May the Fourth

75355 UCS X-Wing Revealed: May 1 Release

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UCS X-Wing, ramblingbrick bedroom edition c.1978.

Now, it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that with May the 4th less than a month away, we are starting to see new LEGO Star Wars sets officially revealed. Overnight, we got our first complete views of the third UCS X-Wing. (The first (7191) being released in 2000, the second (10240) in 2013. Now the X-wing has always been the iconic Star Fighter for me, ever since my first glimpse back in 1977. It was also the first Star Wars ship that I attempted to build to accomodate my action figures, back in the day.

However, I totally missed the previous versions of this ship: I just wasn’t really ready to make that sort of an investment at the time. Life has moved on, and I am glad that I can reconsider adding one to my collection, without investing excessively on the secondary market.

And so, here is 75355 X-Wing Starfighter, due for release on 1st of May for VIP Customers…

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UCS A-Wing 75275 Announced In Time for May the Fourth

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Around the turn of the century, a new type of LEGO® set was released. Star Wars starfighter kits, designed for the AFOL to display, rather than to swoosh around the room. There were two released that year: 7181, TIE Interceptor, with 703 parts and the one we had all been waiting for: the 7191 X-Wing Starfighter was the largest Star Wars Set to have been released at the time.

TIE Interceptor and X-Wing UCS – images from Brickset.com

Twenty years have gone by and almost every major starfighter from the Rebellion and Empire has been represented.

Almost.

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May the Fourth Be With You: Tatooine Battle Pack Review

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IMG_1519Today is May the Fourth, the day when a pun is allowed to take over marketing of Star Wars related LEGO® sets for a limited time only, with a variety of special offers in place, changing daily.  Check Shop.LEGO.com in your country for details.

Tatooine

“If there’s a bright centre of the galaxy, you are on the planet that it’s farthest from.” – Luke Skywalker

When Star Wars debuted in 1977, Tatooine was the first alien landscape we encountered. A harsh, unforgiving desert planet, bathed by the scorching heat of binary stars, we see people enter a daily struggle against the environment: farming moisture to survive; fending off hostile desert nomads and dealing with diminutive scavengers. We see a variety of exotic megafauna, some just skeletons, some utilized as low maintenance transport in an environment which treats life forms and machine with equal contempt. It is far from the attention of authority: smugglers, gangsters and fugitives make this planet their base of operations. We also see hope: cautious optimism in the face of a deadly environment, a place of refuge from the Empire, and spectacular twin sunsets! It was a long, long time ago, and the locale took us to a galaxy far, far away…

And yet with its exotic locations and importance to the overarching saga- events take place on Tatooine in five of the first six movies- the indigenous races: Jawas and Tusken Raiders remain shrouded in mystery. And indeed , in my opinion,  sadly underrepresented in LEGO Star Wars sets.

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1978 X-Wing Fighter. 3 1/4″Action Figure Scale Luke Skywalker in place, and a makeshift R2D2 in the Astromech slot.

Melbourne, 1977

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