Legoland California certainly is an interesting place. Recently (or semi-recently…) Miniland San Diego opened, bringing with it several landmarks of the San Diego region, including but not limited to Balboa Park, the MTS trolley system, Petco Park, and the San Diego County Fair. This last bit is what the focus of this thread is on.
I was particularly interested in the “Minilanders” that populated the town, as I noticed this rather peculiar instance.
The image is zoomed in on a strange occurrence - red Mixel joints. What’s more, it’s both the ball joint and the socket joint. Additionally, I saw this figure nearby.
That’s right, a Blacktron reference!!! I’m joking… we see next to the astronaut blue Mixel joints, again both the ball and socket joints. I checked BrickLink just to confirm, but these parts do not come in blue OR red, so I figured I would ask for your opinions: Do you think this is just Legoland painting stuff, or could this be the reveal of newly colored parts?
A few notes
From some brief research, Miniland San Diego opened about a year ago, in probably February of 2023. As far as I could see, these were the only figures that had recolored joints. Miniland is also not against using strange techniques, such as screws, third party electronics, glue, separating hinge joints (part 2429c01), and other such things, so these parts could very well be painted.
Another interesting discovery was another figure, apparently Hatsune Miku.
I’d suspect they’re specially recoloured parts. Legoland certainly isn’t averse to recolouring pieces into exclusive colours for their displays, and since these ball joints aren’t going to ever be played with, I assume the stability concerns would be negated?
Why do the pictures look AI generated?
The blue pieces look to be a different shade of blue from the other blue pieces. Red mixel joints exist, they’re just very rare, so i would’t be surprised if those were new recolours. Perhaps from the new dnd set with the big red dragon.
The pictures are zoomed in on my phone. The figures were pretty far back from the rail and I could only lean so far in, so the zoom feature would have to suffice.
Where did the red Mixel joints appear? I couldn’t find a BrickLink listing for them.
Yep, I wouldn’t be surprised if these are early releases of parts LEGO is thinking of using in upcoming sets, and they’re just limited to internal company stuff until a suitable set is designed where they would be necessary. It would make sense, seeing as there are several videos I’ve seen where designers and modelers at the company will make small batches of parts in new colors for prototyping. (Most of these parts are destroyed afterwards, but there have been cases where prototypes have made it into the resale market).
I wouldn’t necessarily assume that; it seems entirely possible to me that Legoland model builders can get access to unreleased parts, or perhaps even request special recolours.
The reason I’m particularly skeptical that these are upcoming recolours has to do with the Mixel joints themselves. It’s been stated by Lego designers that, because the tolerances for these small-scale ball-and-socket joints have to be so tight, the molds are optimized for specific colours of plastic.
Of course, a Legoland display model doesn’t need the same type of quality control as publicly released parts, so they can get away with using potentially-out-of-tolerance recolours.
Pretty much my exact argument. And there’s certainly precedent for it - I’ve seen pearl silver 2x4, 2x8 and 2x10 bricks in Legoland builds which were never released in any retail sets. I should think these Mixel joints are no different. They’re not going to be played with, so tolerances don’t matter
But in all seriousness, that is odd to not see an entry for it in the Duplo, Brick, Promotional category. There are several of its translucent blue kind there, just not with those prints.
