San Diego Comic Con 2014 came and went just like that. Four days filled with lots of things to see and do. Although I did lots of other things that wasn’t related to LEGO, I’m going to stick with the LEGO stuff in this post since this is what I’m here for.
One of the coolest things that I experienced there was not at the LEGO booth itself, but meeting people in the LEGO community. I got to finally meet Will from Hoth Bricks and Lim from neoape. It was cool to finally put a face to some of the fellow LEGO bloggers out there. I also got to reconnect with Joe Meno from BrickJournal, Tommy Williamson from BrickNerd, as well as some friends from SandLUG like Tommy and Charlie. I even ran into TT Games’ Game Director Arthur Parsons on the streets and chatted with him a little bit while waiting to cross the street.
Now on to the LEGO booth itself. It was very colorful and what we expect a LEGO booth to look like. Although the space for the booth was one of the larger ones at the convention, it didn’t feel like it. There wasn’t that much room to maneuver and if you thought you did, that was quickly over. One of the few disappointments with the booth was the retail store they had around back. Every time I went by that area, there would be a line outside waiting to go in with a few people inside slowly browsing. There wasn’t even that many things that were sold there and that’s why I recommended that you visit the LEGO Store in Fashion Valley instead.
Another disappointment that I along with many others experienced was how the LEGO booth handled the sale of the exclusive sets. There were some things that I saw and heard first-hand that made it difficult for us to purchase the sets. One of these things that I saw was the line for the exclusive was already full before the exhibit doors were even opened. This mean that people who were waiting to get in pretty much had no chance to buy them. Who was in line, you may ask? I won’t say but you can look on various LEGO forums to find out. Another thing that happened at the booth was the sudden switching of lines to the other side of the booth which caused some chaos. Something should be done to prevent this from happening in the future. I’ve recently sent in my opinions on the survey and hope LEGO takes it into account.
One minor frustration was the quality of the display case they used for their daily product reveals. It wasn’t as clear as it could be as you’ve seen in my previous posts on the product reveals. You can see a cloudy haze around the box and on one side, it was impossible to take pictures of the product until it was moved to the other cases. Of course there were the sets themselves that were revealed there or shall I say, shown there. All of the sets that were on display minus the LEGO Mixels were already posted online so there wasn’t much fanfare at the convention itself.
On Friday July 25th, Adam West was to make an appearance at the LEGO booth and he did, for a few minutes. Of course, he is a busy man with all of the appearances he had to make with the 75th anniversary of Batman and whatnot but whoever did the scheduling dropped the ball a little and didn’t allow fans to interact with him just a little more.
Although there were a few disappointments, there were actually also some cool stuff there. The different statues that were made for the convention were pretty impressive and the pictures shown online didn’t do them justice. If you wanted to see Smaug, you had to make your way to the Warner Bros. booth and even then, it was underneath the stairs and it couldn’t really be appreciated as much as it could be. One other thing that was very nice to look at was the LEGO Star Wars 15th Anniversary Minifigure Case. The downside of it was it was in a very bad spot. It was located right behind the information area of the booth and there was very little space for you to take pictures on one of the sides.
Another thing that went pretty smooth was the raffle for the four exclusive minifigures: Bard the Bowman, The Collector, Batman of Zur-En-Arrh, and Unikitty. After last year’s fiasco, LEGO decided to make some changes to prevent what happened last year. This year, there were two iPads set up for attendees to touch to see if they won or not. There were no misunderstandings on whether you won or not since it was a green yes or a red no. You didn’t even have to wait for your prize as they were handed out there at the same time. The only downside was if you didn’t get there about 1.5-2 hours early, you may have had to wait a while in line before it was your turn. Other than that, it was a pretty good experience there. I met a couple of friends that were in line so time kinda flew by pretty quickly and I also managed to acquire all four minifigures.
I also attended a number of panels although I did miss out on the LEGO Legends of Chima and Ninjago one because I was tied up with other things. The panels that I was able to attend were the A Look at Beyond the Brick: A LEGO Brickumentary, the LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham Panel, and The LEGO Movie. You can read up on the recaps of those individual panels by going to the links provided above.
Finally, if you were able to go to the POP! The Art of the Geek exhibit at the Michael J. Wolf Fine Arts gallery, you could’ve seen a lot of Nathan Sawaya’s work including the Han Solo in Carbonite sculpture as well as Brandon Griffith’s Watchman piece.
Overall, I had a decent LEGO experience while at San Diego Comic Con 2014. There were some things that I wished could be done better but there were also some things that were improved from last year like the minifigure giveaway. I was extremely happy that I was able to get all the minifigures although I found that you really had to hide them right after you get them or else people will be asking for them with unfair trades like someone offering me $100 for the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh or Unikitty for LEGO Star Wars Rebels The Ghost exclusive set. Even though I won’t be selling the minifigs, I do know how much they go for on the secondary market so please don’t insult my intelligence with such low-ball offers.
As for the three exclusive sets, I failed my mission in acquiring them. I thought it would be as easy as it was last year to purchase them but with the popularity of LEGO because of The LEGO Movie and the 75th Anniversary of Batman, many people were trying to make a quick buck off the sets. Obviously, this frustrated a lot of fans who actually wanted to collect them, including myself. Right now, they are going for extremely ridiculous prices on eBay and I probably won’t be getting them unless the prices drop dramatically. We’ll see next year if LEGO does anything different to please fans like what they did this year by bumping up the number of LEGO minifigures that were given out.
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Check out all the pictures I took of a majority of LEGO-related things at SDCC 2014 below. Click through for a larger images. Also make sure to read up on everything that happened during SDCC 2014 here. If you visited the LEGO booth at Comic Con this year, what were your experience(s) there? Leave your comments below!
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