It's one of the most exciting times of the year for Star Wars fans, for LEGO fans, Light My Bricks fans and well... Star Wars LEGO lighting fans in general! May 4th is when the pop culture world stops and all things Star Wars take centre stage!
For over 20 years LEGO has been releasing hugely popular Star Wars themed sets and it's no wonder that today as of this writing, the theme is one of LEGO's most successful!
image courtesy of The Brick Zone
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away... aka the year 1999, LEGO produced the 7140 X-Wing - the first Star Wars set ever released and the one that started it all! It was quickly followed by more sets from the original trilogy later that year. They included the 7150 Tie Advanced & Y-wing, 7180 B-wing Fighter, 7110 Landspeeder, 7130 Snowspeeder and 7128 Speeder Bikes.
Ever since the end of the millennium, LEGO has continued to consistently release amazing set after amazing set and while there are far too many to mention, the Light My Bricks team certainly have a few favourites among them.
While today there are over 20 unique light kits for different LEGO Star Wars sets, the very first one created, that started our journey into the Star Wars universe was the Millennium Falcon 75105. While it's no longer available as a kit due to more popular Falcon builds taking it's place, this kit holds a special place in our hearts, as well as many old school LMB fans who were there to pick one up!
a piece of Light My Bricks history, the discontinued Millennium Falcon 75105
It makes sense that two of the biggest Light My Bricks kits are infact two of the biggest LEGO sets, the UCS Millenium Falcon and the UCS Imperial Star Destroyer! The Ultimate Collectors Series has it's name for a reason - these sets are out of this galaxy system! Enourmous size, scale and detail levels make them some of the most enjoyable sets for our design team to light... and the most complex!
Coinciding with May 4th this year we were pleased when LEGO announced a brand new range of iconic Star Wars Helmets! This wasn't our first dabble with a LEGO helmet however, LMB Marvel fans may have seen us experiment with the popular Iron Man helmet! And while we never actually released an official kit for the set, rather we took the opportunity to educate our fans on how to utilize the DIY section of our store to create a simple lighting solution on their own!
Initially this was the direction we were going to take with the Star Wars helmets, but quite quickly we realised there was an opportunity to include our new Spotlight elements - making these a little more involved than a simple 2 bit light DIY adventure!
Hard to choose a favourite out of these three iconic characters. We love Boba because he's full of so much character... on the other hand the all black Tie Fighter pilot looks so menacing! The Stormtrooper looks classic, however we heard he doesn't have great aim.
We're super excited to see LEGO officially announcing a brand new R2D2 set! The world's most loyal droid has received a few upgrades and the result is something all Star Wars LEGO fans will be pleased about. Our design team are very familiar with the R2 Unit of course, as the Light My Bricks 10225 light kit was another from the early days. The team love the opportunity to build upon and improve existing kits whenever LEGO rerelease a set.
We're always keeping an eye on the blogs for rumours of new sets and possible products coming out of Denmark and the internet is heating right up with chatter about the biggest UCS set ever... the potential Death Star 2.0! We've only just gotten our heads around the current taker of the biggest LEGO set ever title, the Colosseum which required a modest lighting design. Can you imagine what a fully functional Death Star created our of 10k+ LEGO pieces would look like?! Not to mention the lighting opportunities involved! If this is true, then it will almost certainly mean the biggest Light My Bricks light kit designed EVER. We'll be waiting with bated breath.
Patience. Learn we must!