Lord of the Rings Legos

The Battle of Helm's Deep 9474

It's a great time to be a Lego enthusiast AND a Tolkien nerd! Several Lego sets based on The Lord of the Rings will be released a little later this year. So far, 7 sets have been announced with the biggest (1368 pieces) being the Battle of Helm's Deep. I'm pretty pumped about these sets as I loved the books and the recent movies. The other sets listed so far are Gandalf Arrives, Shelob Attacks, Uruk-Hai Army, Attack on Weathertop, The Mines of Moria, and The Orc Forge. I'm hoping they'll continue along this line because there are several sets that seem obviously absent to me. Other ideas would be the Balrog, Mt. Doom (the Eye of Sauron), Rivendell, Isengard, The Shire (or maybe just Bag End), and Minas Tirith would be great, though I think it would have to be done on a smaller scale. However, if all we get are those seven sets, that's still pretty cool.

My First Lego Set?

Barney Bear 3629

I mentioned in my previous post a Lego set that I remembered pretty well from my 7th birthday. However, that wasn't my first experience with Legos. While fishing through the 1000's of pieces in the old Lego collection, I found a bear minifig that was very different from the standard Lego minifigs. It had a big wobbly bear head, a blocky red body, black legs, and yellow arms. There were several other pieces in my collection that didn't match the typical Lego pieces, like a full black car chassis with grey wheels on metal axels. I vaguely remembered seeing the pieces before, but I had no real memory of them. After doing a little investigative work on Brickset, I tracked the little bear down to a specific set, the Barney Bear set from the Fabuland series. It's obviously a set that was designed for small children, and it debuted in 1981. I myself debuted in 1978, which means I was somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 years old when my parents got this set for me. As you can see, I apparently got started with Legos at a very young age, before I can remember, even.