LEGO’s product catalog is saturated with promotional tie-ins and intellectual property (IP) LEGO sets. So how did we get from McDonald’s Happy Meal toys to today’s movie tie-in sets and Comic-Con exclusives? Join us on our journey as we look at LEGO’s IP partnerships of yesteryear. I do highly suggest you take a read of the first article in this series about the earliest instances of partnerships and co-branded sets, as there were a few I missed in the early years which I will cover starting right now! (Pictures in this article come from BrickLink, BrickEconomy and Brickset.) Have You Had Yours? Promotions with UK cereal maker Weetabix were in full swing in the 1970s. Consumers collected tokens from Weetabix boxes and could redeem them for these exclusive sets. 00-1 Vintage Castle was one of the four that was offered. Others included the Weetabix House v1 (1976), Weetabix House v2 (1976), Weetabix Windmill...

Bendigo Bricks is an annual event held in the regional city of Bendigo, Australia. Bendigo is the third largest city in the state of Victoria. It has a thriving and active local LUG, Bendigo LEGO User Group, with around 45 people attending their monthly meetings. This year over 130 exhibitors displayed at the event with a number traveling from interstate to attend. I chatted to some of the interstate AFOL exhibitors about the reasons why they attend, and the logistics in travelling with a MOC. For those readers not familiar with the geography of Australia, BrickNerd has added a nice colorful map of the various states and territories for you to follow along. Amanda Amanda and her husband, Grant, live just over the border of Victoria, in Thurgoona, New South Wales. Their three hour drive was one of the shortest journeys of any of the interstate visitors. Amanda’s colourful MOC featured...

All my contributions to BrickNerd to date have explored various topics in the LEGO train theme. However, none of these articles have offered the most fundamental and yet familiar type of informative content: instructions! There is nothing more unifying in terms of content in our vast hobby than a set of building instructions. Every LEGO set has them, fan community sites such as Rebrickable, MOChub and others are dedicated to sharing this content, and countless times as a LEGO fan, I have been asked “do you have instructions for…”. Therefore, as an experiment in generating and sharing this type of content, this article will show you how to build the ubiquitous, often ignored, but endlessly useful ISO shipping container. Since the concept of multi-modal standardized shipping containers was introduced in the 1960s, the ISO shipping container has become a vital backbone of global trade delivering products to every corner of the...

Look, I’m not a train guy. I can barely tell a caboose from a boxcar, and yet even I am in awe of Smile Leo‘s amazing LEGO train, depicting a China Railways DF11G locomotive. The first thing to notice is the variety of angles at which the bricks and plates all fit together for the smooth, rounded angles of the train’s nose. Next, check out the intricacy of the machinery around the wheels. With another model, I might just classify it as a bunch of greebling (you know, little mechanical details that are there just to look cool rather than have any particular function), but it’s clear that every meticulously chosen element mimics an actual train part. I can almost hear the churning of pistons and the whine of wheels on rails. The post A complex train build that never goes off the rails appeared first on The Brothers Brick. Original...

If you’ve seen any of the Despicable Me movies you know that those chattery little Minions get up to all sorts of shenanigans when left unsupervised. Well, now they can do it in style with this fully loaded party bus. Did the Anti-Villain League approve of this excursion, or did someone leave the key box unlocked? LEGO Despicable Me 4 75581 Minions’ Music Party Bus includes 379 pieces and will be available on May 1st for US $39.99 | CAN $49.99 | UK £34.99 The LEGO Group provided The Brothers Brick with an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews. Unboxing the parts, instructions, and stickers The set comes in a small rectangular thumb-punch box with the Despicable Me 4 branding. The party bus is featured in party mode in the parking lot of the Anti-Villian League. There is...