LEGO recently announced the “May the 4th be with you” campaign offering various reduced prices on LEGO Star Wars models and other exclusives (LEGO Star Wars film poster, Admiral Yularen mini figure, etc). Starting on the 2nd of may lasting one week guess who joined the LEGO store in Nuremberg on Saturday 🙂
While it’s tremendously hard to look at all the fine stuff being reduced by 10% it’s even harder to resist against buying all the bigger models – I personally prefer the bigger ones of the smaller play sets, I love to build LEGO, but I don’t play with it 😉 Being at the LEGO store also answers the questions when models won’t be produced anymore and go off stock. One of them clearly is the VW “Bully” being terminated later this year. “Star Wars”-wise rumors do tell that the Red-Five X-Wing Starfighter 10240, Ewok Village 10236 and the Death Star 10188 won’t survive 2015.
The original price of 420€ for the Death Star is a lot of money, given a discount of 10% and lots of VIP points collected from previous store visits, it was tough, but in the end LEGO won (again). It seems they’ve removed it from the online store in Germany (probably sold-out) but the international version is still available.
While I won’t play with it, I’m really in love with the scenes from the films in each “quarter” – certainly you’ll need to be a Star Wars fan to recognize all of them. Laser sword fight between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker accompanied by the emperor, adjustable guns and the super laser, and even the jail scene with some 3d view (!) where princess Leia will be freed by Chewbacca, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker – directly jumping into the trash compactor.
Even a view onto the hidden rebels base, or vice versa, Alderan, brings the original film scenes to mind. This model really got many many details you won’t see on the box design or any reviews on the net, you need to build them and have the aha-effect 🙂
The build steps are repetitive only on the ground floors (building them in quarters) but then have their own lovely style and details. There’s an elevator in the middle connecting all floors and scenes together, which can be lowered by a cord, similar to a goods lift implemented in the Tie-Advanced parking lot.  There’s also the famous door with an open-close mechanism looking at another laser sword fight between Obi-wan Kenobi and Darth Vader. Before that you may adjust the scene for Obi-wan disabling the power plant (which actually hides the blue-transparent bricks simulating the power when pulling off the knobs).
Check the images from the build process below – 4 boxes, unpacked into 7 build sections and 192 build steps, it took me ~11 hours to build it on the weekend. This time on the couch again, it does not really fit on a small table. The instructions book is pretty big and connected with rings, bringing all the details onto each page. Some build steps must be done twice, but that’s not that many compared to the rest (e.g. two laser cannons). I would’ve replaced the Tie-Advanced with a small version of the millenium falcon but that probably did not fit into the model which already is rather complex to build.
Once you’ve finished it half way, you’ll just build and build and oversee the time 🙂
