Series five of the Monkie Kid animated series is about to air somewhere. I haven’t even been able to find evidence of series four going to air in Australia yet. But still, Life will find a way. In this wave, the sets continue to draw inspiration from both the original story ‘The Journey to the West‘ and the animated series, which sets out to tell an ongoing sequel to the original classical novel.
Today, I’d like to take a look at the 80058 Celestial Pagoda – the largest set in the June 2024 Monkie Kid releases
Yesterday, I was a little bit excited to get my first glimpses of the Monkie Kid set 80054 Megapolis City. Celebrating the 5th year of Monkie Kid, the set is full of the eastereggs that we have come to expect from these large scale urban envoronments from MK. But the image quality was a bit poor: fast forward 24 hours and we have now got high resolution images, some are ‘lifestyle images,’others are renders of the box art. And while I was a bit excited yesterday, today I am turning it up to 11.
It’s early November and for the 5th year running, the Chinese International Import Expo has been the place for the LEGO Group to showcase some of the new sets for next year. This is the event where the Spring Festival sets made their debut back in 2019. Now into the 5th year, the LEGO® presence at CIIE has also seen some of the flag ship sets in other themes presented – and while media coverage has not been readily accessible (Thanks to Jays brick blog and Dylan Chow for the heads up), images of some of these sets have made their debut on the LEGO Builder App.
Fun Fact: This year marks the 30th anniversary of the first ever LEGO Dragon being released, as part of the Dragon Knights range in 1993. This year, we have seen lots of dragons appearing in Ninjago Core, as well as the forthcoming Dragons Rising series. However, Ninjago does not have the Monopoly on LEGO Dragons.
Dragons are frequent characters in The Journey to the West, the novel which inspires the Monkie Kid range. We recently looked at the 80049 Dragon of the East Palace – and Mei is descended from the Yu Long, the White Dragon horse, 3rd son of the Dragon of the West – brother of the Dragon of the East, featured in that set. As such, it is quite reasonable for Mei to have a Guardian Dragon, probably sent by her ancestors, to provide protection in times of trouble.
This set was sent to me by the LEGO Group for review purposes, and I’ll admit, there was something intriguing about its appearance from the outset, that I couldn’t initially put my finger on. But we will get to that later.
The Palace of the Dragon of the East Sea is a key location in both the animated series Monkie Kid, as well as in the classic novel, The Journey to the West. Set 80049 Dragon of the East Palace focuses on the original story, which tells of how the Monkey King gained his staff, while also providing references to the animated series. Let’s take a look at the set, one of the more splendid builds from the Monkie Kid range – due for release in June 2023. In fact, you might almost mistaken it for a castle set!
At the time I received this set (kind thanks to the LEGO group for sending it over for an early review: all opinions are mine), I had not spent any time reading The Journey to the West. I had watched the 1978 Japanese production of Monkey, featuring dubbed English dialogue, back when it was screened in Australia as an evening show for a few years in the 80s. But not since then. So I relished the opportunity to return to the source.
One of the criticisms offered to the early waves of Monkie Kid sets is the relatively high prices, compared with other playsets, for what is essentially an in-house IP. The sets themselves have not been bad value, more tending towards the higher end of the spectrum, with the initial wave featuring no sets for less than $50AUD. As such, I was quite excited to see that there were a couple of playsets in the upcoming 2023 wave with sets retailing for the much more palatable 32.99AUD. That’s right: Not one, but two!
80040 Monkie Kid’s Combi Mech and 80041 Mei’s Dragon Jet. Both sets are great standalone sets, but they also have the capacity to join together to form a larger vehicle: in part serving to introduce the target market to the idea of mixing and merging LEGO sets together.
Both Mei and Monkie Kid have fairly distinctive colour blocking in all of their sets: MK’s are red, gold, teal, and yellow, while Mei’s vehicles are almost all white, lime green, teal, bright green and lime green (which a touch of vibrant Yellow.) The near exclusive use of these colours, with the exception with grey and black elements for joints and hinges leaves me thinking back to the space themes of the 80’s and 90s, where themes were defined by a specific palette, although in this case, we have parallel streams representing different characters.
