PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Stephen Fry reads Harry Potter

Unless you're as rich as J K Rowling you probably can't afford to hire Stephen Fry to read Harry Potter to you. I know, I'm sad too.  Lucky for us JK's already hired Stephen to do that and for a pitance you can enjoy him on cd. I had been waiting for the British Audio Book of the 7th book in the series to get cheaper. I have the other audio books which I picked up at Amazon UK for about half price. I kept checking there and either I was broke when they were on sale or they weren't on sale when I had the money. The 7th book has 20 discs and it's typically about 75 Brit pounds which is about $115. Add some postage and you know that says expensive. A couple of saturdays ago I was at the Half Price Bookstore to get another of their calendars. HPB puts one out each year before Christmas and they have 5 15% off your entire purchase coupons in them. They give them out free if you spend 30 bucks on stuff there or you can pay $3 for one. I like the coupons and try to get 2 or 3 calendars. Usually they run out of calendars before the holidays are over. They had some left over and Sperhauk emailed me to tell me they were giving out one with any purchase. I buzzed on over and while on the look out for something to use the 15% coupon I already had in my wallet on I stumbled on a copy of the very thing I wasn't looking for. What it was doing in a store in St Paul I can't imagine but I grabbed it and with that coupon it was only $45. I've been listening to it off and on for the last week and it's been great. I much prefer Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter over Jim Dale who appears on the US versions. Normally I'm not too keen on audio books but I've really enjoyed the Harry Potter books the couple of time I have gone through them.

Harry Potter - 2011 Bagged Sets

There are three new poly bagged sets in the Harry Potter theme. I picked up the first one at Toysrus last week and hope to pick the others up off BrickLink. Gotta keep the Harry Potter collection as complete as possible.

30110 Trolley

I picked up a couple, thought it's rather pricey, 5 bucks for 22 pieces. There's one of the new white owls, a trunk, Harry and not much else. Still, you can smash it along the wall and play Harry can't get through the invisible barrier to Playform 9 3/4's. I was just glad to get a couple more of those owls and that dark blue jacket that Harry wears is pretty nice.

30111 The Lab

Here's a set with 34 pieces. It's Harry and a bit of furniture with bottles on it. I haven't seen it anywhere other than BrickLink so far.

40028 Mini Hogwarts Express

 

You can get the Hogwarts mini set for buying a copy of Diagon Alley or you can spend a few bucks, over 13 of them, and pick one up on BL. The only part that isn't pretty common are those wheels. They appear in a Cars 2 set and on this train. It's annoying when they sell sets that are exclusives or of limited availability. Ain't that the way of the world.

The LEGO store is clearancing these magnets right now. They are $7.48 or half price. The set is the only magnet set still available that hasn't had the minifigs glued to the base. I complained about that and the clerk said the sales have dropped off since they did that. I can see why.

Boo!

That's part of the new Harry Potter display at the LEGO store. I thought it was a pretty good dementor made better because he revolves. It captures the minifig quite well. The cape on the current figure is quite nice, though it looks like that dementor doesn't believe in ironing. Ha, like I ever iron anything. There's a floor display of the current HP offerings below the figure. In the front of the store they have a large poster and some large HP minifig cutouts. Sadly they put them behind those annoying tubes. That's really an unattractive, and rather useless, addition to the window display. Only small things go in the tubes and they sit empty most of the time. I blame the colleges and universities in giving degrees to people with a lack of common sense and vision. Of course it could be that there just aren't enough good designers around to do all the work and some people from the bottom of the class get hired.

 

   

LEGO Harry Potter - Building The Magical World

 

That's Harry showing off his new book from DK.  I knew the book had come out but hadn't picked one up yet. Imagine my surprise when one showed up on my doorstep today. I hadn't been expecting anything but that shows what a nice outfit DK is. Ages ago I had gotten an email from Elizabeth Dowsett at DK. She's a senior editor there. They were planning a Harry Potter book and wanted to include my HP Bookends in a fan section. I didn't have good enough pictures, or a camera, for publishing but Brian Kasprzyk lent a hand, and his camera, and pictures were taken. Sadly the fan section got pulled before the book got printed. Since there wasn't anything going into the book I wasn't expecting a copy. Nice to get a surprize in the post. I'll still have to buy another one. Then I'll have a UK edition and an American edition.

That's Harry in his dress robes. A minifig that isn't in another set. He looks pretty good, huh. His hole in the cover fattens that book up by quite a bit. It's over an inch thick. All the sets, and characters, on the cover are from currently available sets. Once you get past the end papers there is a 96 page overview of the sets and characters from the last ten years. It's loaded with pictures of Harry Potter LEGO. There are little bits of description for all the sets and characters. I haven't read through the whole thing yet. Might take a while. I found it's fun to look at. I think it's a nice addition to your Harry Potter collection, both LEGO and any other kind. It's 17 pounds in the UK and 22 bucks in the US. It's all color and there are lots and lots of pictures. There's Harry Potter and Voldemort flip book pics on the bottom of each page. Flip the book and see the characters move.

4867 Hogwarts

 

When I first started to hear about the 2011 Harry Potter sets 4867 Hogwarts was called Battle For Hogwarts but between the initial announcement and the final appearance of the set it got changed. Not sure why but sticking to the old title would make some sense of Professor Sprout being in the Divination classroom. Designed to work in conjunction with the 2010 set 4842 Hogwarts Castle this set has two towers, a bridge, and seven minifigs. It's got 466 pieces for$49.99 making it a bit better of a price per piece than the previous two sets. The tower's have an interesting bit of a build around the bases using 2 dozen of the 1x2x3 dark blay slopes, some hinges and 10 of the dark green cheese slopes. There's 10 of the 1x2 dark blay cheese slopes, used as decoration under the windows. The rest of each tower is mostly a stack of tan wall pieces with a few windows stuck in. The sand green roof pieces are nice, glad to have them. The rooms are furnished rather sparsely and that castle must have some major drafts. The bridge has some Technic bits to create an exploding deck. Have fun blowing up your minifigs.

 

Here's the inside. There's a lot packed into the tiny space of the towers. Here's the description from LEGO's shop at home:

Hogwarts™ castle is a place of magic and mystery. Explore the castle to discover your favorite moments from the Harry Potter films including the Room of Requirement, Professor Lupin’s office, the Astronomy Tower, the Divination Room and the Mirror of Erised.

• Includes 7 minifigures: Harry Potter, Neville Longbottom, Professor Sprout, Professor Lupin, Gregory Goyle, Death Eater, Dementor
• Hogwarts™ Castle features the Room of Requirement, Professor Lupin’sOffice, Astronomy Tower, Magical Mirror Room with The Mirror of Erised and Divination Room
• Exploding bridge!
• Measures 12” (30cm) wide and 10” (25cm) tall

I don't think I've ever heard of the Magical Mirror Room but maybe I haven't read the books enough. Maybe a ninth time? The Mirror of Erised isn't too bad but unfortunately it's reddish brown when it should be all gold. I like the design idea but not the sticker. The mirror is made from the inner part of the trap door, in dark tan, which has a layer of plates added and then it's clicked into a pair of those 1x2 plates with a top clip. Professor Lupin's office is sure tiny, he's barely got room to swing a grindylow. It has a desk, a chair, a blackboard, a skull and some bottles to go on the desk. There's a white feather piece, in fact, you get two. Good for plumage, especially now that there are Musketeer minifigs. There's writing on the black board courtesy of a nice sticker. There was a larger, and nicer, printed black board piece in one of the previous HP sets. Below Lupin's must be the Room of Requirement. There are a couple of nice stickers on the wall. They depict a wizard and a witch brandishing their wands. That's Neville brandishing his wand in front of the posters and  across from him are bunkbeds decorated in Gryffindor colors. I'm pretty sure that there were bunkbeds in the Room Of Requirement when Harry returns to it just before the climactic Battle For Hogwarts. Above the ROR is an open space with a nicely printed globe on a base. It must be the Astronomy Tower. I'm not sure what the globe represents but it's rather interesting. Above the globe room is the Divination Classroom with a crystal ball and tea cups on little tables. Sadly there are no throw pillows and Divination wouldn't be on top the Astronomy Tower, it's in the North Tower.

    
Harry, Neville and Professor Lupin. Harry's I got but the torso will come in handy when wanting to make a gang of Gryffindor's. Nice sweater on Neville, it'll make a nice addition to the costume rack. I'm not too fond of his teeth and he looks more mean spirited than I would like. I didn't like the previous Neville's face much either. That's a nice dark tan suit on the professor. He's got a better face than his previous version.

 

Professor Sprout, Dementor, Lucius Malfoy and Gregory Goyle. It's the first Professor Sprout figure. Not too bad, good to have a new dark tan dress and hat. That's the second dementor. The first one was sand green and the cape was gray. Better cape in the new version. It's the fourth version of Lucius and that's a nice torso design. He's still a dick and Gregory Goyle is no better.

4866 The Knight Bus (2nd Edition)

 
Harry and Hedwig ride the Knight Bus in this new version of set 4755. I think it's a bit better than the previous version but it's not without it's oddities. There seems to be a big hole down the middle of the bus. That's for the chandelier to hang down in. There's only one sliding bed and there were three in the previous model. I really liked the 2x2 white slope with the pillow printed on it in the 2004 version of the set. You got one for each bed. There were printed signs for the first Knights Bus, not stickers. That older set was $30 for 243 parts and the new one is $34.99 for 281 pieces. While that's just not that great a price per part it seems to be kind of the average of late.

There isn't much in the set other than a lot of dark purple. I'm exagerating, only 107 of the 281 parts are dark purple. That's not including Stan and his hat. There's some black plate, 4 thin wheels, one of those nice new printed owls, a chest to hold a pair of those nice printed socks. and some  common bits that might come in handy sometime. There's a new piece, a 1x4 plate with a stud at each end, you get 9 of them in black. There's a lot of dark purple windows, 6 of the small 1x2x3 ones and 18 of the 1x4x3 ones. All have glass inserts and there are 3 trans clear windshields. I have too many windshields already.

   

There are three minifigs in 4866. Harry and Stan Shunpike return and they are joined by the ever delightful Ernie Prang. You might notice that the BrickLink and Brickset sites have pictures of the set with Harry in a Hogwarts sweater. That's not how he comes in the set. There he's dressed in the t-shirt and blue jacket torso that I'm so fond of. Ernie has a nice jacket, shirt and tie combo.

That's 4866 on the left and 4755 on the right. Pretty similar but I think they improved the front end quite a bit. They added the back entrance and used a sand green 1x1 round brick with a face on it for the shrunken head. The other version had the shrunken head printed on the windshield. Nice but that printed head limits the use of the windshield. I don't think the bus is really long enough and it would be better if it was wider too. Mostly it works fairly well and you can play with it or drive it around. I'm putting mine on the shelf for a while.

10217 Diagon Alley

  

I was somewhat excited by the new Harry Potter set Diagon Alley. I missed getting a copy the first day it showed up at the LEGO store. The annoying thing was I almost went to the Mall of America at lunch but decided to go somewhere else instead. When I stopped in on the way home from work they were all gone, all 18 of them, sold in a couple of hours. On a visit the following week they had restocked. That was unexpected but then again so much is unexpected with that company. The demand for sets is high and the store always seems to be out of some set or another. I think that happens on the website too, but I don't shop there much. I was at the store earlier today and they were out of the Diagon Alley set again. I am sure it will come and go like a lot of those larger sets.

 
Diagon Alley is the biggest Harry Potter set so far, and the largest set I've ever bought. It's got 2025 parts, including the ten minifigs, for $150.00. That's 7.96 cents a piece, and that makes a guy feel good, even though I know that many of 'em are your smaller pieces. The set makes three different buildings and has some accessories to dress them up for the minfigs. The first things you build after the minifigs are some sidewalk displays. Owls, and a bat, hats, signs, and a couple of rather low lamp posts. Those lamps are minifig head high. Even Wizards don't usually have such low lamp posts. I do really like those owls and that dark green hat is just coming back into style.

     
Diagon Alley, for those that don't know much about Harry Potter, is the Wizard shopping street in London. There's a map from The Harry Potter Lexicon, the place I go to check out HP details. Shops, marketing goods and services to the witch and wizard, line the crooked street. It's a short street, maybe a couple of average downtown city blocks, and there's an even shorter side street, Knockturn Alley, off of that. Two of the buildings, Gringotts and Olivanders, are on Diagon Alley, but Borgin and Burke's is part way down Knockturn Alley. Hagrid doesn't recommend the place:

"Skulkin' around Knockturn Alley, I dunno -- dodgy place, Harry -- don' want no one ter see yeh down there --"

I'd probably go down there but that's me, I never listen.

 

I'd keep my Wizard money in Gringotts. That's the Goblin owned and operated bank. It's hard to rob and we hear of only two times in the books when it was attempted. There are lots of spells and enchantments to stop thieves. The really secure vaults are guarded by dragons. None of that stops our Harry Potter, of course. The set sort of comes close to the movie version of the bank but the columns are tilted differently in the set, there should be a third floor, and sadly, there are no dragons. That would be a good bit of work, huh, seeing a dragon busting through the front of the bank. Wizards, dragons, Goblins and bricks flying through the air. There's yer goddamn yahoo moment!

That's the Mary GrandPre illustration of Gringotts out of one of the US editions. I really like her illustrations, I think they fit the books very well, and I'm sad there might not be any more. The HP novels often don't have a lot of description of the places the story is set in, so GrandPre could be close to what JK Rowling was imagining, or not. Who knows? That's the beauty of those books though, they allow you to fill in a lot of gaps when you read. I think that works to the books advantage. The banks strong point is it's facade. I like the front of the building but the inside is rather barren. The banking hall is really large impressive place in the movie but all the set has is a simple desk, a large safe, and a small chandelier. There isn't as much decoration inside as outside but it looks nice enough when you open it up as a play set. I like that the set folds up into a nice compact building. There's a nice skylight there and some of the building ideas are worth knowing. The facade captures an older style of architecture quite well. I like the white and tan mix. There's some pearl gold accents and lots of tiles of various colors and lengths. Another thing that helps sell that older look is the pair of  large doors. Every collection should have a set or two. This is a new version of the door that came out last year. Now with 60% more woodgrain! It's only been in 3 sets so far. Reddish brown in Diagon Alley and the Spinjitzu Dojo and dark brown in the Battle Of Alamut set. Sadly the Prince Of Persia theme is done. I liked a lot of the colors in those sets. I don't seen the new Pharoah's Quest line quite replacing them. Low part count and silly gimmicks in some of the sets will keep me from buying them. Not that it matters, there's always too many things to buy, and a guy like me likes to go for sales when he can. After Christmas the local Twin City LEGO fans had a really good run of clearance sets at the Mall of America Lego Store, and there were many POP sets in the mix. Many of us have plenty of ostrichs now. Now to figure out something for them to do.

  
Olivander's Wand Shop has a really nice look to it. There are lots of nice sand green and dark green parts. For some reason I have come to like that brick with a deep groove. There are a bunch of them in sand green in this building and a lot more in white in Gringotts. I can't seem to get enough of the nice dark blue slopes. As the kids say, they make roofs rock!. Borgin and Burkes has that great curved skylight, more dark green parts, and 25 1x2 Glow In The Dark tiles. Both buildings have lots of nice windows. As a parts pack for the minifig scale building builder it's a windfall. Neither of the shops has a lot of detail inside. Olivander's has a counter that does break apart when you flip a lever. There are some shelves with plates and tiles and stickers pretending to wand boxes. In the book there are thousands of boxes. There's not quite as many in the set, I think there's a half dozen. Borgin and Burkes has a fireplace that rotates. It's so you can pretend that it's on the Floo Network. There's a vanishing cabinet but it's slightly different from the one in the Hogwarts set. I don't know if that should matter. The trio of buildings look fine and it would make a nice display on a shelf or space to play.

There were other sets that featured all three of these places. Those sets weren't too bad but they aren't as nice as these new buildings. They had other good points. Better, and more, printed parts, for one.

4714 Gringotts Bank was the worst. It not even a building, just some random elements of it. It's got Harry, Hagrid and Griphook in a cart on a short tiny bit of track. I guess that's the action in the set, rolling them down the ramp over and over again. There's a vault, nothing special there other than the really nice printed sign, another Goblin pushing a cart full of treasure, and an arch with a bit of a teller area. These shows up on clearance for a while and I managed to get a couple or three. It was really for the parts. The set came out in 2002 and had 250 parts for 30 bucks. It was a better deal at $15.

  
4720 Knockturn Alley was much better than the bank. It's a nice little shop with Harry and Mr. Malfoy. Harry is dressed in casual clothes and I like that sandgreen sweater. Mr. M is dressed in a nice suit. There are several good accessories in the shop, including that great hand tile, a cash register, some goofy eyes, and that wonderful brain. It came out in 2003, there were 209 parts and it was $20 in the USA. 

4723 Diagon Alley Shops was kind of an odd set. Part of a trio of similar sets, each had a cardboard back drop and a die cut window in the box. It's the only set that has Hermione out of her Hogwarts uniform. It's an odd assortment of unusual pieces and accessories in an odd selection of colors. You'd think it was a Belville set. There's a purple and a dark pink witch's hat, pale green 8x8 plate, there's books, animals, and lots of tranparent parts. It had 80 pieces and cost 10 bucks back in 2001. I missed getting them when they were new but was able to pick a copy or two later. Now they are pushing 40 bucks with a box. When I started buying HP sets I went out and looked for the female minifigs and was able to get some at a reasonable price. Now Hermione starts at 8 dollars on Bricklink.

 

I thought it was a great bunch of minifigs. Good variey of costumes that can be used for many other things than building Harry Potter stuff. Across the top you've got Harry, Olivander and Hermione. Hermione seems to have borrowed Ginny's sweater from the new HP Burrow set. It is a really nice sweater. The second row has Ron, Mr Malfoy in his Death Eater garb, and Fenrir Greyback. Malfoy is kind of evil but Fenrir is really evil. He needs killin', no doubt about that. There's a couple of goblins and a couple of twins on the bottom row. It's the first time the Weasley brothers, Fred and George, appear in a set. Most of the figures have two faces on their heads. Not Hagrid though, or the Goblins.

All in all a nice set with some great parts. The buildings have certain flaws but were still pretty much fun to build and ok to look at. I plan to leave them out for a while and I rarely leave sets built for display. I'd certainly buy more than one except for the price being what it is. Typically I like buying the smaller sets from different themes for more variety in minifigs and parts. I'd almost have liked to see the 3 buildings as three separate sets. I'd wind up buying less Gringotts than the other two. Again as a parts pack it's pretty good for the right guy or gal.

4842 Hogwarts Castle - 4th Edition

 
Finally getting around to looking at the 6th of the Harry Potter sets that came out in October and it's almost time for the Diagon Alley set to come out. Hogwarts Castle 4842 is the biggest HP set so far at 1290 pieces with 11 minifigs included. The first set 4709 had 692 parts, the second was 4757 and it had 928 parts, the third is 5378 and it was 943 parts. All the three first sets had a price tag of 90 bucks and each set included 9 minifigs. The new Hogwarts comes in at $130 or just over 10 cents a piece. That's not too bad when compared to the other new HP sets or some of the licenced theme sets like Star Wars. I didn't pick up any of the first batch of Harry Potter sets when they came out. I bought a few of the early Star Wars sets, but I wasn't building anything of my own then, and the attraction of displaying finished sets faded pretty quickly. When the Harry Potter sets started coming out I wasn't interested in them or the books yet. Of course once the addiction set in I had to buy them. A few were still available from LEGO, their sales were slipping then, and the rest I picked up on eBay and Bricklink. The early sets had the yellow minifigs and old grays and brown. The change to the new colors was a curse and a blessing both. I look at the new colors as part of an ever increasing pallet. Since the post is pretty long I'm leaving the minifigs off and doing a second post about them.

4709 Hogwarts Castle 1st Edition

   
4709 came out in 2001. It's made up of 4 connected units. There's a gate where Hagrid brings the first year students up to the castle in a boat. For Harry's first year class you'd need at least 8 if we followed Hagrid's request of "No more'n four in a boat." At $90 for just under 700 pieces it didn't have a very good price per piece count. It had a nice bunch of minifigs, but only one of the 9 is unique to the set, the Gryffindor Knight. There were lots of great tan and gray parts. Some of the parts were larger than average, things like a couple of lurps, some large wall pieces and a couple of large columns, but there are only about a dozen of the largish pieces. There were 18 printed pieces, not counting the minifigs, and some of them were pretty nice.

   
There are 4 books in this set and I'm just a sucker for those books. I picked up some extras when they were usually around a quarter on Bricklink. That was ages ago, now that black book with the hinges and the ghost face ranges between $3.50 and $9 on Bricklink. The printing on three of the books is nice and the illustrations are generic enough that it could be used for many different themes. I think that the black book is supposed to be Tom Riddle's Diary but it could be the screaming book in the library. You know when Harry sneaks into there in the middle of the night looking for some info on Nicolas Flamel. The other two are more your school books, say Herbology and Potions. The last is book is a medium blue one that has nothing printed on it. There's a really nice banner with the Gryffindor Lion on one side and the Slytherin Snake on the other side. That was so that the house cup could be taken from Slytherin and awarded to Gryffindor. There are 4 owls in different colors, white and gray rats, and two black bats. I don't remember any bats in the Harry Potter series but I do like that bat. It's one of my favorite LEGO animals. Ironically the set has no spiders, which Ron would like. It was a good set, especially for the Castle builder. Besides the tan and gray there are some nice sand green cones and roof pieces, including one of the large Belville roof pieces. Now in a useful color. That sand green is one of my favorite colors. I like most of the sand colors. There's a good assortment of parts in small quantities, all good for building up your stock. There's a nice trans treasure chest, though I haven't ever used the ones I have.

4757 Hogwarts Castle 2nd Edition

 
You can see that they changed the look of the boxes for the 2004 Harry Potter sets. It's Harry's blue period. 4757 was another 90 dollar set but this time there were 929 parts including the 9 minifigs. That's a much better price per piece than the previous edition. Since LEGO was doing poorly at the time these sets came out you could occasionally find good sales on them. They were great part packs even if you weren't interested in Harry Potter. Most of this set is the front entrance hall and clock tower module. It's made up of three separate towers that click together with technic pins. The clock face turns and a pendulum moves with some technic gearing and a wind up motor. It looks pretty good. There's a gate to Hogwarts that would have been made better if they would have had those pigs to place on the columns on each side of the gate. Big warty hogs would be better but I can't have everything. There's another tower that attaches to the main entrance hall module. The towers are 4 stories tall and the rooms are tiny and pretty sparely decorated. They mostly hint at their reason for being. There are 9 printed parts and a sticker. Here's a few of them below. They look pretty good and some of them have other uses. I like that blackboard and the white 2x2 dish with the red printing is really pretty. There was another bat in this set, one black owl, a frog, a rat, and finally, a couple of spiders. Trans red and neon green spiders. What the... There aren't any trans spiders in the Harry Potter books or movie that I remember. Many of the 2001-2005 sets have them as an accessory, and about a third of the sets with spiders have the black ones. Weird, huh. 

 


    
This set had a good bit of the light and dark blay, a bit of reddish brown, a nice amount of tan, a bit of sand green, some black parts, and some odd bits and pieces. A good mix for the Castle builder or someone interested in building buildings. There's a lot of light blay arches and 67 of the 1x2 light blay logs. There's a dozen of the 1x2x5 dark blay wall panels and a nice 1x8x12 dark blay door flame with reddish brown doors. I like wall panels, they can come in handy, for quick building. Those doors and frames have been around in the Belville sets but not in a color for the castle guy, unless a hot pink castle is your goal. Having one of those large doors in reddish brown in your building stock just makes sense. What castle doesn't look better with a nice big door, besides how are you going to get the large trolls through some of those small doors, make them crawl? I don't think so. This set only had two books, one a blank green one, and a tan one that's printed to turn it into the Monster Book. A book that bites you! Who wouldn't want that? That Hagrid! He's the best! So a good set by most measures. Of course, I found all the HP sets to be good sets for the most part, but you know what a sap I am for Harry and his pals.

5378 Hogwarts Castle 3rd Edition

 
Three years would pass before LEGO revisited the castle in set 5378. It was the only HP set in 2007 and it was a scarce one. I'm lucky to live near a LEGO store and they had some. The price to buy one now is high on Bricklink. If you have a box it's 2-4 times the original price of 90 bucks. With 943 parts in the set that's a better price per part. There's a scaled down entrance hall with a small award display area and a bit of the astronomy tower on top of that. There are towers on each side of that central piece with a bedroom and a bit of Umbridge's office on top of another small room. The separate castle segment opens revealing some more vague rooms. All the walls are even more open than usual and only the small greenhouse is nearly a finished piece. The thestral is pretty nice, using a 1x1 plate with a clip to hold a black set of the dragon wings in place. Luckily for us we don't need to have seen someone die to see them.

   
That openness of the walls bugs me, the awards are kind of goofy, Umbridge's office has two huge stickers, a sad little desk and a purple lamp shade. Ron seems to be asleep in astronomy class. It was the only new Harry Potter set in 2 years and the only HP set that year. No new HP sets would follow until 2010. 5378 seems thrown together to me. It's one of the worst sets to display but it still was a nice parts pack. There's lot's of tan and blay parts, with some nice sand green and a nice mix of other bits and pieces. There are only 5 printed parts, a sticker, and one red unprinted book. I do like the face of the mandrake. Make sure you have your earmuffs on tight or you'll be passing out on us. There's 6 animals including the thestrals, a rat, a bat and two owls. No spiders, even of the trans variety, but still the bat. At least they are consistant, huh. I'm not as happy with this set as the other editions but I still bought a couple.

4842 Hogwarts Castle - 4th Edition

 

Three years later and the theme is red and we see Harry, Ron and Hermione on the box of 4842. It's the biggest HP set with 1290 pieces for $130. That includes 11 minifigs and 9 animals. There's a cooked turkey but I didn't count that. They added a black bat, again. All three of the gorgeous new owls, a rat, and a new color, medium dark flesh, for the 6251 crouching cat, painted up to be Mrs. Norris. I wish they had made a cat for Hermione but this one is nice. Her cat's a ginger cat and this is close enough. The castle is made up of four modules that are mostly tan pieces. As a tan fancier I can tell you that is one nice parts pack for some happy brickster. Trouble is right about now they are hard to find. Maybe after the holidays they'll start turning up again. Seems there was some more thought in putting this set together than the last one. It looks better from the outside, especially all that sand green for the roof.

 
Inside there are some small rooms with a feature or two. Here's a nice pic from From Bricks To Bothans showing that off. There's a vanishing cabinet in the bottom room of the astronomy tower. It's the square tower with crenellated top and a hidden bookcase in the middle. There are three reddish brown books in there and a 4th black one somewhere else. None of them are printed on. Kind of sad. The tallest tower next to it has the owlery on top with white 1x1 round plates for poop. There are some small rooms, starting with a tiny bit of the Gryffindor common room. There's a moving part that pops a plate with a sticker of Sirius Black's head out of fireplace so he can talk to Harry. You can see the big sticker up above. It's nearly 6 inches across. Lots of texture for the tan corner wall pieces of the tower and a couple of odd portraits. Even though I don't use them often I have to point out the ever increasing quality of the sticker in the current sets. There's a bit of corridor in the middle of the tower, and below, a bit of the Slytherin common room. I guessed that because of the green snakes. Those are nice to have. The largest module is the school's great hall. It's a nice bit of work but skimpy to say the least. There's only two student tables and only three teacher's chairs so you know it's been scaled back a tad. There is one huge cake and some other good accessories, like red and green cherries, and pearl gold goblets. The last module has one of those new doors in a nice facade, a knight in armour, and a circular stairway up to a bit of Dumbledore's office. Above that there's the silver sword of Gryffindor and fire on a stick. I don't know what that fire is all about. There are some good printed pieces. I liked the sorting hat in reddish brown, and the Quibbler and Daily Prophet 2x2 tiles are really fun. I was happy to see the return of Harry Potter. I find the sets mostly pretty entertaining. I wouldn't play with them but I'm going to leave mine built for a while. Maybe dust them.

4841 Hogwarts Express - 3rd edition

 
I wouldn't normally buy a LEGO train set but this is Harry Potter and I just had to have it. It's the third edition of this set and the fourth time that LEGO has made the Hogwarts Express. 4807 was the first back in 2001. 4758 was the second set and it was released in 2004 which was the same year for 10132 Motorized Hogwarts Express. That 9v set is going for over $300 on Bricklink. That's where I scavenged some of these pictures, that and Peeron, both are great resources. Here's the other three sets, 4807 is on the left below in the early HP style, the two blue boxes are the 2004 sets, you can see they changed up the brand artwork. The latest style is very red and it's nice to see Ron and Hermione on the boxes this year. That's the first time they get to share the corner with Harry.

   

 4708 Hogwarts Express

   
4708 has an engine, a passenger car, a bit of Platform 9 3/4 and it's all made up of 410 pieces for a list price of 50 smackers. There's a Harry and Ron in their muggle clothes and Hermoine is all ready to go in her Hogwarts robes. Some might remember where she tells the boys they should get their Hogwarts robes on since they are close to Hogsmead. She starts bossing them around right from the start. They need it anyway. The minifigs in 2001 were the yellow kind. The printing was ok but Hermione barely has a face. Things have certainly improved in the last 9 years. There are a few accessories for the trio, like Harry's owl, a frog, a spider, a couple of gilt keys, some wands and a nice green book. There's a pretty cool hologram of Dumbledore. It's to represent the magical picture on the back of his Chocolate Frog card. That's where Harry learns that subjects in Wizard photos don't always stay put. The train looks ok, nothing special. The passenger car has room for 4 people, which I have always thought was kind of an odd scale for train cars, but they look nice enough. The engine front has a nicely printed disc and the basic design is the same on the other editions. The rest of the train and station are decorated with the stickers from that big sheet. I have always enjoyed the books that came with the Harry Potter sets, that's some very nice printing.

    

 4758 Hogwarts Express

    
4758 has 4 minifigs and 386 pieces for $40. That seems a better deal. Harry, Ron, Professor Lupin are the new flesh minifigs. Some people didn't care for them but I like them. Ron and Harry have nicer muggle clothes than last time. Professor Lupin has a shabby suit that should be useful to for non-HP mocs. There's also a Dementor to stop the train and make everyone uncomfortable. His robe should be black but what are you going to do. The train consists of an engine and the passenger car. It looks pretty much like the previous train. There's a bit of  the Hogsmead platform, an tiny archway, and a pole to hold the station name.

    

There's an owl and a rat and a few nice painted pieces but not as many nice items as the previous set. The sticker sheet got smaller without the station setting. I liked the monster book and that bar of chocolate quite a bit. Back when the books were cheap, 2004 or there abouts, I used to pick them up on Bricklink when I could. There  was a vague plan in my head to build a Hogwarts library but that hasn't materialized so far.

10132 Motorized Hogwarts Express

 
10132 is the motorized version of the Hogwarts Express. It's got 706 pieces, the same 4 minifigs as the previous set, and it's a $120 set. That's a pretty poor average piece cost but there are all those costly train parts in there. The engine and passenger car look similar to the previous sets but it has a coal tender. There's a station that goes with the track oval. I like the nice batch of printed parts that came with it too. Nice cash register, a train ticket, bag of money, some kind of parcel and a spell bag maybe. There's that nice blue suitcase and the purple magnifing glass. There's an orange spider for some unknown reason. Still all those accessories aren't much of a reason to get one, at least for me. Again, I'm glad not to get wrapped up in train layouts.

       

 4841 Hogwarts Express

 

 
     
 

The new set, 4841, has 646 parts for 80 bucks. There are 5 minifigs and like many of the new figures these look great. Harry and Ron return but still no Hermione. There's Ginny Weasley and Luna Lovegood to get all excited about and Draco Malfoy to consider throwing from the train. I'm a meanie, huh. The train is very much like the version from the motorized set, it has a coal tender and nice looking wheels. There's no building this time. There's the flying Ford Anglia for Harry and Ron to take to school. It's sort of like the car that came in the 2002 set 4728 Escape From Privet Drive. I think the Privet Drive set has the better car. The new one seems squished somehow and the trunk isn't as well designed, it tends to fall off when being opened. Here's a look at the Privet Drive car on the left below, and on the right, a bigfoot version of the same car from Mike Walsh's blog. That's a hoot, huh. 

 
There are a nice bunch of parts in 4841, especially the printed owls. You get all three colors in this set and a reddish brown frog. There a nice sticker sheet, not that I put mine on the model when I got finished building it. I dragged these 6 new Harry Potter sets around to the October TwinLUG and TCLUG meetings so the other guys and gals could take a gander in the flesh. Then I'm going to break them up and pack them away so they are ready to be rebuilt. I kept a single copy of each HP set seperate from my building stock but I still have to dip into some of them for the odd figure or critter. I really like the copies of The Quibbler and The Daily Prophet. Fine reading. The invisibility cloak is anything but. It's nice and shiny, wonder what that material is? Ron's rat Scabbers is light blay and the spider is black this time. That's better, huh.

    

Aren't those owls gorgeous. I keep raving about them, people would think I'm shilling for the company. They don't need my help, that's for sure. I just enjoy pretty things and I can't help marveling at the multi color printing for their eyes. They all look striking and highly useable. If your thinking parts pack then there are a lot of useable bits and pieces. The left over trains bits might be a waste. I have a whole small box filled with train parts, someday I'll have to think of something to do with them.

4840 The Burrow

 
The new 4840 The Burrow set is the only set that doesn't have a preceding version. It's got 568 pieces including the 6 minifigs. It's not too bad a version of The Burrow. There are better, like this really nice one from Matn. The official set version isn't quite high enough. Should have 6 stories, and an attic, but I understand, it's already 60 bucks. It has the right kind of look for the most part. It's pretty hard to get a good description from Rowling's books. She's scatters little bits and pieces of it through out the series. The Harry Potter Lexicon has a pretty good composite view of the place. It might have been an ancient farmhouse, it might have been a large stone pigpen, J.K. isn't telling. I guess someone at LEGO must have read the pigpen part since they included a pig with the set. When you build the set they have you put the pig into a little enclosure off to the side of the house. There's a gate on one end of the pen and a gate into the house. No door, at all. I can't see Molly putting up with that. It's  moot anyway, there are no pigs in The Burrow. Not in the book or the movies. None, at all. Someone suggested that there were a lot of pigs left over from the farm sets and people love those pigs. Isn't he cute. I can't get mad at a little bacon.

 
I like the new Harry and Ginny. Very cute. The new Ginny minifig is a big improvement over the early version and it has a great new hair piece that will be a welcome addition to the collection. Their torsos and faces are printed on both sides. The new costumes will come in handy for City builds. Harry has his snowy owl Hedwig and the Weasley's have Errol. He's old and in poor shape. I think the new printed owls look great. Mr and Mrs Weasley are adorable, though I think they look a little younger than they might be in the books. Magical living must agree with them. I'm glad to have 'em. Bellatrix LeStrange is a skank who can also sub for a Goth chick or a vampire vixen. Her hair piece is a new one. Not a style I much care for at any rate. Fenrir Greyback is pretty ugly but that torso has plenty of potential with it's hairy manchest. The hair is the same as the Draco hairpiece but in dark brown. The Weasley's have single sided heads but Bella and Fenrir are double sided.

   
It's only in the movie that Bellatrix and Greyback are attacking The Burrow. It's an exciting scene that puts a bit of action near the beginning of the movie. In the book it's all pretty uneventful for quite some time. What I didn't understand was why they burned The Burrow. That seemed a bit too far off the novel. Hopefully it will be better for the wedding. The scene does give the designers of the set a chance to toss Bellatrix and Fenrir into the mix without having to make a different set. It does yield up a reason to toss in a couple of those tan spikey bushes and I like those. There's one in the small Prince Of Persia set. I still haven't seen that movie but it might be on the menu for next friday.

    
There are a ton of great parts in the set and good quantities of some. The dark red roof tiles look great and there's quite a few of them. Four of the corner piece above. There's an interesting sticker but a couple of the printed parts stand out. The Quibbler and The Daily Prophet are great. The sock is nice too. Many pieces in the medium flesh color, some tan, some reddish brown and some dark brown. Smaller amounts of the blays in this set than the Hogwarts based sets. It could easily aid the Castle or Town builder. There's a large octagonal plate in dark tan that's sort of interesting. There are some of them in the Hogwarts Castle in dark blay. A good number of log pieces in reddish brown and dark brown. Several windows of various types will come in handy at some point. The fireplace is seperate from the house for some reason. It has an action feature. You put a figure in the fireplace and turn a leaver and he vanishes. It's like using Floo Powder. There's trans red fire pieces for the front and a sticker of green fire that appears when you flip the lever. The lever is made from a technic piece and a dark red fez. I wonder if they had a bunch left over from the Indiana Jones sets. I know some of us ordered them in the LEGO bulk program.

There are a couple of bedrooms, one of which has bunkbeds, and the other a single bed. There are lots of tiles in various sizes and colors. The main living area has a bit of kitchen with some cabinets, a table with four chairs, and a grandfather clock made with stickers. Sadly that clock doesn't replicate the special Weasley clock that tells where the family members are and what danger they're in. Mortal danger! Indeed! I like the new box design. It's finally gotten Ron and Hermione onto the box. All in all a nice set that has some nice bits and pieces. If you played with it, it might be fun.