It’s well-known that LEGO, with the freedom of building their products provide, gets plenty of mileage from fan contributions. The most prominent venue of this is LEGO Ideas. Their website invites submissions to fun activities, prize-winning content and the chance to make their custom builds into official sets. Outside that, LEGO has been known to invite popular builders to join their design teams. They’ve also engaged LEGO media-makers like animators (3D or stop-motion) to do commissioned production work. This particular avenue just gave YouTube LEGO animator Forrest “forrestfire101” Whaley a big break. Here’s his new animated video featuring all the latest LEGO Star Wars sets around.
As Brick Fanatics tells it, the LEGO Group tapped forrestfire101 to do a stop-animation promo vid to highlight their latest sets. His output, featured on his YouTube channel, features some choice recent-release LEGO Star Wars sets. The setting is the Mos Espa racetrack from “The Phantom Menace.” As for the competitors:
- Imperial TIE Fighter (75300)
- Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing Fighter (75301)
- Imperial Armored Marauder (75311)
- Boba Fett’s Starship (75312)
- The Bad Batch Attack Shuttle (75314)
- Mandalorian Starfighter (75316)
- Gonk droid (not an official LEGO set)
The race starts out similar to the Podrace sequence from “Phantom Menace,” then escalates as only LEGO can. Whaley’s stop-motion visuals make this minute-and-a-half video a non-stop LEGO Star Wars extravaganza. And you might have an idea which of the racers wins. All in all, this is a fun promo vid commissioned by LEGO, one that would excite LEGO Star Wars collectors.