shops being closed, hence I was only able to get the magazine now some days later.

This being the last mag in this series I didn’t expect anything exciting and well, as much as I hate to say this, this sure feels like they are counting their losses and have just scraped together a few bits and pieces they had prepared in the long-term, but not tailored specifically to a farewell issue. The editorial team probably already had been dissolved two months ago and is now working on other stuff after they finished this edition.

This shows throughout all the pages, with in particular the posters and puzzles being super generically built around the pastel-colored ghost designs. You also notice it right away on the pages where references to Hidden Side sets and advertisements would have been. Blue Ocean simply use them for marketing their other mags (not only the LEGO ones). The comic is okay and likely gives us another glimpse of what might have been, had we ever gotten more to see of the Newbury underground.

The minifigure is a variation of the service technician found in the Newbury Subway Station (70430) set, this time in the guise of a demolition/ blast worker who is working on extending the tunnels. It’s completely identical, but they added at least some value with a pick axe, a bundle of Dynamite sticks and a map pouch. The figure itself is generic enough, so it might fit any construction or mining scenario in City or other series as well.

Sadly, this final issue doesn’t do much to leave a lasting impression and won’t help to keep Hidden Side as a whole in people’s memory. I would predict that two years down the road it will barely be remembered and with only nine overall issues the magazine had a very short run. You could get the mag for the figure or if you just want a complete collection, but otherwise there’s not much here that’s worthwhile, unfortunately.

Small-ish Ghost Patrol – LEGO Hidden Side, Ghost Firetruck 3000 (70436)

After I’ve been a bit under the weather in the last two weeks and didn’t really get much done it’s time to pick up pace again on this here blog and what could be more fitting for the Halloween weekend than to have a look at another LEGO Hidden Side set with the Ghost Firetruck 3000 (70436).

Package and Contents

I got this set only very recently. I always kind of wanted it, but at the same time I never thought it would actually be worth a 70 Euro investment. I only jumped on to it when it dropped below 50 Euro. Aside from my overall cost-conscious approach to LEGO this simply had to do with the fact that it never felt essential within the Hidden Side series itself and in addition also didn’t look like it could hold up on its own as a standard fire truck to be used elsewhere. More on the specifics of that later on.

The other thing that I noticed when looking at the official marketing photos is that this model looked somehow oddly small next to the minifigures. You can even see this in my own overview shot. This also contributed to my reluctance and was confirmed once I had the model. The box it comes in is a rather pretentious affair in that it is being very wide and tall, but very flat, which always makes me suspicious. It’s the old gag of “Size does matter!” and I don’t like being lured into a false sense of scale by oversized boxes.

By comparison the model is indeed a bit on the tiny end. This is in particular disappointing as it doesn’t even match in scale with the Paranormal Intercept Bus 3000 (70423). At the very least this will impact play value should you or your kids decide to use both vehicles next to each other. I have no way of verifying any of this, but I would wager that you’d have similar issues with the ghost train, the school or other buildings. It may even look weird next to the Graveyard Mystery (70420) or the Wrecked Shrimp Boat (70419). So no matter what – something is wonky with the scale they chose.

The Minifigures

The figures are your run-off-the-mill standard Hidden Side crew – Jack, Parker, J.B. – complemented by a robot called TeeVee and on the opposing side a Shadow Walker. The robot doesn’t have a real torso but rather uses a 1 x 2 x 2 brick with studs on the side for the upper section and it’s face is created with two exchangeable printed 2 x 2 tiles. Sadly they are designed so unimaginatively, I was ready to throw them out immediately. They are pretty garbage and at this point I can’t imagine ever using them for anything.

The Monster

For once this set comes with a genuine monster by ways of Nehmaar Reem – The Harbinger, constructed from buildable parts. This, however, is yet another only half successful effort at best in my opinion.

I do understand the concept – some tentacles or strands of smoke/ some oily liquid form the limbs and then converge to form the torso – and it might even look pretty cool when animated in 3D inside a game or a movie with everything wobbling around and constantly re-forming itself, but as a physical object it looks utterly boring. Most notably there should be a lot of additional half-formed tentacles coming out of the ground and the main character be engulfed in them as well as having other little stuff on their ends like bats or lumps of “mud” that the creature tries to fling at the ghost hunters.

The biggest shortfall is however the head and I’m not even criticizing the color choice. A plain 2 x 2 round brick in Light Aqua doesn’t bother me. It just looks way too tiny and not the least bit scary here and I guess that is the point: It would have made a lot more sense if they had dug out an old Bionicle face mask like this one for instance. It looks positively alien-ish and creepy. Re-done in Black and Yellowish Green and combined with some glowy transparent color for the underlying head piece that apparently go with those masks this could have been pretty rad.

The Truck

The main item is recognizably modeled after an older General Motors fire truck from the 1970s and early 1980s. In theory that should be a good thing, as there’s a certain charme to those old rustic vehicles, but of course it is sort of ruined by all the add-ons.

The vehicle itself (minus the blue parts) represents some sort of mix between a ladder truck and an equipment truck with a large box/ container section. I’m not an expert on this stuff, but as far as I can tell such a hybrid could exist somewhere as some sort of specialized version e.g. with a big rigid float for water rescue operations covering up the rear deck and the equipment lockers therefore having to be shorter in order for the vehicle to not exceed height limits for driving under bridges and the like. It’s just one possible explanation, of course, and you can always craft your own story around that. Either way, in that regard the model is highly plausible.

As far as it remains visible, the shaping is done nicely all the way round, be that the driver’s cabin or the rounded edges at the top not least of all thanks to the 1 x 2 rounded bricks introduced two years ago.

The rear bumper, or for that matter the entire rear, loses quite a bit of its magic due to being split in the middle. As you may already have guessed, this has to do with these areas actually being parts of the mech folded onto the back of the chassis in a Transformers-like attempt to disguise themselves as normal sections of the car. Inherently the limitations in precision with plastic-based joints prevent the alignment from ever being truly one-hundred percent perfect and the crack can be easily seen most of the time, no matter how meticulously you push things into place. This could have benefited from a solution where the two halves actually interlock to stay straight.

A lot of the sides is covered up with the “junk” equipment used for ghost hunting and the bumper bars/ cages around the wheel wells. Those would be the first elements I’d remove to turn the car back into a regular fire truck, but then you would also have to replace the black wheel hubs with grey or metallic ones. If you will, there’s a bit of illusion painting going on here which only works with the bumpers in place.

The cockpit exterior is nice and the front believably looks like it could have originated in the 1980s. In fact in addition to the GM trucks this also reminds me of the similar Skoda fire trucks that I saw in my youth. The horns/ sirens are extremely exaggerated, but i think that this is appropriate and looks cool.

Splitting Up Together

As mentioned earlier, “the lady comes in two parts”, as they say with one being the truck undercarriage and the other the mech huddled together. once you remove it, a few things come to light or become accessible.

The first of those is the cockpit interior. It’s not impossible to remove the roof with the mech saddled up, but the big cannons tend to get in the way if you’re not careful. It’s much easier this way, even more so as I found the fit to be very tight and removal of the roof requiring some force and technique. The layout inside is pretty much identical to what you get in the yellow school bus from this series, with the area behind the driver’s seats occupied by a big computer workstation to track the ghosts. Unimaginative, but okay.

The rear section of the plain truck has some nice details indicating some sort of docking mechanism as you also would find it on cargo trucks. There is also some pretty elaborate tubing to hint at exhaust pipes and power ducts, but a lot of it is hidden behind the equipment shelves and beneath the color dial used for the interactive app. That way the two silver goblets used to hold the cones barely get their due.

Speaking of color dials, the big one behind the cockpit is pretty much Hidden Side 1:1 standard fare, but in a neat twist there are also additional markers on the sides that use the new cut-in-half round bricks I already was so fond of with the Supernatural Race Car (70434), only this time in Yellow.

Finally, the doors can be opened, of course, but again with the “cannons” in the way access to the interior might be finicky at best. Better to remove the roof entirely. On that note, the Red doors and train window panels likely should prove popular with train enthusiasts to some degree. The ones in this set even have actual glass elements in Trans Black already, making for excellent port hole windows e.g on the engine sections of some diesel locomotives.

The Mech

The worst part of the set, and I have to be honest here, is indeed the half-concocted mech. It literally has “We ran out of ideas, so let’s just do the umpteenth mech!” written all over it. Now perhaps I need to blame myself for having bought too many Ninjago mechs, but it’s getting a bit tiring – not so much the subject itself, but seeing the ever same interpretations and techniques being used in the LEGO world.

This particular model is reminiscent of the smaller tactical mechs found in some older Mechwarrior games and similar – open cockpit areas, ridiculously oversized guns (or rocket launchers) and overall rather barebones with critical parts like hinges hopelessly exposed to enemy fire.

In its folded up posture this constitutes the whole rear section of the fire truck and basically just looks like one big gun. It’s held in place by the few exposed studs you saw further above on the truck’s chassis frame. This works okay if you press things down neatly and don’t mess around too much, but for my taste the mech comes off too easily, not to speak of the symmetry alignment issues I also already mentioned earlier.

Posing the mech is far from easy and essentially the pose you see in the images is the maximum of how you can spread the legs to appear somewhat dynamic without the whole shebang tipping over. Sadly the model copies the “stiff knee” approach LEGO have adapted for Ninjago et al, meaning the knee joint is missing and instead there’s a fixed ninety degree angle, and as a result due to the shortness of the legs there is very limited freedom of movement to get this balanced nicely.

One good thing, and ultimately one of the reasons I took the plunge to get this set, after all, is the plethora of parts in Dark Azure. That also includes parts of the large joints, which in my book counts as an extraordinary event. Usually LEGO doesn’t bother to color them consistently with the model and will opt to go the standard route by using the stock Dark Bluish Grey, Light Bluish Grey and Black versions, so this is indeed something worth pointing out specifically.

 

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Concluding Thoughts

As I wrote in the introduction, this is in no way essential to have, well-executed as some parts of it may be. It doesn’t do much for Hidden Side and converting it to a more regular fire truck for a city scenario, while not impossible, would require some not so minor effort to replace the mech sections and convert them into standard superstructures. Ultimately that’s perhaps the point: A more conventional design with a ladder or just a large tank and water guns would have been more useful from the outset and looked the better for it. The mech somehow doesn’t cut it at all and only disturbs what otherwise could have been a nice fire fighting vehicle to hose down them ghost’s…

Halloween Double – Brickheadz Scarecrow (40352) and Ghost (40351)

Halloween isn’t that far off, so it seems fitting we should have a look at LEGO‘s seasonal Brickheadz sets on that subject for this year, those being the Scarecrow (40352) and the Ghost (40351), numbered as the 84th and 83rd entries in the series overall, respectively. Let me begin with the scarecrow.

Born from the myth that birds would get scared off by anything that looks remotely like a human inevitably the clichée of them being imbued with human characteristics or even getting re-animated had become a popular trope in books and movies, but rarely ever in my life have I actually genuinely seen such a puppet anywhere. On the assumption that this is probably true for most people, the subject leaves lots of room for interpretation and one of those classics is the Mid-Western US version with its blue jeans overalls and oversized felt hat. This is captured in the LEGO model.

By now the Brickheadz clearly have surpassed their prime, so almost everyone of them follows the same building pattern more or less, with only minor deviations and tweaks done every now and then to accommodate some more specific requirements of a given figure. Here a novelty is presented with the arms actually being spread out from the body in a T-pose instead of being incorporated into the surface contours. This is achieved by some plates going through the body across the upper chest. On its own this would look kinda weird, but to some degree this is mitigated by the golden claws used to represent straw sticking out extending the range further. This is further backed up by some crossbar being hinted at.

Somewhat surprisingly the little dude has a rather elaborate hairdo which in itself accounts for a good chunk of parts. In an odd way it even contradicts the rest of the model because it’s almost too realistic. Most people wouldn’t put up with the effort to make it look that real unless they are set dressers on movies. 😉 I guess, like me, they couldn’t think of a simple and efficient way to approximate a simple straw wig and decided to go the full mile. At least off hand I can’t quite think of a part from LEGO‘s portfolio that could be easily stacked in large arrays to form something with separately recognizable stems/ stalks similar to the claws used for the hands. Figuring into this, and by all means only a small complaint on my part is the absence of shoes then. You know, with something that human-like, I would imagine it could jump of its perch and stomp around in secret when nobody is looking.

The small ancillary tabs sure add parts value and help to contextualize the model, but overall don’t feel essential. They’re okay, but I wouldn’t have missed them. It would have been a cool idea if they had decked this out with those three-fingered leaf elements, but in autumn-ish colors like Dark Orange, Yellow and Dark Red. I also sort of miss a big black bird like a raven, stereotypical as this may sound. In fact even a hoard of sparrows making fun of little scarecrow and sitting all over him would have added a bit of a fun twist to what otherwise amounts to a mostly mundane figure. It’s not bad, but nothing to go particularly crazy over, either. I had a completely different feeling about the next one, the Ghost.

Chasing for this set was actually a bit of a pain, as it was in short supply even in the LEGO online store. It was in fact released even earlier than the Scarecrow some time in September, but didn’t really show up in stores. that’s why I consider myself pretty lucky having been able to obtain it on that magical Friday when I picked up both these sets, after all. I really wanted this one right after I saw the first photos because they completely triggered my “Aww, how cute!” senses. The reason for that is of course that this is far from a genuinely scary ghost but rather a very stylized version such as you would find it in Pac Man or a spectre ripped from an illustrated children’s book. It’s all too obvious where the inspiration came from. 😉

In terms of construction this follows a similar novel approach with a long plate going through the body to represent the arms. It wouldn’t have been necessary as the arms could be just as well represented with their drooping “sleeves” simply attached to the main body, but I guess this is just the designer thinking his idea is super cool and re-using it on multiple models. The rest of the model is kind of pretty simple with the emphasis on making it look sort of rotund/ round-ish and the edges of the imaginary cloth draping in a nice regular wave/ fringe pattern. As a result, the model is hugely symmetric both in the Left | Right plane as well as Front | Back. this is helpful when building (but also a bit tedious) since you only need to build the elements twice and then it doesn’t matter where you attach them. Apparently the face would be the exception here, which BTW you could get creative with by placing the eye elements differently or even using black round tiles from your spares box to good effect. There’s several possible facial expressions.

I also found the extras extremely useful. The Jack-O-Lantern minifigure head element might come in handy for anything Halloween-related, of course, I didn’t have any of the long bones and there’s a bat and a spider. Even the barrel in Dark Bluish Grey will be useful as a jet exhaust one day. Lots to love here. The one thing I didn’t quite like is the somewhat odd coloring choices. On a good day Dark Blue and Sand Green are of course nice colors and one can never have enough pieces, but, and I guess that’s the point here, they don’t mix too well with Olive Green and Dark Green, at least not when it’s meant to be some mossy/ moldy/ swampy thing. I would have preferred a more consistent coloring.

In summary both sets are okay, but I’d always prioritize the Ghost if I had only the money for one of the Brickheadz. The Scarecrow just doesn’t bring much new to the table and simply feels repetitive. It’s just the same ideas from different other figures combined and flavored a little with some minute new stuff. It sure does the trick if you’re only looking for a decorative item or indeed are a collector that has to own them all, but it doesn’t particularly tingle my nerves as a LEGO builder. The ghost on the other hand is just lots of fun on every level and adorable to look at, so I would recommend it every time…