Tahra,
Thanks for sharing your knowledge about the specials already offered. I read through the first 10,0000 listings of PM on eBay last night to get a feel for what had been made before we decided to begin collecting about 7 months ago. I learned a lot from the first 55 or so of 95 pages. The price went down to about 4USD around the time the 10,000th item appeared.
EBay then stopped showing the listings saying one could only see 10,000 listings under one search heading. That surprised me because I have used eBay for over 10 years and never had that message pop up and a search end. So the next go round I will do the other half starting at the lowest price.
What I seemed to notice is that there is a ton of vintage Lego for sale out there, and not just the Victorian style. Many of the 10 to 20 year old sets use older styles of figures and accessories. Many collectors prefer these styles, especially the medieval fighting sets. We prefer the newer styles, such as the rock star and guitar player figures, and thus usually go for the more modern people and sets with settings from all over the world.
So for our collection it would be cool to find more solid color parts that have different color skin and arm and leg covering choices with more choices as to modern accessories. It would have been easier if PM had made these new figures as Specials so we would know what we are getting because most of us care for less than all of them.
And several folks have mentioned how great it would be if PM introduced plainer figure parts for making customs. It has been a major pain trying to collect solid color L torsos for normal looking adults as well, and I have thousands of those figures. Sometimes I have to turn a printed torso backwards to get a solid one, but this does not work for most PM figures.
So maybe PM could lead the way and give us plain torsos in 50 different colors so we could make them whatever we want. They seem to have enough head, arm and leg colors and faces to offer plenty of ethnic options, which is a wonderful way to customize. It looks like you have a real city of people once you get enough choices as to hair and plain torso colors, and sleeve and pants leg length.
A good starting place is the Grande Mansion 5302 figures in several skin colors, especially the bath lady wearing the towel over her bikini. The new hair styles and rarer hair colors in the collectibles is also a big step in this direction. If we could buy these new parts individually or in a kit composed of 50 different male hair parts (or 50 female hair parts,) that would be a quick and easy way to customize. Same thing with legs and arms, a set of 50 different solid color arms with choices of bare, short, half, 3/4 or full color sleeves in different skin colors and torso colors. The bare arms are especially important for making female figures because they usually look more feminine with bare arms.
These are just some ideas from a collector of the more modern pieces. There are a few pieces before 1995 in my collection, but I am definitely an outlier in this crowd when it comes to the date of the setting. Thus my preferences definitely differ from many of the collectors who focus on earlier time periods and are so active in this forum. It is still entertaining looking at sets one does not collect!
Making the figure parts removable for easy changing is a major first step in this process. Let's hope that the rainbow of torso, arm and leg colors arrives sooner than later.
Cheers, Pgal
