An Old Prince

One of my habits when buying things from Bricklink is to browse through all the minifig parts a store I'm shopping has in its catalogue. This isn't my only such habit; I usually also take a look at whatever old grey pieces are in stock and whatever trans-yellow pieces might be there. As a result, although I've never really set out with a goal of collecting old minifigs, I've built up a number of classic Castle figs over the years, figs from prior to the 1984 debut of Legoland Castle. On the parts to these figs that I acquired was a torso to the prince (or lord or king or what-have-you) who comes with 383/6083 Knight's Tournament, LEGO's very first jousting tournament set. According to Bricklink, this torso only ever came with this set. Unfortunately, in the condition I got it, the torso was a little bit worn; in fact, all the gold was worn off completely. In and of itself, this isn't such a surprise--there are probably more examples missing the gold printing on Bricklink than have it, and gold printing has vanished off many early torsos, such as the Classic Space torso and Lion (Legoland Castle) torsos. I added the torso to my cart without really knowing what I was going to do with it. Should I convert it into a soldier's torso? Rebuild the prince and ignore his missing printing? As you can see, I decided to "customize" him back to his original appearance with the use of a little gold-star sticker:

As you can no doubt also see, I decided to upgrade the prince a little bit so that he could hang out with the other royal minifigs in my Castle realms. I decided against giving him a crown--I kind of like the fact that this guy doesn't have the ubiquitous crown-helm that all the later kings have--but I did give him a sceptre (stolen from the KK2 in the Knights' Kingdom Chess Set.

I also gave him a cape, in the style of the Dragon Master and Royal Knight cloth capes of the mid-1990s, though of course this is actually a paper cape. It should be noted that, in addition to the tri-colour shield emblem of his torso, the prince's cape also sports the crown off the emblem of the main faction of knights in 375/6075 Castle. In my LEGO world, all the pre-Legoland Castle factions are united under the Knights' Tournament Prince, thus making him the titular "crown" of those original Crown Knights. Presumably the Tri-Colour family acquired the throne or married into the original Crown family at some point.

Wedding Loot

Despite the fact that my lovely wife vetoed putting LEGO on our Target registry, our wedding day was not without LEGO. The wedding favours have been mentioned before, but as it turned out, they were not the only LEGO involved with that day. Though no LEGO was on our registry, my family knows me well enough to indulge the habit a little. From my brother, the fare was minifigs of a variety I'd never managed to get my hands on:

(By the way, I apologise for the poorer quality of the pictures in this post--in addition to the usual excuses of photographer ineptitude, it was raining yesterday--hence the droplets on our friends.) These magnets were Toys R' Us promotional items, and as I have no car and Boston has no Toys R' Us, I would never have been able to acquire them--even though I'm a Castle fan. In a similar manner, as I've mentioned before, I never got the opportunity to acquire any Series 6 Collectible Minifigs. Knowing this deficiency in my collection, my brother got me these:

The Highlander and the Legionnaire were the two minifigs of Series 6 that I most regretted missing--and my brother knew this. My sister, on the other hand, probably has no idea at all what LEGO I have, lack, want, or need--but she does know I like LEGO and I like writing. So she got my wife and I these:

(The red in this photo is absolutely atrocious...) To my surprise--and glee--these Moleskine notebooks also come with a couple sticker sheets.

The reason for my glee is that I realised right away that although these stickers are (presumably) intended to decorate the pages of the notebooks, they also have minifig customising potential. Granted, this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I think the results are pretty good:

I am embarrassed to show this photo at all, but it gets the idea across. Both torsos and heads of these two minifigs are stickers cut from the sticker sheet. The effect may not be perfect, but it's sharper than most "do it myself" attempts and looks not unlike some of the very early minifigs, which often had torso stickers rather than printing. And as a way to rehabilitate some of the very worn, garage-sale heads that have been sitting useless in my collection, it's not bad. One just has to make sure to use the right head.

Favourite Minifigs: Sir Edmond of Orimault

He's a Lion knight. No... not those new Lion Knights. This fellow belongs to the oldest Lion Knights in the LEGO Castle genre: the 1984-1992 Legoland Castle "Lion Knights."



Of course, as you can see, this guy isn't straight out of a contemporary set, but a customized fig. He's made an appearance on the Internet before, as the rather minor character of Sir Edmond of Orimault, one of Princess Anne's suitors in the early chapters. His sword, helm, and breastplate comes from the now-defunct Little Armory, one of the earliest commercial LEGO customizers.



However, as you can see, the customization on Sir Edmond is not limited to what the Little Armory products I gave him. The pennant on his lance, his shield, and his torso all bear customized arms--based on the gold-rimmed classic Lion shield seen on this torso, and it is by limiting myself to these two colours (with the addition of greys and blacks) that we get this distinctly non-traditional Legoland Castle Lion Knight--a faction that defined itself by wearing red in opposition to its opponents, the Black Falcons.

Although I created the actual stickers seen on Sir Edmond, the templates were based on those created by Anthony Sava on Classic-Castle, and would likely not have appeared without them.


Also, in other news, look forward to daily updates from Aquazone Breakfast News over the next twenty-four days. Starting tomorrow, they present the 2011 City Advent Calendar!

Modified Harry Potter Torso

Well, actually it's a modified Draco Malfoy torso (most likely) as Harry Potter wouldn't likely travel around wearing Slytherin colours (bar being polyjuice-disguised as one). If there is a prime candidate for "useless multiple figs," Harry Potter is surely the posterboy, and it's rather likely that I'll do a post or two on his various non-Harry Potter uses in my LEGO collection... but it'll have to wait until I'm back in Boston, since that's where most of my Harry Potter figs are these days.

(On which note, I leave Alberta on Sunday and after a couple nights' stopover in Toronto with relatives, I'll be back in Boston a week from today. Expect updates to be sporadic at best for the next couple weeks.)



This post, in the meantime, is not about the usefulness of Harry Potter parts, as such, but about the attractiveness of a specific Harry Potter part, once modified. As one can see from the picture above, I've modified an existing Slytherin torso by removing the Slytherin shield, producing a "sweater and tie with green highlights" torso. Admittedly, one's LEGO collection probably doesn't need multiple "sweaters with tie" but one or two are easily incorporated into a Town scene. Even if the modified torso is no more useful in high quantities than the original version (and, personally, I think it's more useful than the original), it's still a rather handsome piece.

As to the mechanics of modifying the torso, I simply used a normal pencil eraser. The abrasiveness required to remove graphite from paper is about the same as that required to remove the printing from a LEGO piece, although a lot more elbow grease is needed. The fact that you can find erasers handily positioned on the end of pencils also made it rather easy to exert the necessary control that would not have been possible with a stand-alone eraser--since, of course, I didn't want to remove ALL the torso's printing.

MOC Figs: Ancient Egyptian Troops

I don't think it's been mentioned here before, but I am a rather large fan of the Stargate TV franchises (the movie that started it all is a bit "meh" to me, but I suppose I'm glad that it allowed the TV series to develop). One of the major consequences of this for LEGO is that one of my "Space" themes has a distinctive ancient Egyptian flavour. While by no means composed of Goa'uld and Jaffa, my "Egyptian Troops" (pictured below) probably wouldn't exist without them.



These little fellows were among the figs that I had to replace after the May 30th burglary, and as you can see they have finally been fully restored. Originally, they didn't have black headdresses, but the tan ones from 1383 Curse of the Pharaoh--mostly because they predate the release of Pharaoh's Quest. The new black headdresses look a wee bit sharper, in my opinion, and (even more importantly) were easier and cheaper to amass anew.

And, for those who were wondering, that is a scorpion gun the commander is holding, and those are custom torsos (thanks to Anthony Sava and his articles on Classic-Castle).

Custom Clerics

Although I am not a gung-ho customizer of LEGO pieces, and have my purist moments, I'm not *really* a purist, and have been known to do a little bit of it here and there. For the most part, I tend to limit myself to some torso decals (well... torso stickers... let's not overstate what they are). The figs below, however, go slightly beyond stickers, and represent what are probably the most advanced customized figs I've made



From left to right, we have three members of the Catholic clergy: a priest wearing an alb and stole (who could easily be a Lutheran minister... or all sorts of Protestant ministers), a priest wearing a chasuble over his alb and stole, and a deacon wearing an alb and stole.

All three figs belonged to one of my earlier post-Great Take-Apart MOCs, St. Adrian's parish (which can be seen in an earlier stage in this Brickshelf folder). I'm a Catholic myself, and spent four years in seminary training to become a Catholic priest before I realised that what made seminary awesome for me was the academic end of things--at which point I shifted to academic and moved to Boston for grad school. The church goes back to before I even entered seminary, and these figs go back to my last year or so of seminary--about a year and a half ago.



Having established that baseline of what they're wearing on the bottom, this second picture goes whole-hog. On the left is a priest again, now wearing a cope (which is used when presiding at liturgical events OTHER than Mass). In the centre is a bishop--actually a metropolitan archbishop, as denoted by the pallium he is wearing over his chasuble (which one will note is more ornate than the first). He actually has a crozier (staff) with a crook somewhere, but it's not the handsomest piece, so I didn't worry about digging it up for this picture. Finally, the deacon is still there on the right, now wearing his dalmatic over his stole and alb.



This is a view from behind of the previous picture. Both the cope and the chasuble look their best from behind, and I've removed the archbishop's pallium so that the detailing on his chasuble is visible.