Zombie Cliché Lookout: Have a Look
Conventional wisdom tells us that judging a book by its cover is pretty much the worst thing you can do (right up the with looking a gift horse in the mouth). You might pass on something transcendent simply because it’s got a plain cover. Conversely, you might get your hopes up on something because the cover is outstanding, only to have it be four hundred pages of garbage.
So, when you’re kidnapped by weird, vaguely creepy folk who are inordinately prepared to survive the zombie apocalypse, perhaps you owe it to yourself to at least crack the binding any see what’s inside. Or, you know, not. They are a bunch of violent kidnappers with terrifying quantities of firepower, after all.
About this Episode:
For some reason, I really don’t like to show the holes in the back of the figures’ legs. I generally try to hide them as much as is reasonably possible. This episode has three panels with leg holes in it. That makes me sad. But with three characters in a relatively small space, you can only go to that “look over the character’s shoulder” shot so many times.
Discussion Question: The Ultimate LEGO® Zombie Set
By now I’m sure you’ve all seen photos of the forthcoming “The Zombies” set from the Monster Hunters theme. It’s… well, it’s okay. I like the figures, but the set looks a bit uninspired. So if you were the designer, how would you make a zombie set better than this one? And let’s keep the price point below $50.00, shall we? It’s fun to imagine a set with a thousand zombies in it, but no one is going to shell out the cast for it.
The first thing I’d do, is get them out of the graveyard and into an old, dilapidated farmhouse. Set up a siege of sorts. A couple zombies outside, pounding on the doors are windows. A couple survivors inside fighting for their lives. Need a play feature? How about a collapsing barricade? The whole set wouldn’t be two big. Dollhouse style, with a front porch on one side, and a kitchen on the other. The survivors putting up boards to cover a window and door, while the zombies do their best to defeat the slapdash barricades.
First off, 5-10 zeds(yes that is allot minifigs) and 1-3 survivors, preferably only two. It would be a kind of mix between so existing Lego sets. Like the Bank from Lego City and a SUV that Dave uses for the get away car. The only diference is that it won’t be two stories high, it be one story high but a wider. Like using the second floor as an extension to the first.
For play feature, let’s add a window or two that may collapse. Weaponry? They are cops of course! So they have the following: A handgun, baton, and a shotgun. Who needs more?
Sounds pretty cool to me. I was kind of going for a building similar to the bank as well.
A zombie battle pack or two would be cool. How about three zombies and a girls in one, and three zombies and a boy in the other. Each pack could have a little something, like a road section with a garbage can and streetlight, or a phone booth, something like that to add to a cityscape.
I would buy the hell out of those.
Seriously, I’d push little kids out of the way.
*Pepsi out the nose!*
Imagining this bald, bearded guy throwing elbows.
WIN!
Well a I would make 4 sets of $50. 1-2 buildings in each one, maybe a neighborhood when it’s done or something else. Not to big. Survivors in each house each house with a car or truck. Playablility would be braking doors, broken windows, and breakable fences. Does that count as $50 or $200?
Seems like $50 sets that combine. Modular like. I like it.
So let’s say Sam doesn’t want to stay anyway, and wants out? Are they even going to give him the option? If I were them, letting one person go really wouldn’t be that difficult for me, as I always like freedom of choice. So let’s see if these weirdos have some honor left and are willing to let Sam go! 😀
About the discussion question: I think the Monster Hunters theme is geared towards kids whose parents buy multiple sets and let the kid mix and match to whatever kind of play theme he desires. Far from sticking every set into a predictable themed setting, they give the kid a few basic sets to build a play arena on and hopefully the parents will catch on and buy their kid multiple playsets, even if just for the extra variety of parts. If the kid can mix and match freely he’s making choices, most toy lines just encourage the kid to annoy the heck out of their parents instead of drawing them into getting multiple sets for their young one to play around and mix and match with by himself.
Good question on Sam and the weirdos. They sort of imply he can choose to leave, but are they just leading him on?
The LEGO brand themes are cleverly marketed so people will ‘collect them all’. There’s normally some sort of collection of arbitrary items in each set, that must be brought together to give the whole theme a point. Remember Pharaoh’s Quest, Atlantis, and now Monster Fighters, all have such pieces. Another thing that links ALL of the the brand themes together is the stereotyping of the characters, which I’ve mentioned before. What theme have we not seen where there is a ‘hero’, a ‘old guy/boffin’, a ‘girl’, and ‘guy that fails at everything’? Look on the website right now and see for yourself.
As for the ‘Zombies’ theme idea, I think LEGO will screw that one up too, but here’s my two cents anyway! It might feature a hospital or place of zombie origin (not the graveyard). My idea was a quarry, where a new rare rock is found that is actually toxic. There could be a road playset like in The Walking Dead, maybe a house with multiple features and rooms. Weapons would be good too.
The “Collect them all” thing always annoys me. Usually the collectible pieces are fairly useless.
A hospital would be fantastic.
LEGO needs a decent hospital/clinic anyway, about as big as the old police station, with an ED and a helo pad out front (a road plate with a big “H” or “X” on it.
And for crying out loud, how about a decent male nurse?
Ugh.
Isn’t it amazing how much need LEGO City has for fire and police services, and how little for medical services?
Hospitals aren’t as exciting as garbage trucks, evidently.
For some reason, I love garbage trucks (they go so well with garbage cans), so I can’t argue there.
I think the garbage truck set is pretty cool, to be honest; so maybe the comparison was weak.
A better comparison would be the new miners. How in the hell do they fit in a “City” theme? I mean, I grew up around open-pit copper mining; and you can be sure there is none of that going on in the city.
TLG needs to grab their ears tightly and pull their heads out of their asses.
The miners thing is bizarre, especially since they re-branded “Town” into “City”.
http://shop.lego.com/en-GB/Helicopter-Rescue-4429
Not quite on the same scale as the fire station or police station but it does have a cool looking doctor minifig.
Hey, cool. That’s not on the US site. I wonder if it’s coming soon.
That’s another question to email zombiemutts: What City sets would be most complimentary to a zombie apocalypse?
and forgot to say, obviously Lego City is rife with criminals and pyromaniacs……but everyone is fit and healthy!
Bo……how about the Creator Log Cabin set(5766) that would look cool surrounded by zombies.
On the garbage truck Bo mentioned: I personally find the real-life wheelie bin tipper trucks to be fascinating. It’s a pity it would be a bit complex to reproduce in LEGO especially in minifig scaled proportions, and there’s definitely not much chance of getting an operating tipper and packer in that small a scale! 😀
That little hospital looks like a jazzed up version of the bank- not saying I wouldn’t get it, but that it would need a lot of supplemental brick to be really playable.
You Euro-types get all the fun LEGO sets…
The log cabin would make for some interesting vignettes, to be sure, very Night of the Living Dead.
BrickVoid, my biggest gripe about minifig vehicles is that they’re never really to scale. 🙁
That scale thing might show up in a small supplement to the comic in the future.
@Dave: I ordered my supplement yesterday! Now where is it? 😉
Dave, are you gonna break the fourth wall?
I’m not sure how I feel about that…
Hah, the forth wall will remain intact.
@BrickVoid – I need to bounce back to Stewart, Cheryl, and Murphy first, but don’t worry, it’s coming. On a related note, I don’t think I received your check or money order…
@Dave: Your ad said ‘pay later, get your free stuff immediately! 😀 Bouncing around the characters is okay with me, just make sure the zombie threat is always around! 😉 Okay, regarding the money I could make a donation north of $20 soon but how would it be if I picked out a custom zombie instead of a minifig? If he gets his head damaged, well that’s showbiz! 😀
Boy, that was a really poorly written ad on my part 🙂
As far as the donation thing goes, a custom zombie is pretty much exactly what I had in mind. As another example, a character in the background getting mobbed by a handful of zeds.
Well, Dave… I hope you won’t mind me sitting this one out, I believe I have given enough time and energy in trying to show TLG how to make a decent Zombie set!
I’ll just share my own 2 cents on the Monster Fighters line though. The Zombie cemetery is just lame IMO, I mean if they really wanted to cash in on some Zombie minifigs they could have made it a battle pack and save themselves the trouble to build something around it. Worse, unless I’m missing something, the late (?) addition of this set into the line sort of screwed their Monster Fighters story line. It seems each monster set was supposed to come with a “moon stone” – “collect the 6 stones and eclipse the sun in the Vampyre’s castle”. Yeah, right, and where do you stick the 7th Zombie stone? I do have an idea of where they could place it but I won’t mention it here.
Now if we want to talk about some serious Zombie set there is the recently unveiled Haunted Mansion… honestly I’m a little undecided on this one. As AFOL I’m thrilled to see such a set – great details, awesome color scheme, cool play features, cool figs… all sorts of wins. But when I see this I’m also gutted to think that they turned down the Winchester based on its source material. I mean look at the Haunted House pillars.. 4 zombies heads, seriously? How macabre is that? The Win was just a pub. They hide themselves behind the fact that their Zombies are harmless… I mean, come on… Zombies are just Zombies and LEGO is just a plastic toy. Tsss… why should you bother licensing something when you can cash in with a generic version.. that’s the real question.
OK, sorry about that, that was the ranting of the day but I had to get this out of me!
The set looks incredible but I am totally on your side about the Winchester. If they can license Star Wars and Halo, why not Shawn? I mean it’s HALO!!
Thanks Angie, note that Halo is produced by Mega Bloks though… but I’m with you with Star Wars! Just because it is considered “family friendly” does not take away the nature of the topic… in these movies we had mass-murdering and torture just to name a few – not to mention the political context of the story. LEGO is always doing some rope dancing with these themes and whenever there is something going too far they put a “LEGO veil” on top of it to make it compatible with their values. I mean, they are making Lord of the Rings now… Shaun isn’t more graphic than this medieval violence.
I think Mega Bloks must be part of Lego. They were available all over the place at the park. But that is a violent shooter game. I hear you about LOTR.
Megabloks were at the LEGO park? Insanity.
BAD ANGIE!! I meant Dulpo was at the park. My bad!! I always get those 2 confused.
Hah, that’s quite the difference, Angie.
Yeah, that’s the difference between shit and strawberries…
I’d request a spanking but that would sound like a bad dirty joke. I’ll just hang my head in shame.
=(
Yatkuu, the only objection I feel that TLG had towards your fantastic Winchester build is that fact that it tied to a film that had foul language in it………there are no other alternative’s. For the fact that it is a pub, well they had “a cosy tavern” in the Medieval Market Village set(10193) so that theory is out of the window.
With every other movie tie in there has been violence aplenty! Indiana Jones, Batman, Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean to name a few but no foul language.
If that was their sole objection…then it was a very poor choice.
My two cents worth anyway……..as we say in Scotland “Yea wur robbed!”
I hadn’t really considered the foul language thing. If that was the sticking point, then that’s really lame.
You’ve got every right to rant, Yatkuu
Well, I made peace with this story.. mostly. No point in arguing their decision, it’s their call and they never gave any guarantee. But I have to admit that the announcement of the haunted mansion is a bit difficult to take. They could have justified their decision of shooting down the Win by saying “sorry we have another exclusive in the pipeline that’s in the same theme – we don’t want to create internal competition”. Or “we box the project for later”… hiding themselves behind moral standards was just the easy pick.
Regardless, it was lame. Yeah, the haunted house is in a similar vein, but still.
“Similar vein”?
Hell, I’ll just say it: they ripped you off.
Wait Dave, you would actually want your set to have a building of sorts?! That would bring it to at least $90! (LEGO price joke, yuk yuk yuk) Mine would probably be A few survivors, a construction vehicle built to be zombie ready (I was looking at the latest ThinkGeek magazine, and some four zombie grabbing on.
A zombie-survival vehicle would be great!
And yeah, the pricing gets annoying sometimes. It’s getting pretty hard to hit that $0.10 per piece price point these days.
As a recent AFOL, I have one problem with 99% of LEGO themes (Friends and Harry Potter are about the only exceptions, and I hate both of their figs). They’re all vehicle (or at least locomotion) centered. Decent LEGO buildings are a rarity. I want nice little buildings. That might not be possible in the $50 range; but for a zombie set I want something like the Friends cafe, but with zombies, a 7-11 in which the survivors can try to barricade themselves.
So what I really want are nice little City-themed buildings, with zombies (or aliens, or biker gangs, or any fun, fantastic little bad guys besides the lame City-themed crooks.
A convenience store would be doable for a $50 set, so long as it was a dollhouse-style build (only two walls, no roof, etc). I love the idea.
And yeah, the fact that everything is so vehicle-centric is really annoying. How many police RVs does a town really need?
I’d certainly be willing to pay more, if I could get cool brick. Why can’t LEGO sell more brown, tan, and dark red brick? Then I could actually make some decent buildings? It frustrates me. I’d like a street on which to scale some skirmishes. Plus, if you want road plates, you pretty much have to order them from LEGO…
Oh don’t even get me started on the road plates. Want a straight plate? Well it only comes packaged with a cross-street.
I need some road plates. Gonna check and see if my preferred local Bricklink vendors have any…
I’ve never had luck on Bricklink for the newer, gray-backgrounded plates. Of course, I haven’t checked in a long time.
I’m with you guys that the best set would involve barracade not a graveyard. Dave’s idea is totally my idea but, dammit, he typed it first! lol
One of the benefits to being the guy writing the discussion questions 🙂
It’s good to be king…
That it is.
Is this going to be a 2013 set? Or is it going to be coming out this year? I’ve never seen it before.
I believe it comes out in September.
On a related note, my birthday is in September in case any fans want to get me something special 🙂
My birthday is setember UNO. Para los personas que no hablan espanol uno es one. Translation: For the people who don’t speak spanish one is uno.
Mine’s the 11th. Pretty easy one to remember.
It’s crap; but I’ll probably buy at least one each of the zombie sets, just to get the minifigs. I’ll use the other monsters for my own monster hunter theme (think vampires-meets-Blackwater).
Have any of you read any of the Monster Hunter International novels?
“vampires-meets-Blackwater” well that certainly sounds interesting.
I haven’t read those books, but it seems like I heard good things about the first one.
The first one was the best. I have one of the first self-published editions. the second one was OK. I got bogged down in the third one and haven’t finished it yet.
It fits in the theme here, though. What if every monster story you ever heard was true? It’s kind of like Men in Black with lots and lots of guns. Yeah, they’re pulpy; but they’re meant to be. The gun stuff is about 99.999% accurate to boot (I found one glaring error in one of the characters, that actually embarrassed the author when I pointed it out to him).
Oh there’s nothing wrong with pulp done right. Sounds like a great concept for a series.
I think you can purchase the electronic versions inexpensively directly from Baen Books.
Perhaps I should write them inquiring about a review copy…
My idea for a zombie set, totally original and never seen before: See, there’s this Nazi dude experimenting on a Japanese feller, a drunk Russian, and an American GI in about WW2 time. They teleport from set to set, but the basics are the same every time. They try to hold out against wave after wave of zombies, with the odd hell hound or whatever.
On a more serious note, I would totally buy these sets… ;D
Hah, I’ve never played the game, but even I know what you’re talking about.
You forgot two American presidents, a cuban dictator, and a US Secretary of Defence. Just rambling about missiles in Cuba. That would definitely confuse Trayarch…
I think an oil rig filled with zombies would easily surpass $50, right? Maybe an old abandoned theater/drive-in could work.
Yeah, I think it probably would. It’d be a hell of a cool set though.
Honestly, until this episode, I forgot they even HAD holes in the back of their legs!
I’m still on the fence about these guys. The whole “saved” thing was really creepy, but I can think of an innocent meaning for it.