Ménage à Monster

One of the advantages to being an uncle to a small army of nieces and nephews is keeping up on the latest toy news (it’s a nice excuse).  While flipping through the summer Lego catalogue I ran across Monster Fighters, the company’s latest series of themed sets, and I thought I would share.  The story that ties the Monster Fighters sets together has the evil Vampyre (admittedly a horrible name) gathering the world’s monsters in an effort to collect the mystic moonstones necessary to carry out a ritual that will forever blot out the sun (a plotline that should be familiar to D&D players as it was used in both 2e’s Illithid trilogy of adventures and 3e’s Second Darkness adventure path).  Opposing the monsters are a group of steampunk and pulp flavored heroes (dig that pith helmet and blunderbuss!), some of whom even have pneumatic looking prosthetics.  Check out this awesome collection of minifigs (click to enlarge)!

Lego has some pretty awesome sets – the Star Wars and upcoming Lord of the Rings series are things of beauty – but I am overjoyed to see the company embracing classic movie monsters.  Is Lego predicting a resurgence in interest in the monsters of old, or have Frankenstein’s Monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Wolf Man already begun to percolate back into the pop culture mainstream (and I wasn’t told)?  I embraced a similar monster mania revival in the 80’s, so I have high hopes it will catch the interest of one of my nieces or nephews… it’s a good excuse for a trip to the Lego store and a night of monster movies.  The only thing that Lego could do to make this cooler would be to follow it up with a Cthulhu mythos themed series next year (that gill man could stand in for a deep one pretty easily).  Then again, maybe Lego bricks aren’t up to the task of constructing the non-Euclidean geometry of R’lyeh.