Fantasy Era cancellation

[Bragallot]

I heard the Fantasy Era was cancelled because of parents who thought the orcs were 'too much like demons'. I wouldn't have given it much thought because the Fantasy Era, given the large amount of sets it had, seemed finished to me, but considering stubby's answer to the Lego Balrog topic, I put two and two together and am wondering, is this correct? How do parents exactly have so much influence over Lego? By threatening to give their kids MegaCrap instead if they don't give in to their wishes? (which would be funny seeing as they're doing Warcraft, which has demons. It's a pretty nasty threat though and I could see why people would want to save others from such a fate).

[Quantumsurfer]

Lego, despite the fact that almost half of the splash images on their products page are waving swords and various assorted other implements of violence, seems like a pretty family oriented company. I'd be damned surprised to learn that trend setting families didn't have any influence with them.

[Zahru II]

lol, that sounds soccer-mom dumb.
I don't necessarily think it was 'cancelled', FE had a 'standard' run of 3 waves (humans vs skeletons, dwarves vs orks, and then a bit of both). I've noticed that most non-licensed themes have a similar average life span of '3 waves' (Exo-Force and Power Miners come to mind); I don't know whether that's intentional or not (either to avoid the line from becoming stale, or maybe because kids get bored of a theme after that time), it would be interesting to hear stubby's take on this whether it's an intentional thing or simply koincidence.

[Quantumsurfer]

What the hell kind of moron kid gets bored with fantasy castle?

[stubby]

I haven't heard anything about this, I'm mostly all tied up in other areas. But yes, the standard run for a playtheme is about three years, give or take, because you're always comparing how much of a sales boost you get from theme loyalty compared to how much of a boost you would get from new-theme novelty and the three-year-mark tends to be where the loyalty kids are growing out of the core age group and the novelty kids are just entering it.

I don't know whether there were any orc objections or whether they would have been strong enough to affect marketing decisions, but my instinct is probably not. What's more likely is that a continuation of a fantasy-themed castle line would have competed too directly with the Lord of the Rings license and muddled the marketing segment.

[Bragallot]

Well that's reassuring.

[Gungnir]

Which means, when LoTR goes away, the fantasy sets will likely come back...
Right?

[Apollyon]

Which means, when LoTR goes away, the fantasy sets will likely come back...
Right?

What are the chances of LoTR going away? It will run at least as long as there are movies in the cinemas which means another two years at least. Then, they will make every character and set that appeared in the movies. Once that is done they will start over to troll the afols... It will be there for a very long time.

[Natalya]

Yeah I'm kind of thinking what Apollyon is saying. Remember what happened with Space when Star Wars came out? It totally died. It wasn't until a few years ago that they started running space stuff again at the same time as Star Wars, and the stuff they came back to was of course Space Police III which is a very AFoL-oriented line and furthermore could in no way be confused with Star Wars.

I mean it looks like it was meant to attract newer kids too, but Space Police are such a classic line, nay, a distinct Lineage, of intergalactic law enforcement and futuristic badassery that it would have been easy for them to run it at the same time as Star Wars.

[morganm]

I'd have called BS if someone told me they discontinued castle /fantasy because the "trolls" (read: orcs) looked like daemons.

All of the LotR bad guys look way more menacing and disturbing than any of the castle / fantasy stuff.

[Bragallot]

Yeah we can see there's nothing wrong with them, but people complain about stupid stuff all the time so I wouldn't have deemed it impossible.

[aoffan23]

I'm pretty sure Lego gets alot of stupid complaints, so I don't see why they'd heed to that one in particular. Unless there was an overwhelming amount of people on board with it, I don't think it would have any effect. I can see this being a valid theory if the theme was cancelled in the first year, but after three years? Looks like it just ran out like every other theme. It's kind of like saying that they cancelled the Adventurers theme because of the mummies. Or Power Miners because of the rock monsters.

Sure, it's possible. It's also possible to win the lottery, survive a lighting strike, and be hit by a meteorite in the same day.

[Bragallot]

I hope so.

[pkbrennan]

I need to start hunting out these fantasy era sets for the "Orks".

Here in the UK there was one public pressure campaign upon the Lego Company that does appear to have worked - to get the Lego Company to stop doing promotions with The Sun newspaper because of their Page 3 Topless Models, but this is a clear cut case of the Lego Company dealing with a morally ambiguous advertising partner, and public opposition to that.

Note: It is strange how all our Redtops promote patriarchy while decrying the effects of patriarchy within their news articles and comment sections. You can make of that what you will...