Lego is one of those toy lines that have remained constant for the last few generations. Along with a few select board games, Lego is one those rare brand name toys your children play with, you played with, and your parents may have played with too. For the past few years, however, the Lego franchise has been diversifying a fair bit more, and we’ve been only more than happy to go along for the ride.
Lego’s video games are almost guaranteed million sellers each time out. A bi-annual series release of just minifigs have catered to the demographic that feel like they have enough bricks and not enough figures (that’s me!) and they’ve been attempting to reach and target specific demographics with lineups like LEGO Friends and Hero Factory while maintaining some of the classics like LEGO City.
Lego has even broken into a previously unforeseen market, TV and movies, and on February 7th the Lego Movie will make its way into theaters (and at home ina video game 3 days before) with an accompanying lineup of toys.
The movie’s voice cast is essentially a who’s who of the last decade of TV comedy. Everybody from Arrested Development’s Will Arnett to Chris Pratt and Nick Offerman of Parks and Recreation and Community’s Alison Brie. Even Liam Neeson and Morgan Freeman participated and Will Forte is back playing Abraham Lincoln a decade after he originally voiced Abe on Clone High. The movie’s music is put together by Mark Mothersbaugh of Rugrats and Devo fame.
Where does Best Buy come into all this? Well, you can now get your hands on the Lego Movie Sets online at BestBuy.ca and you can even pre-order the games for all systems. Click here to visit the online Lego Movie store where you can take a look at all the different sets available.
Here’s a close look at the 100 piece Getaway Glider set, which comes with 3 minifigs and a horse!
There’s also other great sets like the Ice Cream Machine, which is a 2-in-1 playset, going from a standard truck to a rock boring device. There’s also the 2-in-1 Trash Chomper which goes from eating garbage to eating your minifigs!
The biggest playset is the Evil Lord Business’ layer, which, at over 700 pieces should take a couple hours of effort. All of these sets represent areas of the movie, where Chris Pratt’s voiced character Emmet is an ordinary minifig mistaken as the legendary Masterbuilder who is being trusted to stop the evil Lord Business (Will Ferrell) from gluing the entire Lego universe together. The movie ties in elements of other Lego over time, such as the DC Comics universe, and perhaps my favorite – Charlie Day’s character is an 80s Lego Space minifig! I’m now interested in seeing how many other eras of Lego they’ll tie in. Does anybody remember M-Tron? Those were some of my favorite Lego playing hours as a kid.
You can expect the Lego Movie video game to be more of the same. The Lego movie game is the first simultaneous Lego game release for the XBox One and Playstation 4 (the Marvel Superheroes game being the first released in general) and will follow the plotline of the movie itself. You can assume that there will be a mission based storyline, followed by freeplay elements just like the rest of the series. Characters will be broken into classes, with different abilities based on this class set. In order to fill out the huge roster of characters you normally see in Lego games, characters from other franchises will be playable too. Who and which franchises will be represented exactly? Well, that’s half the fun of picking up the game and finding out, but you can be sure that it’ll be a great accompanying piece for the movie itself for kids and adult Lego fans alike.
Besides just the Lego Movie line, did you know that Best Buy carries a huge assortment of Lego? With more than a dozen different product lines available, you may want to hone in on a couple different product lines. There’s the old favourite Lego City. City has been around for over 35 years, and has over 200 sets to its name, settling in on its current generation around 2005. City is where you see familiar playsets like fire stations, police sets and so on. City products are where I started my Lego playing when I was young, so it has a special place in my heart. There’s also the newer line Lego Friends, which was introduced in 2012. Friends is more of a character based, storyline driven series featuring named characters and playsets based on them and in some cases, their pets. You get to see a lot of different types of playsets and minifigs you don’t see elsewhere, especially with animals. City and Friends are now available online at Best Buy too.
Remember, you can catch the Lego Movie itself starting February 7th at a theatre near you. In case you missed the first link, click here to visit the online Lego Movie store.
The following Lego Movie sets are available right now:
and you can pre-order the video games for all of the different consoles here.
