This year, LEGO will end their six year run of exclusive minifigures for the annual May the 4th promotion with the LEGO Star Wars R2-D2 (30611) polybag as it was confirmed on the May 2017 LEGO Store Calendar. For many collectors, including me, the May the 4th promo is one of the times of the year where we are excited to see what characters we’re going to get as a minifigure that we normally wouldn’t get in a regular set. The Star Wars canon as well as the Expanded Universe is massive and there is an unlimited number of characters that could be turned into buildable characters like R2-D2.
Does this year’s polybag start a new trend for buildable characters for future LEGO May the 4th promotions or do you think this is just a one-off thing for 2017 of LEGO testing the waters for these kind of polybags? Keep in mind, this post is about the May the 4th promotions and not ones that are for other times of the year.
Here’s a list of the May the 4th LEGO minifigures from previous years:
2011: Shadow ARF Trooper (2856197)
2012: TC-14 (5000063)
2013: Hoth Han Solo (5001621)
2014: Darth Revan (5002123)
2015: Admiral Yularen (5002949)
2016: First Order Stormtrooper (30602)
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I thought they ended it at five and just put Donald Duck in a Stormtrooper costume for last year’s minifig.
Regardless, I’ve got one of those 8-compartment minifig display cases stuffed full of pretty much all of the actual Star Wars polybag minifigs (missing the chrome C-3PO, which is unlikely to change any time soon). I’ve managed to fit 21 into that one case, and only have room for two more (shirtless Darth Maul’s lightsaber takes up a ton of space, so no way to increase that to a full 24 without breaking it down and shoving it into the back of the compartment). At this point, I’m pretty much okay with them moving on to other promotions. The threshold is set lower than with minifigs ($50 vs $75) and I have less reason to get more than one copy. With the bulk of sets these days being tied to Disney Wars movies, I have a much smaller pool of sets to buy from anyways.
This was my main issue in previous years.. nothing Star Wars related I didn’t have already or really needed to buy. (where I’m OK with ‘Disney Wars’ I rarely ever even acknowledge the existence of the prequels)
Disappointing but i still think a lot can happen in a year.
I agree. I think it was more of offering a polybag every year which happened to be a minifigure.
They started to kill it last year, going with a fairly generic FO trooper. My guess is we will see some mini-figs in the future, but more generic like the FO or modified major characters like Hoth Han. I do not think we will see anyone as niche as Yularen again. May the 4th has grown way beyond hard core star wars fans, and disney is going to want to milk it as much as possible.
You will probably see less and less minifigs from the expanded universe as Disney has removed that from canon. And most of the sets that have come out or are coming out have most of the main, supporting and obscure characters that are still canon, so you would have to scrape the barrel of the obscure characters (like a random alien we see for 5 seconds) to get something new as a May the 4th polybag. Maybe as they expand the universe again with more comics, books, and games we will the randoms like Doctor Aphra and such.
I doubt we’ll ever get EU content again unless Disney re-canonizes something, because I don’t see why they’d ever want people to pay attention to content they didn’t create and can’t profit nearly as much off.
But at the same time, Disney’s acquisition has left us with figures we previously never would have gotten like Admiral Thrawn suddenly become very relevant. So maybe they’re just cutting the crap content from old EU and re-adapting the best stuff. We might actually see the better parts of the EU end up in sets or bags simply because there’s profit to be had in re-introducing it.
isn’t Rebels ‘EU’?
I think we both meant “Star Wars Legends,” which is the rebranded version of the old “expanded universe”
I think you’re going to find series like Rebels bringing in more EU characters and that’s probably your best shot at getting some of these characters.
Maybe you seen the 2014 Lego Star Wars Darth Devan minifigure of the 2014 one?