Tag Archives: Toys

LEGO’s Marvel Skyline: Superhero Landmarks Without the Sprawl

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Marvel fans who follow the movies, comic books, TV shows, and more, and who are also collectors, would probably want to have the entire universe in their house, at least in miniature form. But that would mean having a whole separate room or space, since that universe includes so many different places and even worlds. If you’d like an overview of several iconic landmarks in a shallow display footprint, LEGO’s upcoming Marvel Skyline set could be worth a spot on your wish list.

The Marvel Skyline is a collectible LEGO set that gives you a visual architectural narrative of several recognizable buildings from across Marvel properties. It packs familiar architectural details into a microscale display that both casual and die-hard fans might enjoy as room decor. Plus, you can recreate some moments from your favorite storylines, if you’re also into that sort of thing.

Designer: LEGO

Collectors understand the joy of having action figures, posters, memorabilia, and all sorts of things you can, well, collect. Marvel offers plenty of opportunities for that, and here the focus shifts from individual characters to the places associated with their adventures. It’s a way to collect the settings, too.

The Marvel Skyline includes these iconic hubs: Avengers Tower, the Daily Bugle, the Baxter Building, the Wakandan Embassy, the Rand Enterprises Building, Pym Laboratories, and the X-Men Mansion. For more excitement, there are also villain strongholds like Hammer Industries, Roxxon Corporation, Oscorp Industries, and Fisk Tower.

Of course, there are also characters to populate this miniature neighborhood. The set includes a Galactus minifigure, a Spider-Man trophy figure, and a Human Torch trophy figure. There are also vehicles like the X-Jet, the Fantastic Four Rocket Ship, the Spider-Mobile, and other small vehicles to place throughout the streets.

Rather than treating this as a literal map, it makes more sense to enjoy it as a collection of Marvel locations brought together for display. The appeal is having these landmarks share one skyline, without worrying about their fictional addresses. So it’s a fun way to imagine an Avengers-type crossover involving your favorite buildings.

The shallow footprint is probably the most practical part for collectors running out of display space. LEGO lists the finished model as over 8 inches tall, 15.5 inches wide, and 4.5 inches deep. You’ll still need to measure your shelf, but the limited depth could make it easier to accommodate than a larger city layout. It represents several locations without requiring a separate display for each one.

The different figure sizes are another clever detail. Galactus looks enormous beside the tiny Spider-Man, even though he’s a regular minifigure. Meanwhile, building signs and symbols help identify the landmarks without requiring each one to become a large model. The Avengers emblem, the Daily Bugle sign, and the Fantastic Four’s “4” give fans recognizable clues. That’s particularly useful when so many buildings are competing for attention in one compact arrangement.

The 1,261-piece set is intended for builders ages 18 and up, and it supports Build Together mode in the LEGO Builder app. That gives couples, friends, or family members an option to work on it together. For someone who enjoys the construction as much as the finished collectible, sharing the build could be part of the appeal, before deciding where the skyline will live.

There’s one important detail if you’re thinking about buying it as a gift: the US price is $99.99, and LEGO currently lists it for preorder, with shipping scheduled to begin January 1, 2027. For collectors who prefer detailed interiors or larger individual buildings, this smaller approach may feel like a compromise. But if your favorite part is recognizing the places and connecting them to stories you love, that trade-off makes sense. You get a neighborhood to look over, with a little more room left for everything else you collect.

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Lego’s 5,682-brick Venice set has canals, a clocktower, and a tiny piano that actually plays

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Venice sits on roughly 118 small islands stitched together with bridges, which makes it the one city where a flat LEGO base feels almost historically accurate. Throw in canals, gondolas, and a skyline of domes and bell towers, and you have a place that practically begs to be built out of plastic. LEGO clearly noticed. In 2025 it sent adult builders to Liguria with the LEGO Ideas Italian Riviera, a 3,251-piece fishing village that began as a fan design by Alex Sahli. Now the Italian road trip lands in Venice with the LEGO Icons Venetian Neighborhood (11388), and the travel budget has grown to match.

Designed in house by LEGO’s own team, it packs 5,682 pieces and costs $549.99, with Insiders buying from November 1 and everyone else from November 4. That buys a luxury villa, a glassblowing workshop, a clock tower with a knob-driven astrological calendar, an arched bridge, and a gondola with two gondoliers. Seventeen minifigures wander around, including two in full Carnival costume. Add pigeons, a street piano that plays real notes, and a bonus boat for early buyers, and the shelf starts to sweat. Venice has never been cheap either, so the price tag stays in character.

Designer: LEGO Design Team

Canals made of studs, towers made of legend

The canals are built mostly from trans-blue elements with the studs left showing, so the water ripples instead of sitting flat like a glass tabletop. An arched bridge crosses it, and the gondola and its two gondoliers are sized to slip right underneath. Pale bricks and domed roofs set the skyline, with a green-capped tower standing tallest. Brick Fanatics’ main nitpick is that the set could use more water and more gondolas. I second that, since a Venice with one gondola is a lonely Venice.

The three buildings are a luxury villa, a glassblowing workshop with translucent orange and yellow panels, and a clock tower whose knob drives an astrological calendar. That tower recalls St Mark’s Clocktower, unveiled in 1499, where legend says the doge blinded the clockmaker so he could never build a rival. The real story is tamer, since the two mechanics were made caretakers and moved in with their families. Roofs and floors lift away to show the interiors, and the diorama separates into sections you can rearrange. It stands over 18 inches high, about 25 wide, and 12 deep (48 by 63 by 31 centimeters), so measure your shelf first.

The piano that actually plays

My favorite detail, though, is the street piano, a tiny black 3D-printed element that plays real notes when you twist the flower vase on top. That is a sentence I never expected to write about a minifigure prop. It does four jobs at once: instrument for the musician minifigures, tiny mechanism, manufacturing milestone, and wink at the street pianos that pop up in public squares. The vase works as the crank, which keeps the scene looking natural. Venice gets a soundtrack, and your living room gets a tiny busker.

LEGO has molded bricks since the late 1940s, and the piano is only the second 3D-printed element in a widely available set. The first was the tiny blue train in 10361 Holiday Express Train, released in October 2025, with spinning wheels and a puffing chimney. Before that, the list was a drafting arm, a toy duck for minifigs, and a pogo stick, all handed out or sold in tiny numbers. LEGO has not said how the piano was printed, though selective laser sintering is the likely suspect, same as the train. LEGO’s additive team wants this tech to feel ordinary, and a music-playing piano is a funny way to continue.

17 minifigs, one bonus boat, and the bill

The cast of 17 includes gondoliers, musicians, tourists, a glassblower, and two Carnival revelers dressed as the moon and the sun. Their costumes lean on clever part use, including an upside-down video game controller and a DREAMZzz headpiece. A flock of pigeons crowds the plaza too, because no Venetian square is complete without birds judging your lunch. It is classic LEGO, giving the crowd personality instead of filling the canals with identical tourists. Nobody on this waterfront is checking email, which is the whole fantasy.

At $549.99, the set works out to roughly 9.7 cents per piece, which lands between the $499.99 Tropical Aquarium and the $649.99 Minas Tirith. Insiders get first crack on November 1, and the general release on November 4 runs through LEGO.com and LEGO Stores. Early buyers also get the 322-piece Venetian Water Taxi (40898) as a gift while stocks last. It adds a dock, a captain, a tourist, and two more pigeons, because the birds clearly have a union. My only request is a second gondola, so the taxi has someone to race.

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This 2,680-piece LEGO AKAI tape deck is my kind of analog nostalgia

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Owning a reel-to-reel deck in the 1970s meant owning a piece of furniture you could not move alone. The Akai PRO-1000 came in two boxes, with published specs putting the drive unit at about 62 pounds and the amplifier at about 22. That is roughly 85 pounds of hi-fi, which explains why one UK dealer listing recommends collecting in person or booking a pallet. People bought these anyway, because a machine with two huge spinning reels announced to every guest that you took music seriously. Nobody ever put a reel-to-reel in a closet. Now there is a version you could carry to the couch without calling a friend, made of 2,680 LEGO parts.

That version is the AKAI PRO 1000 Open Reel-to-Reel Tape Deck, a LEGO Ideas project from Zo Lee that has already picked up a Staff Pick badge. The original was a semi-professional machine from the late 1970s that sold mainly in the US, Canada, and Japan, with a 1977 US price of $1,995. Its two boxes were joined by three cables, so owners could park them side by side or stack them, and the LEGO version takes the stacked route. At about 17 inches tall, 11 wide, and 6.3 deep (43 x 29 x 16 cm), it is a compact take on an original roughly 19 inches across. Finally, a hi-fi flex that does not need a pallet.

Designer: Zo Lee

Here is the party trick: the thing moves. A motor turns the reels, the VU meters swing along with them, and the big knobs rotate under your fingers. A removable grid on top lifts off to hold a LEGO battery, so the deck can sit anywhere on the shelf without hunting for a wall outlet. The reels were the first thing every guest stared at on the real machine, so making them the star of the show is exactly right. Powering it up is its own small concert, minus the music.

Zo Lee describes the build as extremely difficult, and the list of headaches reads like a boss fight. The odd quarter-distance spacing between tiles, the big reels with all those cutout windows, and an internal frame that has to hold the outer casing each took plenty of brainstorming. Getting that same frame to drive the reels and meters took lots more attempts, per the creator. The payoff shows in the renders: gray reels with dark red cutouts, black knobs with colored pointers, tiny transport labels like CUE, PAUSE, and REC, and a tape counter parked on 977. From a few feet away, the front panel reads like actual hardware, which is the whole point of a shrunken replica.

My favorite detail, though, is the pair of VU meters, which Zo Lee says swing in sync with the reels, but asymmetrically. I am guessing the same motor drives both, which would mean the needles twitch like they are reacting to a song instead of marching in lockstep. That one choice fakes live audio, hides a mechanism behind two amber faces, and probably saves the builder a second motor. It also slots the deck into a neat lineage of LEGO Ideas audio gear, next to Tomasso Builds’ Technics SL-1200 MK2 turntable and Headlight Bricks’ Sony Walkman. Reel-to-reel is the format that came before the Walkman’s cassette, and it has the most dramatic moving parts of the lot.

The deck currently sits at 527 supporters on LEGO Ideas, with the next milestone at 1K and 396 days left to get there. Ideas works like this: fans submit builds, supporters pile up, and LEGO reviews the ones that reach the threshold. The Staff Pick badge is a nice head start, but the votes have to come from people like you, so head to the LEGO Ideas page and give it your vote. Every supporter helps push this toward an actual box. Get it there and you can finally own a reel-to-reel deck without recruiting three friends and a hand truck.

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Halloween finally gets its own snow globe, and it’s made of LEGO

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The snow globe was invented by accident in 1900, when a Viennese surgical instrument mechanic named Erwin Perzy tried to build a brighter operating room lamp and ended up with a glass ball full of drifting semolina. Medicine’s loss was the gift shop’s gain. For the 125 years since, Christmas has hogged the format, filling every globe on the shelf with Santas, snowmen, and tiny trees. Halloween never got a turn, which feels unfair to the holiday that loves a spooky little scene trapped under glass. The Brick Artist just fixed that with the Halloween Snow Globe, a LEGO Ideas build that swaps snowfall for a creaky graveyard you can spin with a crank.

Inside the dome sits a twisted dead tree, a floating ghost, a jack-o’-lantern scarecrow, gravestones topped by a gargoyle, and a full moon peeking out from storm clouds. A Vampire minifig guards the front of the black base, arms out like a bouncer at the world’s smallest haunted nightclub. Turn the lever on the back and an internal gear mechanism rotates the whole scene 360 degrees, bringing a skeleton and a spider into view from behind the tombstones. The same builder gave us a spinning Christmas Snow Globe last December, so the setup might ring a bell. It’s the same clever chassis, now dressed for the other big holiday, and frankly it looks better in black.

Designer: The Brick Artist

A hand crank that spins the whole graveyard

The crank sticks out of the back of the base as a Technic axle with a tan handle, the kind of grip you’d expect on a music box. Turn it and gears hidden inside the black drum rotate the entire scene a full 360 degrees. The builder doesn’t spell out the gear layout, so the guts stay a mystery, but the renders show a clean hand-powered setup with no motors or batteries to fuss over. That keeps the base a tidy stage instead of a machine room. A crank also beats a shake, because nothing gets rattled loose and you control the drama.

My favorite detail, though, is where the skeleton and spider are parked. Both sit around the back of the scene, hidden behind the tombstones from the front, so the crank doubles as a reveal. That one placement gives the spin a reason to exist, hands whoever is turning it a tiny jump scare, and borrows the logic of a haunted house ride where the creepy stuff waits around the corner. Plenty of rotating displays just show you the same scene from another angle, while this one hides a punchline on the far side. It also means the globe looks different from every direction, which is rare for a decoration.

Brick-level tricks inside the dome

The tree is built from jointed black bars and clips, which lets its branches twist and reach in ways stacked bricks never could. The ghost hovers on a transparent stem above the gargoyle, so it floats like it’s up to no good. The scarecrow’s pumpkin head wears a top hat, and its coat is layered dark slopes that fake ragged, wind-tattered cloth. Behind it, a flat round moon is half covered by gray cloud plates, a cheap trick that sells an entire night sky. Check the render from behind and you’ll spot the moon’s bare studs, proof that it’s a stage prop built for the front row.

Autumn leaves do the job snow normally would. The ground is a patchwork of tan and gray round tiles, spiky reddish brown plants for dead brush, and orange and yellow leaf elements scattered between them. Those warm colors pop hard against an otherwise black and gray scene, like a Tim Burton still with one splash of orange. The base repeats the trick with wreaths of leaves and white flowers, plus a black spider and little web elements at the corners. The palette does the lighting work, since a mostly gray dome needs somewhere for your eye to land.

A Christmas classic with a Halloween Town makeover

LEGO already blessed this exact idea in 2024. When Simon Scott’s fan design became the 2,193 piece Nightmare Before Christmas set at $199.99, LEGO Ideas ran a contest asking builders to turn a Christmas classic into a Halloween version. The Brick Artist’s globe is that same swap with no prize pot attached. The Vampire up front looks a lot like the 2010 Collectible Minifigures Series 2 Vampire, a figure whose look later inspired Lord Vampyre in the 2012 Monster Fighters theme. Dracula standing guard at the front door is a very on-brand way to greet trick-or-treaters.

The Halloween Snow Globe was submitted on October 8, 2026, and as of October 9 it sat at 420 supporters (hehe) with 424 days left to reach the 1K milestone. LEGO Ideas runs on community votes: fans submit builds, supporters pile up, and LEGO decides which ones graduate into real boxes. Head to the LEGO Ideas page and give it your vote, because every supporter pushes it toward the next milestone.

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This Expandable LEGO Frame System Finally Solves the Collector Storage Nightmare

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Somewhere in a closet, a perfectly good LEGO minifigure is staring through a plastic bag at the back of a cardboard box. It has a tiny printed face, a surprisingly elaborate hat, and absolutely no audience. Every serious LEGO collector knows the feeling: shelves fill up fast, display cases sell at fixed sizes, and at some point the collection starts living in labeled ziplock bags rather than anywhere it can actually be seen. LEGO has released over 775 Collectible Minifigures across 51 series since 2010, with new figures arriving three times a year, which makes the storage problem a permanent one for anyone collecting seriously. Stephen Peaple, a British-born collector now based in Perth, Australia, had thousands of them and spent four years building the solution he could not find anywhere.

Finity Frames puts a collection on the wall in a clean white grid. A single frame carries 16 spaces, but removable dividers let you make room for bigger figures or pack in a crowd. When the collection grows, connected frames share edges so the display extends as one continuous piece without visual seams or doubled-up borders. Your next minifigure gets a spot without requiring a complete wall makeover. The system is injection-molded ABS, ships flat-packed, and the connection method that makes all of it work is patented.

Designer: Stephen Peaple

Click Here to Buy Now: $55. Hurry, only 5/16 left!

A Display System That Grows With Your LEGO Collection

Every Finity Frame is built around a seamless edge connection where neighboring frames share a single border, eliminating the doubled-up edge and any visual gap at the join. This is the core innovation that solves the fixed-size problem inherent in every other display case on the market. It means you can start with a single frame for one series of figures and expand outward in any direction, at any time, without having to replace your original investment. The aesthetic is clean and continuous, looking like a single, cohesive unit no matter how large it gets.

This design approach also makes the system more efficient as it grows. Peaple makes the math explicit: the first frame measures 312mm across, and each connected frame adds just 298mm, because one edge is always shared. This reduces material waste and lowers the cost per additional frame. A 2×2 Collector, for instance, cannot be broken apart into four 1×1 Starters, since it doesn’t include the extra pieces. For context, the most prominent fixed-case competitors max out around 190 minifigures. The Finity Frames Showcase holds 1,056, and two of them together can display over 2,100 figures as a single, unified piece.

Built for Customization and Creative Play

Each Finity Frame ships with three horizontal and three vertical internal slats, forming a standard 4×4 grid. This sixteen-space layout is not arbitrary; it maps exactly to one complete Collectible Minifigures series, which traditionally ships with 16 unique figures. The slats are removable in any combination, yielding 64 different internal layouts. You can pull the vertical dividers out, double-stack figures with jumper plates, and a 1×1 Starter can hold up to 88 minifigures. This flexibility lets you create custom spaces for dioramas, larger vehicles, or oversized figures like the Hulk who need a little extra room.

The system’s dimensions are precisely calibrated to the LEGO System of Play. Internal slats are exactly one brick wide, and the frame edges are exactly two bricks wide. Each compartment accepts a 6×8 LEGO plate or four 3×4 minifigure plates, the same stands that come with CMF packs. This means removing the acrylic cover turns the frame into a wall-mounted baseplate where builds can bridge continuously across spaces and frames. Peaple calls this “bridging,” a feature that turns a static display into a creative canvas. Every horizontal slat even has a built-in row of six studs for securing figures or small builds.

Designed for Collectors of All Kinds

A magnetic Perspex acrylic cover protects the collection from dust and removes in a single pull. It’s made from UV-stable material with built-in absorbers to block harmful light, preventing the slow fading that can damage valuable figures over time. The frame itself is a gallery-white, UV-treated ABS plastic, a color choice meant to disappear behind the collection rather than compete with it. Everything is designed to last, preserving the collection while keeping it easily accessible. The magnetic attachment is secure but quick, so you can get to your figures without fussing with clips or latches.

Flipping the horizontal slats 180 degrees turns the studded surfaces into flat shelves, opening the frame to almost any small-scale collectible. A single 64x64x49mm space can hold Funko Pocket POPs, Be@rbricks, Sonny Angels, or even shot glasses. Removing dividers creates double-height spaces for larger items like vintage Kenner 3¾” figures, Super7 ReAction figures, Playmobil sets, or graded collectible cards in their hard cases. It’s a true cabinet of curiosities, designed for a LEGO collection but adaptable enough for just about anything else that deserves a spot on the wall.

Five Sizes, Starting at $65 USD

The five frame sizes run from the 1×1 Starter at 12.3×12.3 inches (up to 88 minifigures) to the 4×3 Showcase at 47.4×35.7 inches (up to 1,056), with the 1×2 Duo, 2×2 Collector, and 3×2 Lifestyle filling in between. All frames run 55mm deep without the cover, 61mm with, and production units are estimated at 0.9 to 1.1kg for the 1×1 (roughly 2 lbs).

Retail pricing starts at AU$99 (roughly US$65) for the Starter and reaches AU$835 (roughly US$550) for the Showcase. Any size can be extended later through a Frame Extender on finityframes.com, where you input what you already own and order only the additional sets required. The system ships flat-packed globally, with US distribution in place through the manufacturing partner.

Click Here to Buy Now: $55. Hurry, only 5/16 left!

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You can buy a Server Rack plush toy that actually emits Data Center noise when you hug it

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It’s 2026, and there’s a fair chance any kid born in the next 10 years will see more server racks than they will actual bears. An incredibly twisted reality, but a reality nonetheless… so much so that Rajeev Basu decided to poke fun at this predicament in a way that only artists with a dark sense of humor know how. Meet Bezzy, a stuffed plushie that’s actually a server rack, not a teddy bear. Squeeze it and it emits an incredibly annoying hum, captured from actual data centers around USA.

Bezzy would be cute if it weren’t so pathetic. The toy’s thinly veiled satire on the fact that our AI CEO oligarchs want us to think of their world-ending water-sucking creations as anthropomorphic harmless beings. Meta unveiled Muse, a seemingly cute avatar that hides the fact that it’s selling your data to governments and marketers. OpenAI unveiled Dots, an adorable set of AI assistants that definitely don’t want you to think about the fact that the company’s AI bots have been routinely hacking into organizations, governments, etc. To that extent, Bezzy might be too effective in making AI seem cute. That’s until you hug the thing.

Designers: Big Data & Basura

Take a close look at Bezzy and you start appreciating how much thought went into making him look so deliberately unstudied. The gray sherpa fleece, the floppy limbs, the googly eyes, and that little smile are all pulled straight from the visual grammar of the charity adoption plushie, specifically the kind WWF used to send you after you donated to save a panda. His torso, though, is a different story: a black textured panel with rows of blue LED dots running down it, server-rack iconography dressed up in fur. All 20 were handmade in the US, and the design intentionally avoids looking polished or new, going instead for that lived-in quality of a toy you might find at the bottom of a thrift store bin. The yellow tag dangling from his chest, screaming “HUG ME FOR EAR PIERCING FOREVER HUM,” is doing most of the heavy lifting.

The toy is the physical centerpiece of a bigger satirical project called Adopt A Data Center, which Basura designed to look exactly like a charity adoption portal. Hit “adopt now” and instead of a certificate, you get a page of citations and journalism covering data center noise complaints, water consumption, land use, and the tax incentives that make communities such convenient targets for developers. Stickers in the campaign read “Open your heart. And your power grid.” The tagline for the whole thing is “All they ask for is everything,” which is honestly one of the better lines written about the AI era.

The duo behind the project is a pretty inspired pairing for something this arch. Rajeev Basu runs Basura, a New York studio with a resume that includes stints at Wieden+Kennedy, Spotify, and Maximum Effort, where he wrote for Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. His previous projects have the same DNA as Bezzy: the Hinge Phonebook was a phone-shaped book filled with ideas for getting off your phone that sold out in 24 hours, and the Yerba Madre Dirt Shoes literally crumbled apart mid-walk to spread wildflower seeds. His collaborator is Alan Wilkis, who makes music as Big Data, a project he started in 2012 explicitly to comment on how the internet was mining and monetizing personal data. Bezzy launches alongside Big Data 4.0, Wilkis’s first album in seven years, and a new single called “Rabbit Hole,” which honestly tracks.

The hum inside Bezzy wasn’t recorded in a studio. It was captured by a woman living next to a data center in Virginia and handed over during Basura’s research process, part of six months of conversations with people across the US who live beside these facilities. Northern Virginia alone hosts over 500 data centers handling as much as 70% of the world’s internet traffic, and residents there have been filing noise and health complaints for years with very little relief. A 2026 UN University report found that data centers could consume 945 terawatt-hours of electricity annually by 2030, while AI-related water use could equal the domestic needs of 1.3 billion people. Bezzy, all 20 of them, at $99 each, won’t fix any of that. But he’s a pretty hard thing to ignore while he’s screaming.

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The first LEGO Dragon Ball set is here, and Shenron costs $180

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LEGO has been making anime for about fifteen years now, it just never bothered to license any. Ninjago is a spiky-haired ensemble of teenage martial artists who power up through color-coded elemental forms and shout while they do it. Monkie Kid pulls straight from Journey to the West. Both shows are anime in everything except paperwork, built by a Danish company that clearly spent a lot of time watching after-school TV and taking notes. So there’s something very funny about LEGO finally going to an actual Japanese animation studio in 2026 and asking, politely, if it could borrow the real thing.

Toei said yes. The result is the LEGO Icons Dragon Ball: Shenron & Goku (11390), a 1,764-piece display model of the wish-granting dragon coiling up out of all seven Dragon Balls, with Kid Goku parked on his Kintoun off to one side. It’s the first LEGO and Toei Animation collaboration ever, the first Dragon Ball set LEGO has ever produced, and the first time Goku has existed as a minifigure. For a debut, going straight for the dragon is a confident move. Shenron is the hardest thing in the franchise to build out of rectangles.

Designers: Jae Won Lee & LEGO

Bar-and-clip hinges hold Shenron’s body together internally while plate hinges do the work on the outside, and that combination is the entire reason this thing reads as a curve instead of a staircase. Jae Won Lee built the dragon in repeating segments, each angled a few degrees off the last, so the deviation accumulates into a loop rather than a series of visible steps. Brickset’s review called the process repetitive in stretches, which is true and also the price of admission. Anything smoother would need custom molded parts, and then it stops being LEGO. The finished body flows upward through 32 centimeters of height without a single moment where you can see the seams doing their job.

A grey rock pillar runs up the center of the model, and Shenron is permanently attached to it. Brickset confirmed the dragon cannot be built or displayed independently, which is the honest engineering tell here: 1,764 pieces of green plastic arranged into a loop have to hang off something, and physics does not negotiate. I respect that LEGO left the pillar visible rather than disguising it as scenery. Articulation is modest as a result, with a few degrees of head rotation, an opening jaw, and legs that pivot at several joints. This is a statue that lets you nudge it, and the marketing sensibly sells it that way.

Goku arrives here as a minifigure for the first time in either company’s history, wearing the orange gi with Master Roshi’s Kame kanji printed on the chest. He carries the Power Pole, wears a printed Saiyan tail, and sits on the Kintoun, which matters more than it looks. At this point in the original series Goku cannot fly on his own ki yet, so the cloud is his actual transportation rather than a prop. Riding it also requires being pure of heart, a detail that becomes very funny once you learn he is an alien from a warrior race. The new spiky wig element is the best part of the figure.

Seven Dragon Balls sit at the base on trans-clear studs, each individually printed with its correct star count, one through seven. Lightning bursts in translucent yellow where the dragon breaks through, and the front nameplate carries the original manga logo rather than anything from the Z era. LEGO also colored many of the internal structural pieces orange to match the Dragon Balls, including parts buried inside the base where nobody will ever see them. The instruction booklet highlights new pieces in orange instead of the usual red. Those two decisions cost money and win nothing measurable, which is exactly how you tell a licensing exercise apart from a set somebody cared about.

One minifigure for $179.99 is where this set loses me. Bulma invented the Dragon Radar and drove the entire original search, and her absence from a set celebrating that specific storyline is a genuine gap that Brick Fanatics and Stonewars both flagged. Brickset’s per-piece math lands at 10.2 cents in the US against fairer numbers in the UK and Eurozone, part of a wider 2026 exchange-rate drift on LEGO pricing. Bandai’s S.H.Figuarts Shenron sits around $130 fully painted and articulated. LEGO is charging a premium for the privilege of assembling yours.

Insiders get early access on November 1, with general release on November 4 through LEGO Stores and LEGO.com, and more Dragon Ball sets are already confirmed for 2027 and beyond. Put this beside the 681-piece Pokémon Rayquaza and the comparison stops being polite, which tells you something about how seriously LEGO treated its first swing here. Fifteen years of building its own anime gave the company an unusually good understanding of what this material needs. Toriyama died in March 2024 without seeing his dragon in brick form. The set that finally arrived is worthy of him, and I hope Bulma is in the next one.

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Your Old Barbie Dolls Actually Become Speakers and Power Banks

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When I was young, a lot of my stuff was pink. Not just any pink. It had to be Barbie pink. I eventually grew into other colors, but those bright, familiar shades never lost their hold on me. They still remind me of afternoons spent inventing elaborate stories for dolls who, in my imagination, had unusually busy social calendars. Even now, a flash of that pink on an ordinary object makes me stop and look.

Gomi seems to understand that kind of attachment. Its Barbie x gomi Childhood Memories Collection incorporates recycled Barbie dolls and accessories into everyday electronics. The lineup includes Bluetooth speakers, power banks, wireless chargers, and tracker tags. These aren’t just devices dressed up in colors borrowed from a toy aisle. Actual doll materials go into them, alongside other recovered plastics, so the connection to childhood runs deeper than a coat of paint.

Designer: Gomi

The Brighton, England-based studio makes the limited-edition products by hand. Reclaimed plastics form marbled surfaces with patterns that vary from piece to piece. Gomi describes each design as unique, which is part of the appeal if you like objects with a little individuality. The visual variety matters, too: it lets the source material feel transformed rather than hidden inside a new product. A childhood toy becomes something you can recognize in the tech you use now.

On the Bluetooth speaker, recycled doll material is paired with an aluminum back plate and buttons. The contrast gives its playful surface a more practical, finished look. Gomi also lists fast charging and a modular, repairable design for the speaker. Those details matter because color can catch your eye, but an electronic product still has to earn its place in your routine. Repairability suggests that Gomi intends the speaker to be kept and used, not treated as a short-lived novelty.

The power bank makes the collection’s practical side even clearer. It has a 10,000 mAh capacity, USB-A and USB-C ports, and fast charging, according to Gomi. The company says it uses repurposed e-bike batteries and has a modular design that allows repairs and battery replenishment. If your phone runs low while you’re away from an outlet, that’s a problem it can help solve. Its childhood references are a bonus, not a substitute for the job it needs to do.

Wireless chargers and tracker tags broaden the idea beyond audio and backup power. Together, the devices raise a simple design question: Why should accessories we carry or leave out on a desk all look interchangeable? A charger doesn’t have to disappear into its surroundings, and a speaker doesn’t have to resemble every other black box on a shelf. The collection invites people to choose useful tech partly because they enjoy looking at it.

The reuse angle deserves attention as well. Giving discarded dolls a role in new products offers another use for their plastic, while repairable construction may help owners keep their devices longer. That doesn’t mean the electronics are impact-free, and Barbie materials aren’t the only recovered plastics in the collection. The more precise story is also the more interesting one: Gomi has found a visible, functional use for old toy materials instead of relying on nostalgia alone.

Distinctive design does come with trade-offs. If you fall for a particular pattern, you may not be able to return later and find another just like it. Gomi says only one of each power bank design is available; its listings show a $95 price, though availability can change. Anyone shopping primarily for technical performance should still compare specifications. Here, the draw is the combination of everyday function, an individual finish, and a material story you can see.

For me, the appeal starts with that familiar pink but doesn’t end there. Childhood Memories takes a material associated with make-believe and gives it an adult errand: keeping a phone charged, playing music, or adding character to a daily accessory. It doesn’t ask anyone to outgrow their affection for Barbie, and it doesn’t pretend a fond memory is enough to make good tech. Instead, it gives those memories a useful new form, ready to sit on a desk or travel in a bag.

The post Your Old Barbie Dolls Actually Become Speakers and Power Banks first appeared on Yanko Design.

San Francisco’s most iconic buildings are now a 4,200 brick LEGO diorama

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Every city has one view that ends up on the fridge magnets, and San Francisco settled that argument a long time ago. It’s the row of Victorians on Steiner Street facing Alamo Square, seven Queen Anne houses put up between 1892 and 1896 by a developer named Matthew Kavanaugh, who liked them enough to move in next door. They’ve since appeared in roughly 70 movies, shows and ads, most famously as the establishing shot of Full House, a sitcom whose cast never actually lived there. The houses have a nickname (Postcard Row), a backup nickname (the Seven Sisters), and a level of fame most buildings would commit crimes for.

Wonderbrick_design went to California a few months ago, came home charmed, and built the whole street. The San Francisco Street runs to roughly 4,200 pieces and stretches 50cm across, with three Victorian facades on a sloping baseplate and a cable car climbing the hill beside them. Each house opens from the back like a dollhouse, the roofs lift off, and there’s a jazz dance academy, a surfer’s place and an artist’s home waiting inside. He built it with his sister, who teaches modern jazz, so one of those houses is hers. It’s a Staff Pick already sitting at 6,491 supporters.

Designer: Wonderbrick_design

Worth knowing before you look too closely at the colours: they’re a 1960s remix. The architecture is 1890s Queen Anne, all gingerbread trim and bay windows and Victorian restraint. Then in 1963 a local artist called Butch Kardum started repainting grey facades in lime, vermilion, gold and turquoise, other colourists piled in, and the city quietly redecorated itself. The term “Painted Ladies” only arrived in 1978, via a book. So the most photographed houses in America are a century-old building wearing a sixty-year-old outfit, and this MOC (My Own Creation) nails the outfit. Salmon pink, curry yellow and sand blue, white trim on everything, with a sand-green conical turret capped by a tiny gold finial.

That turret is my favorite thing here. Cones are miserable to build in LEGO because the system hates anything that tapers, and Wonderbrick_design has shingled the whole thing, stacked three storeys of bay windows underneath it, and then still found room for a wrought-iron fence over the basement level. Behind it, the dance academy occupies the ground floor with a black upright piano and a mirror upstairs, the yellow house holds a surfboard with a shark mouth painted on it leaning against an armchair, and the blue house has an artist at work with an easel, canvases and paint tins.

The whole baseplate is pitched, so the sidewalk, the stone retaining wall, the curb tiles and the track all descend together, and the cable car sits at a genuine angle rather than parked on a flat road pretending. Look at the rails and there’s a slot running down the middle, which is exactly how the real thing works. San Francisco cable cars carry no engine. A steel rope moves under the street at a constant 9.5 mph, powered from a building on Mason Street, and the gripman works a lever that clamps onto it. Andrew Hallidie got the system running in September 1873, and it survives today as the only moving National Historic Landmark in America.

LEGO has flirted with this material before, tucking a microscale Postcard Row into the 2019 Architecture skyline set, and builders keep proving the appetite is real. Peter_Designs pitched a 2,997-piece Ascensor da Bica at 20.5 degrees to match Lisbon’s hills a couple of years back. Minifig-scale San Francisco remains unclaimed territory.

With 766 days on the clock and 6,491 supporters banked, the climb to 10,000 looks very doable. You can head to the LEGO Ideas page and cast your vote here. The only thing missing is a string and a winch to pull that cable car up the hill for real.

The post San Francisco’s most iconic buildings are now a 4,200 brick LEGO diorama first appeared on Yanko Design.