The page you have attempted to load is not currently available on the BZPower server. Please use the site search, return home, or check the discussion forums to find the page you were looking for:Lego Death Star 75159 rrp £409.99, mint, 100% complete. 100% complete, built once, included all pieces which have been double checked and all minifigures. Only displayed, never played with. It’s 9:30 at night and I have yet to finish an article that’s due in the morning. I should be polishing up my rough draft and checking facts, or at the very least, stressing about it with a glass of scotch in my hand. Instead, I’m two hours deep into playing with LEGOs. And I have no intention of stopping. You remember those big-ass 500-piece LEGO castles you put together when you were a kid? Feeling your patience tested as you searched for the one piece you swear they left out of the kit? Or almost finishing, then having to pull apart the entire castle because you left out a small, but vital, piece about three hours ago?
This is the anxiety that was triggered when Paste agreed to let me write an article about putting together LEGO’s 3,000-piece S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier. If the trauma of sifting through 500 pieces for a single block was enough to make me shudder 25 years later, putting together this behemoth just might drive me insane. Fortunately, it turns out LEGO has done some growing up in the last few decades as well. The kit (the newest of a series of licensed projects that includes iconic set pieces like the Death Star, the Tumbler from Batman Begins, and Boba Fett’s Slave 1 ship) doles out the 2,996 pieces in about 25 separate plastic bags, all numbered in the order that you’re supposed to open and assemble them. It’s a great tactic to prevent the user from getting overwhelmed at the sheer volume of tiny bricks, but the inch-thick instruction manual (400 pages!) made me skeptical about just how much I’d actually enjoy putting this bad boy together. I took a deep breath, took a swig of coffee, then snapped the first two pieces together.
The excitement of playing with LEGOs for the first time since I was a kid should have faded into tedium after the first hour, but that hour faded into two before I had to quit for the night. The Helicarrier was nowhere near done, but was that an outline of the hull sitting on my table? You can bet your ass it was. The next few days, I found myself at the kit as often as I could, stealing an hour here, an hour there. I felt a constant compulsion to keep going, and part of it was the fact that I could see the carrier coming together more and more as time passed, but there was something else to it as well: clicking thousands of LEGOs together is oddly soothing. The repetition of finding a piece and clicking it onto the section in my hand was downright hypnotic: one afternoon, I resolved to work on it for half an hour. I ended spending two hours on it and working right through an appointment. There were some lows—tearing the dining room apart trying to find a clear brick that fell off the table (it somehow fell into my pant cuff);
getting a sore back from leaning over the table all night, and having to lie about why I missed the aforementioned appointment. After seven hours spread out over a few days, I finally put the last piece on the Helicarrier. The kit is huge and shockingly detailed, from the stacks of cargo and forklifts on the deck to the windows that show the little LEGO microfigurines that I put in the control room. At nearly three feet long, it’s an imposing piece, and I’m taking an inordinate amount of pride knowing that I put it together. This must be how Da Vinci felt after he sketched the outline of the Vitruvian Man. Except the Vitruvian Man doesn’t have spinning propellers.75159 Death Star has been the subject of enormous speculation for months, with some believing that we might see a display model akin to 10143 Death Star II and others considering the possibility of a set based on Starkiller Base. Now that the set has been revealed, under bizarre circumstances, this has been proven incorrect and 75159 is instead almost identical to 10188 Death Star which was retired earlier this year.
This has elicited a great deal of disappointment which is understandable as there is plenty of room for improvement and this has not been exploited to the fullest extent possible. The reveal of 75159 Death Star has altered our schedule a little so What's Missing? Return of the Jedi will be published next Sunday instead but for now we are taking a closer look at the new set and how it differs from the original. The most apparent alteration has been made to the minifigures. 10188 Death Star was released in 2008 and was finally withdrawn from sale in December of 2015, seven years and five months after it first arrived. The design of minifigures was greatly advanced during that time but the selection included in 10188 remained the same, but for the addition of white pupils to the eyes in latter production runs. This therefore left the 24 minifigures looking rather outdated after the set had been available for a few years and I am glad to see that they have been suitably updated for 75159.
There are now 25 minifigures included but only a few are brand new. Han Solo features a new hair piece and the RA-7 Protocol Droid head first seen in 75051 Jedi Scout Fighter is finally re-used on an updated Death Star Droid. The Imperial Astromech Droid has also been improved and now has blue markings to match those of R3-M3 from the film. Grand Moff Tarkin has also been updated with a new hair piece and is flanked by a pair of Imperial Officers which did not appear in 10188 Death Star. Death Star Gunners have been introduced since 2008 as well so were not included with the original set. The white Assassin Droid is the only figure to have been removed. The new set is obviously very similar to the original but the piece count has increased from 3803 to 4016 which suggests that some changes have been made. The ones I have spotted are as follows: The back of the box shows the other side of the model and reveals a few more updates: I like 10188 Death Star very much but it is not perfect, particularly by the standards of today.
The original design was very successful and it would be unwise to overhaul the entire model but there are therefore several improvements which could have been made and these are described below: The long lifespan of 10188 Death Star suggests that the set was exceedingly successful and I am sure 75159 will prove similarly popular with children and new adult fans. However, the majority of existing LEGO Star Wars fans are understandably disappointed as it would have been nice to see something new or at least see some further improvements over 10188 as there are plenty of alterations which might have been made given the huge range of new elements which have been released since 2008. Inflation would warrant an increase over the original price of £274.99 or $399.99 but the increases far exceed that of inflation as the new set is priced at £399.99 in the UK and $499.99 in the US. Ultimately, I do not object to the fact that 10188 Death Star has been remade but an opportunity has been missed by not making further updates.