If there’s something strange in your neighbourhood, who ya gonna call? Light My Bricks!.. uh, I mean - Ghostbusters! While we might not be able to capture spooky spectres that are on the loose (but you never know?) we can certainly light up those who can! Enter the all-new LEGO Expert Creator Ghostbusters ECTO-1!
This new set was seemingly released out of nowhere late last year, to many LEGO fans delight! It’s not the first time we’ve seen the classic Cadillac in LEGO form (more on that later) but this is certainly the most impressive version we’ve seen to date! Boasting 2352 pieces in total and measuring a massive 22.5cm high, 47cm long and 16cm wide, creating ECTO-1 at this enormous scale has meant LEGO has been able to really pack in the detail! It’s an incredible set!
The morning that the office received a courier notification, alerting us to the imminent arrival of our set, we could hardly get any work done. The anticipation was just too much! Once it did arrive we tore right into those swiss cheese bags we’ve come to love, 23 in total! Noted that this set has received the slick black box treatment with an 18+ age range. Makes sense considering the amount of detail included, as well as the age of the original films. All up we spent about five hours in total building the famed (and now somewhat battered) automobile. Not surprising due to the size of the car, ECTO-1 now has a simple Technic frame to support the finished product, which made complete sense once we got deep into the build.
We won’t spoil it for those who haven’t built their set yet, but let’s just say there are several interesting build techniques used here to achieve all the wild and wacky details and interactive components. Our favourite has to be the ghost trap... it's on wheels!
Once the build was complete it was time to get serious about lighting. Our designers had had a rough idea on what they wanted to do since the set’s announcement, building on past ECTO-1 projects. Long time Light My Bricks fans will be familiar with LEGO Ideas 21108 Ghostbusters ECTO-1 and LEGO Ghostbusters ECTO-1&2 set 75828.
So while our designers had plenty of experience in the ghost-busting-automobile world, at the time of the Expert Creator ECTO-1’s release they were neck-deep in several other lighting projects! Now that the updated, upscaled Cadillac was sitting here in front of them, they realised how much potential this set truly had! A quick meeting was called and the case was made to develop some brand new components to really match the level of detail packed into the set. This would push the release date back and we already had hungry LMB fans asking us when our kit would be ready!
If there’s one thing that we’re passionate about here at Light My Bricks, it’s producing the absolute best quality light kits on the market, even if they take a little extra time to hit the shelves sometimes! Our designers got their wish and they set about designing an all-new sequence board to give ECTO-1’s famous sirens the authentic effect they deserved.
They had first tried using more traditional components, like the trusty emergency and pulse boards. These components were great for the simpler effects, like headlight flicker and rooftop lights but fell a little short for what was needed to really capture that awesome siren look! What's a little extra time to wait in the short term, when the siren effect will live on forever right?
Well with that hard work done, our designers thought they were adding the finishing touches by combining blue and red LEDs to create a plasma-purple effect in the back of the spooktacular station wagon. That was it, lighting complete! Time to go to send this kit to our production team to begin the assembly, right?... Not so fast, as an eagle eye team member pointed out that the classic Cadillac floodlights we'd used were actually just a little too yellow. Sure, floodlights are normally yellow in colour, but after rewatching footage of the world-famous converted caddy, sure enough, the LEDs we’d selected didn’t quite match what we were seeing on the silver screen.
We’re all huge film fanatics here at Light My Bricks and even bigger sticklers for detail! We just couldn’t let this one go, even though the kit had already been delayed by the all-new sequence board we had to hit the lab and produce an all-new colour LED, a pale yellow, to accurately match ECTO-1’s floodlights.
Finally, we knew a long time Light My Bricks fans would be firing up their Remote Control & Sound kits to add incredible sound effects to their kits… so we went ahead and beat them to it! ECTO-1 is the first Light My Bricks kits with the option to include a Remote Control & Sound with your light kit. Head to our Instagram page to hear that siren blaring now. Slimer better beware (though he might be glowing green in that trap?)… we ain’t afraid of no ghost!