This design will be custom printed just for you and therefore cannot be returned or exchanged. BustedTees is a U.S. Registered mark of Brain Buster Enterprises, LLC. Sign in to rate or reviewFrom New York Toy Fair with have an up close look at the new Lego Movie kits: 70814 Emmet’s Constructo Mech 70815 Super Secret Police Dropship 70816 Benny’s Spaceship Spaceship Spaceship Video-game guidance from real families, children and parents.Before The LEGO Movie hit theaters in February, LEGO said that there were no plans at that time to continue the LEGO Movie theme past 2014. But that was before The LEGO Movie actually hit theaters and became insanely, outrageously successful and sent crowds of customers to the LEGO Stores like never before! So, yeah–LEGO has clearly rethought their stance and LEGO Movie 2015 sets are on the way! And the set most likely to be a huge seller brings together some of the most beloved characters and concepts from The LEGO Movie–it’s the LEGO Double Decker Couch 70818 set!
LEGO obviously wasn’t planning to expand the LEGO Movie sets for 2015 until the last minute, which would explain why in January 2015 we’ll get a selection of three smaller 2015 LEGO Movie sets that contain a lot of recycled minifigures and accessories. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though, as many of the returning LEGO Movie minifigures and vehicles/furniture are currently expensive and/or hard-to-find on the market! Of the three new sets, the best example of this is the 70818 LEGO Double-Decker Couch set. Almost everything in this set either been released before or is in a slightly modified version (such as the new facial expressions on some of the minifigures). I love the eyes closed/open smile face on the new LEGO Benny minifigure, and it’s great to finally get a LEGO Benny the Spaceman minifigure in a set that costs less than $99! Benny’s inclusion here is going to make a lot of kids happy! In addition to Benny, LEGO 70818 includes minifigures of Emmet, Ghost Vitruvius, President Business (looking surprisingly friendly!) and a Unikitty with new quizzical/pouty face plates.
The two non-minifigure items in this set are the LEGO Emmet’s Car vehicle and the infamous LEGO Double Decker couch build. Emmet’s Car was previously only available as an exclusive free build at Toys R Us stores twice in 2014, but both times the crowds were wild and many people went home disappointed that there weren’t enough LEGO Movie Emmet’s Car sets to go around. Well, it won’t be free in 2015, but as part of LEGO 70818, everyone can finally give Emmet a car to drive around it! It’s also a very nice move on LEGO’s part to make the lovably ludicrous LEGO Double-Decker Couch itself available again for a low price, as I imagine most kids (and adults!) who wanted this may not have wanted to buy the awesome (yet immensely expensive) $250 LEGO Metal Beard’s Sea Cow set to get it. The LEGO Movie Double-Decker Couch 70818 set is scheduled for release in January 2014 and contains 197 pieces. I’ll post an update here and to the Bricks and Bloks Facebook page once the set shows up in stores or online for sale, so stay tuned if you’re planning to continue your LEGO Movie collection in 2015!
And thanks to just2good for debuting these images on his YouTube channel! What do you think of the 70818 Double-Decker Couch LEGO Movie set, LEGO fans? Is this a worthwhile addition to your LEGO collection, or is this set too rehash-y for your tastes?For my birthday my wife bought me the LEGO kit Benny’s Spaceship. For anyone who’s seen The Lego Movie you’ll get the joke. It’s the outrageous monster outer space cruiser the little blue 1980s LEGO astronaut with the busted helmet finally can unleash his manic creative energy to build in a fit of frenzied, 9-to-14-year-old glee near the end of the movie. Watching that moment in the movie, and holding the box, I felt the rekindling of that same mania, dull and dormant since it last animated me 30 years ago. It was then when I realized I had essentially failed that younger version of myself. Because if I had been true to my 12-year-old ambition, I would be working at LEGO right now or I would have worked on The Lego Movie.
Or, at least, I would have visited Legoland somewhere in the world. But I had Benny’s Spaceship and I found the visceral pleasure of assembling it did not fade with age. At the same time I happily watched a switch flip in the mind of my four-year-old son. What had been a jumble of abstract multi-colored DUPLO blocks now took solid form in his mind. He began to assemble cars, airplanes, helicopters out of the pure form. And then, inspired by his favorite television show, he began to “transform” them. Snapping a few pieces into different positions, he turned his vehicles into robots. It took me years to do something like that. I received my first LEGO kit, a train set, from Japanese friends when I was about five years old. From then on, LEGO was, with the possible exception of plastique models, my favorite things to play with growing up. I rarely bought blocks for their own sake and always built the pre-designed kits, but they eventually became something else entirely – ships, planes, submarines, spacecraft, battlefields, the whole populated physiography of a boy’s imagination.
Considering how expensive the kits were (and continue to be) they are probably the most cost-efficient toy on the market. You can make them into almost anything you want. At the risk of putting down the pure joy of childhood creativity with the needle of an adult’s hindsight, it’s been interesting to see how the same processes I cultivated on the floor of my bedroom as a child evolved into grown-up habits and skills. The Lego Movie sets up a rigid dichotomy between the instruction-following if happy-go-lucky automatons and the rebellious, anarchic Master Builders. But any organization needs both to succeed; indeed any person needs both creativity and attention to detail in order to function in modern life. It may surprise my friends and family to find me poring over a LEGO instruction manual (or any manual for that matter). Following instructions and conforming to rules are not my strength, but even as a pre-teen I would regularly do so in order to get the product shown on the box.
That attention to detail – an ability to focus and work precisely, behaviors not engrained in my character – may have been all I needed to get through school and my first few jobs. But once I completed the kit I could break it down and use the new pieces to build other things. I could build almost anything I could imagine or – a different notion entirely – a model of something else. I had a whole fleet’s-worth of space-faring warships of my own design, but I found these to be less difficult to build because the problem set was more flexible – it could be whatever I wanted it to be. On the other hand, trying to build a scale model of some real (or pre-existing) object was a much greater challenge. Because the greater the fidelity, the greater the achievement – and with the blocky, finite resolution of the LEGO bricks, that was quite a challenge. I recently found a book published by LEGO diving into the design of it Architecture series which explores this concept in some detail.
Replicating the Eiffel Tower, the White House or the Taj Mahal to high fidelity at 1/25th scale in a place like Legoland is impressive but, given the size, relatively easily done — and especially so after seeing how The LEGO Movie was designed. But what about at a scale that will fit in a box on a shelf? The Architecture book explores the engineers’ iterative process to find the right design, scale and parts to faithfully replicate these icons. I went through a similar process as a child and tried to do the same thing as I started building again as an adult – replicating the ships from “Guardians of the Galaxy,” say, and seeing if my children could recognize them when I finished. This was (and is) a significant life lesson in engineering and problem-solving. Engineers like to say that their job is about what can be – that is, solving real-world problems in real time for real people. The situation, tools, and equipment will always be inadequate but your goal is to get the best outcome and improve for the next time.
I learned almost too late that creativity is a tremendous part of the sheer physical aspect of getting things made, fixed and done. Without creativity, the greatest achievements in science, technology and engineering would have never left the chalkboards of theory. I have applied a creative, half-now-is-better-whole-later approach to problem-solving most of my life. But creativity has a curious double edge. I tried once again to model the venerable Enterprise from Star Trek – introducing my children to yet another commercial franchise – and I was as disappointed with my effort now as I was as a boy. I instantly recalled a good friend who was a LEGO prodigy. I remember his uncanny ability to assemble the Enterprise on virtually any scale — as an inch-long model or a foot-long version — with incredible fidelity. When I was younger I was jealous and confused by his ability – as I was by those who could do other creative things “better” than me. They could draw, sing, play music, and paint better than I could.
I didn’t understand what this “better” was – why, in a group of people, one object would necessarily be valued more than another. I was confronting a fundamental question of aesthetic philosophy that I would never be able answer but one that fundamentally separates an art from kitsch. Rifling my hand through the bricks I felt like I was back on my bike again. Thirty years had passed but very little had changed. I remembered their proportions, how pieces fit together, recognized their limitations, delighted to find new blocks and tools. There was something intensely familiar and calming about the focus on what I was building. And unlike work or writing, I didn’t feel any tension when my focus was broken by distractions, such as when my son would triumphantly display his latest LEGO transformer creation. Happily we could enjoy this activity together. Today we call this a mindful activity, also at the risk of killing off the pure notion of play. It is interesting that I don’t feel my mind wander, I don’t use the time to think about other things, I don’t worry (usually) about other things I have to do.