80107 Spring Lantern Festival LEGO Review - Chinese Festivals, 2021

A beautifully-festive addition to any LEGO city.

TL;DR:

• Original Price:  $119.99
• Pieces: 1793
• Minifigure(s): 3 men, 2 women, a boy and a girl, and a red statue
• Sticker Sheet: No (but does contain plastic punch-out sheet for printed banners)
• Pros: Beautiful and creative build, still pretty cheap (for the part count), generic figures good to part out 
• Cons: Lack of background information, a few less-than-sturdy builds

Assembly: 

Book 1: Main section, Bags 1-7 

Bag #1 - Man 1, main base

Bag #2 - Woman 1, continued main base

Bag #3 - Pond water

Bag #4 - Man 2, Woman 2, grass, & ox

Bag #5 - Bridge, fence

Bag #6 - Lanterns, bamboo

     [no photo taken]

Bag #7 - Boy 1, wall

Book 2: Side section, Bags 8-11 

Bag #8 - Man 3, secondary base

Bag #9 - Girl, gazebo base

Bag #10 - Gazebo roof

Bag #11 - Red statue, decorations

Leftover Pieces

• Interesting Steps:

Book 1 

• The set also includes a foldout sheet with warnings and instructions for the lightbrick

• The book begins with a two-page spread, a lovely (and lively) illustration hinting at the feelings of the Spring Lantern Festival. I wish they had had the space to include text explaining what the different traditions were, the significance of specific details (the girl's toy rabbit, the type of dumplings and what they symbolize, a translation of the banners, etc). It gives the vibe, but none of the background information, and anything I might have learned—as would have been the case with an Architecture set—instead is just supposition.

•  58: The use of a 2x2 turntable base and two 1x1 round plates allows the 6x6 and 4x4 circle plates to be joined at an unusual angle. This can be tricky to align properly, however, and you have to follow the diagrams exactly. Also resting on three points in a line (the two 1x1s on either side of the turntable base) means that the final build is a bit unsteady; it might have been better to use a 4x4 round brick on a 4x4 square turntable base, since this is all just to have the ox statue be rotated into an unusual angle.

• 108: A yellow frog, hidden underneath the bridge footings seems to be a signature of the set's designer. It's also a nice little detail, and calls attention to the use of 4x4 turntables to angle the bridge.

• 216: The lanterns on the light pole look really nice; the one downside is that the connection between the 1x1 clip and the handlebar piece isn't super secure, which means that it can be easy to bump them out of alignment...and just as easy to nudge them back into place. It's not a major flaw, only a minor annoyance, and not necessarily worth redesigning such an otherwise-elegant design.

 

Book 2

• 12: Bricks are arranged beneath the baseplates to provide strength and lightness, focusing their support only where the upper plates join and where structures above them would need it. This is definitely an indicator of a build that's gone through editing passes, as otherwise one wouldn't know just where these under-plate supports would be needed. It's also very much like the MILS plates (Modular Integrated Landscaping System) used by AFOLs to give structure and stability to their builds while also decreasing weight and cost (compared to if they were solid plate stacks). This arrangement actually has more under-plate supports than the average MILS setup, which indicates a bit of overengineering, probably to give more strength than might be needed, just in case.

• 25: While they don't form a perfect hexagon, the A-plates do make for a good underlying structure for the gazebo, with all four studs along one side being attached to the base, with the other side "floating" over the tiles underneath. The shallowness of the base hexagon will be fixed in later steps by adding rockwork.

• 44: Combining Technic propeller plates and 1x2 round plates to make an under-floor structure for the gazebo not only creates a sturdy base, but also makes a satisfying hexagonal structure. I could see this being used for STEM-style builds (caffeine molecule, anyone?) as well as for sci-fi textures and patterns.

• 51: As mentioned in step 25 above, these steps build up the rockwork of the gazebo's base. I called out this step in particular because of the simple but effective combination of curved wedge with plate wedge, which looks nice and stony.

• 75: While the entire roof assembly is quite complicated and interesting, a few steps are worth pointing out. Here, dark red fences (the same piece as is used—66 times over—in the new Maersk set to separate container stacks) are turned upside down by use of 1x2 clip-and-bar hinges and used as a decorative lattice between the support pillars.

 

• 83: The use of blue bananas (this is also the only set to contain banana pieces in dark blue) to create the up-swept corners of the gazebo is quite smart. My only complaints are that the use of candlestick pieces to hold the bananas to their clips means that the bananas can rotate sideways easily, and that the clips themselves hold only loosely to the top ring, which makes them flip and flop around. On the one hand, that makes them easy to reposition, but on the other it also means that you often need to realign them. Still, they do look cool.

• Interesting Techniques:
• Using 1x3x2 arched pieces creates a barrel vault and steps on the moon bridge, with 1x8 arch pieces giving strength and shape to the outside edges. Given the recurve of the 1x3x2s' undersides, I wouldn't have thought this would work as effectively as it does, but since those pieces aren't as thick as the bridge's sides, they hide in the shadows underneath.

• The bridge's sides are also interestingly-built, using the slight gaps beneath 1x1 cheese wedges to make them look more like carved details. Overall, the bridge is a great element that could easily be used in other builds, perhaps recolored to suit other settings.

• Speaking of arches, I really like the way the moon gate is created: lower arch pieces form the structure, which is polished by quarter-round tiles affixed to SNOT brackets, just as on the bridge. This picture also shows several interesting techniques that the wall uses, including utilizing 2x4 jumper plates as window sills. I like the chunky tiled look of the ingot flooring too, which contrasts with the smoother tiled "concrete" sidewalk around it.

• The wall's little roof is also an interesting approach, using 1x1 arch pieces to simulate rows of round-topped tiles, with 1x1 studs becoming decorative front edges. This could also have been done with 1x1 round bricks, but that wouldn't have been as secure as this method, I think.

• Interesting Pieces:
• The 5x5 corner studless bricks are a nice addition to the quarter-circle family, and make a good and supportive base for the ox's platform, somewhat mitigating the instability mentioned for step 58 above.

• Pain Points:
• Bag 4, which contains the entirety of the ox's parts, can be a bit tricky. This is because there are four nearly-identical pieces contained within it: 1x2 slopes, 1x2 slopes with eye printing, a 1x2 slope with a left angle, and 1x2 slope with a right angle. Particularly with the plain and printed 1x2 slopes, it can be easy to mistake these: I had to partially disassemble the ox my first time, because I had mistakenly used one of the eye-printed pieces on its leg.

• A minor difficulty, but the line of lanterns—as cool as they look when done—can be tricky to get right. I found that it's easier to place the clips on the line first: that way their uniform width can be used to align everything properly by pressing against a flat surface. Then the different lantern combinations can be added in the proper sequence, without needing too much further adjustment.

• The printed plastic banners are a nice visual touch, but lose some of the punch they might otherwise have, because 1) the set provides no multilingual explanation of the Spring Lantern Festival (as mentioned under Interesting Steps above), and 2) the flowing script of the banners makes machine translation difficult. For example, some of the translations I got were "Eat green grass at Crescent Moon Corner" and "Sometimes I fall in love," as well as "sugar plums," "high moon," and "ox." I have no idea how accurate these are, but it would have been neat to get even a little more information.

• Furthermore, the banners are supposed to be mounted on tow bar balls, as shown in step 184. Oddly, the instructions say to have the longer banner in front of the shorter, with both of them having the text face the same way. This results in the longer banner obscuring the shorter one. My guess is that perhaps this pairing creates an almost poetic twist, where the front banner sets up a premise ("Eat green grass at Crescent Moon Corner") that the back banner builds on ("Ox")...but that's just a guess. Lacking any other information, I decided to—for purely visual purposes—reverse the back banner so at least it has a possibility of being seen (it's worth noting that the holes on these banners mean they swing loosely on the tow balls' bars, and therefore hang straight down when mounted to the light poles).

• As is often the case with darker colored pieces, the printing on this book (and the lack of a lighter outline like with black elements) makes the dark blue roof pieces hard to distinguish, especially when their shapes are so similar. (Admittedly, this is slightly less of a problem in the digital version, but I'd still rather build from physical instructions than a screen.)

• With only two Technic pins to hold both pieces together, it's very easy to put the two parts together and separate them...even when you don't want to. There's also no lateral support, so if you're trying to carry the assemblage, or place it on a not-quite-flat surface, you end up putting stress on those two pins and will likely end up having to juggle to catch half of the build as it disengages. Further research indicates that this is a standard arrangement for MILS plates; I wonder if adding a pin to the middle would improve this flexibility issue any, but I expect that the thousands of AFOLs using what seems to be a standardized setup would know better. I guess at the end it's just a matter of remembering to separate the two parts before transporting.

• Play Features: 
  
• The light brick is technically the only play feature in this build, and the positioning of the Technic axle-hole trigger is...amusing. When pushed, it lights up the whole ox, including the trans-red radar dish on its front and the pinwheel-printed trans-red 1x2 bricks on either side. Rather than being a direct light source, this light brick makes the ox feel more like it belongs with the neon-illuminated ice sculptures of the Harbin Snow and Ice Festival.

• The roller skate pieces have a raised lip on the front and an extended lip at the back; this means that it's impossible to place two front-to-back without having a stud's worth of space between them. Because of this limitation, the single red roller skate piece underneath the rabbit toy is off-center and looks odd. The rabbit's underside only has two anti-studs (unlike, for example, a 1x2 jumper plate, which has capacity to connect to two studs underneath or just one), so adding a single plate to the skate and attaching that to the rabbit's underside also wouldn't work. As far as I can see, the only solution would be to connect two roller skate pieces to the underside of a 1x3 jumper plate, and mount the rabbit to the two studs on top. This would be centered, but would also result in a toy with a much larger base, losing the simplicity of the original build.

• My Modifications:  
• In a set like this where there's several mirrored parts, I'll organize them individually, for example joining left and right wedges into separate stacks. This way I can grab the right stack at once, instead of having to try every piece individually (much like trying to find matching socks in a pile, it's easier to just do it all in one go).

• Final Build:

• Overall:  Despite being a single-year release, and half a decade ago at that, the resale price (for both used and, surprisingly, new) remains surprisingly close to—in some cases below—the original retail price. My guess is that the lack of any licensed characters means the set doesn't appeal to collectors of specific themes, and its size and price also mean it's somewhat out of the realm of more casual builders. That said, it is a beautiful set, and a good addition to any LEGO city.

By being generic, therefore eliminating the need to keep costumes or whole figures together, the minfigures are good for parting out: their legs are all unprinted, but their torsos have a nice arrangement of fashion styles—there's even a Monkie Kid reference! The most interesting one is definitely the statue, by virtue of being totally different from other monochrome figs; as you can see in the last picture above, even his back is printed (since I'm not sure what the script on his front says, I might be tempted to reverse his arms so that the back, with its lovely illustration of lanterns and a bowl of noodles, would be his new front...this would make him a fitting sign for a restaurant, for example).

The build as a whole looks good, particularly from the front and right side, and I could see this being placed on a city street corner with tall buildings behind on on the left side, perhaps with a brick-built mural to blend the natural and man-made worlds and soften what would otherwise be a blank flat wall. There are a lot of creative and unexpected building techniques, which make the more mind-numbingly-repetitive tasks (like filling in the pond, which has a particular pattern of pieces to incorporate water lilies and koi-printed tiles) worth it. This would also be a great set to modify for MOCing—even just making small alterations like moving rock or banner pieces around, or swapping the ox statue for a noodle cart, market stall, or ornate fountain—or borrowing chunks of the instructions to for inspiration and recoloring.

As mentioned above, the place where the two plates join is flimsy (the gazebo portion of the build is only half as wide as a standard baseplate, which might also cause some issues in incorporating it into an existing city grid), and several of the design elements are rather fragile as well, specifically the lanterns and gazebo roof. Handled with care, it shouldn't be too prone to breakage, but care is still needed. It also takes up quite a large footprint...but then I'm not quite used to the modular scale of builds, so I expect this isn't quite as much an issue as a question of my own inexperience. I'd definitely recommend it, especially since it can still be found at (or under) the original retail price.

Score (out of 5 🧱):

• Price: 🧱🧱🧱🧱🧱
• Process: 🧱🧱🧱🧱🧱
• Presentation: 🧱🧱🧱🧱🧱
• Play: 🧱🧱🧱
• Pieces: 🧱🧱🧱🧱

• Total: 🧱🧱🧱🧱

Lego Instructions: here