Column: LEGO Star Wars needs to ditch the limiting labels

The LEGO Star Wars theme is obsessed with categorising its collections and subthemes, but if it really wants to keep surprising people, it needs to drop those limiting labels.

It’s no secret that the LEGO Group likes a good label. It’s been grouping its sets under themes for decades, and then breaking them down into further subcategories across certain product collections for… well, also decades. (Just not as many.) But while saying ‘here are the Star Wars sets’ and ‘here are the Harry Potter sets’ is all well and good, going beyond those broad labels can be suffocating.

The roots of those subcategories within the LEGO Star Wars theme can be traced all the way back to the line’s sophomore year with the advent of the Ultimate Collector Series in 2000. And for 18 years, that label served a clear and defined – yet expansive – purpose. UCS sets were (and are) those intended for adults or more experienced builders, and typically those with deep pockets.

And even if it referred exclusively to larger versions of classic vehicles for a while – because that’s all the LEGO Group was cooking up at those higher price brackets – the notion of a model being the ultimate item for collectors didn’t stand in the way of mixing up the format, occasionally breaking away from a cavalcade of X-wings and TIE Fighters to bring us a Death Star or Ewok Village playset.

Today, 10188 Death Star and 10236 Ewok Village would undoubtedly come under the Master Builder Series tag, which debuted in 2018 with 75222 Betrayal at Cloud City, and denotes location-based sets that might otherwise have fallen under the UCS range. But since the LEGO Star Wars team introduced that label, we’ve only seen one other set join the MBS range in 2020’s 75290 Mos Eisley Cantina.

Still: that’s another label vague enough that it could encompass any and all location-based sets the LEGO Group decides to tackle from a galaxy far, far away, whether it’s a Jedi Temple, Yavin IV or the Geonosian Arena. (If only, if only.) The problems start with more specific product collection labels, and it’s a trap the theme is about to fall into all over again.

Before we get into that, we need to establish the first time it happened. Smash cut to the launch of the LEGO Star Wars Helmet Collection in 2020. There are so many helmets in the Star Wars universe that the LEGO Group managed to keep that subtheme going for four waves – with 11 sets in total – and still left some pretty major characters on the cutting room floor. (Kylo Ren, anyone?)

But that narrow definition of what might belong in that range – helmets and helmets alone – was to its detriment. While the LEGO Group blurred the lines a little with 75343 Dark Trooper Helmet, which was based on a droid character from The Mandalorian, we were never going to see the likes of C-3PO or General Grievous in that subtheme precisely because the LEGO Star Wars team had labelled it as a ‘helmet collection’.

LEGO Star Wars Creative Lead Jens Kronvold Frederiksen said in 2022 that the team were ‘not going to do’ C-3PO (as one example), because ‘something that really has personality will probably not happen within this concept’. He explained away the Dark Trooper helmet as ‘a little bit in-between’, but specifically referred to the label of the Helmet Collection while explaining the distinction.

The LEGO Star Wars team were therefore clearly cognisant of the parameters defined by that needlessly narrow label when choosing which sets to produce next, and it’s that line of thinking that prevented us ever seeing Threepio or Grievous alongside Darth Vader, Boba Fett and so on. From the community’s desire for those characters, it’s pretty obvious that the distinction only really mattered within Billund. Why not just call it the Character Collection instead and leave the door open to absolutely anything?

The LEGO Marvel and DC themes’ equivalent line has not suffered the same fate, giving us everything from helmets to cowls to masks to full-on alien heads, all in the interests of creating an expansive character roster rather than limiting its collection to just Iron Man helmets. In an ideal world, the LEGO Star Wars team would have looked at that and thought, ‘Hey, good idea.’ But that… didn’t happen.

Which brings us to the latest batch of LEGO Star Wars reveals for the theme’s 25th anniversary, among which are three new additions to what the team has retroactively branded the Starship Collection. This is the series of ships that originally debuted under the banner of ‘midi-scale’ all the way back in 2009, with 7778 Midi-scale Millennium Falcon and 8099 Midi-scale Imperial Star Destroyer, and then returned in 2023 with 75356 Executor Super Star Destroyer.

Last year’s 18+ set featured zero branding at all to distinguish it within a particular collection, but the three new sets coming in March – 75375 Millennium Falcon, 75376 Tantive IV and 75377 Invisible Hand – are apparently all part of the Starship Collection. And once again, here is a label that for no good reason narrows the scope of what we might see under this banner.

By casting a limited net of ‘starships’, the LEGO Star Wars team has effectively ensured that we’ll never see the likes of an AT-AT or Clone Turbo Tank in midi-scale. And sure, maybe you never wanted those anyway. But once we’ve plumbed the depths of cruisers, and possibly even starfighters (a midi-scale X-wing could be… something), it could have been neat to see the LEGO Group try something different.

On the other hand, maybe this is just emblematic of the LEGO Group’s current position on these subthemes, which is that they are ultimately – like most things in life – fleeting. The LEGO Star Wars Helmet Collection wrapped up with plenty of options still in the tank, even without turning to characters with personalities, and the Diorama Collection looks to be flagging in only its third wave, with just one set rumoured to be on the cards in 2024 (versus three in 2022 and two in 2023).

The Starship Collection might therefore only run for one or two more waves anyway before the LEGO Star Wars team sets its sights on something else, ever-keen to keep the portfolio fresh. But within that spirit of keeping things interesting and unpredictable for veteran fans, wouldn’t it be better not to use such constrictive labels in the first place?

75375 Millennium Falcon, 75376 Tantive IV and 75377 Invisible Hand launch on March 1 and are available to pre-order now.

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