Builder chat: LEGO set 43302 Disney Main Street U.S.A.
And now for something slightly different. LEGO is encouraging us reviewers to change up our commentary from review, review, review, hitting the same notes and do something creative. Don’t know how creative this is, but it is different.
My son, Lou, and I did a co-build of this set. LEGO suggests that five people can simultaneously build this set, but there were only the two of us. Lou assembled the Popcorn Cart, Fire Truck, Fire Department, and Emporium; I assembled the Crystal Arcade.
M: I have to say that going into this build there wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm for it. I let it sit in the box for about three weeks. I tried to get the kids next door to build it. They had absolutely no enthusiasm for assembling it and today the choice was assemble the set or mow the lawn in 85 degree temperature and and 90% humidity with full sun. So that’s why and how it got done. I note that the box and the instructions says that five people can simultaneously build this set. However, there are only four books. Lou had an observation about why there were only four books and five people noted.
L: Well, it was so that if one person had to tap out from sheer boredom somebody could sub in their place and continue building from where the first person left off.
M: You said repeatedly during the build that this was the most boring build that you had ever encountered.
L: Yes. I would have rather put all the windows in the Avengers Tower again than do this.
M: I think that the Colloseum is the ultimate boring build, but I didn’t build the Avengers Tower, so I don’t have a point of comparison on that.
The first thing that you noted was that the popcorn cart had all of the elements needed by the popcorn cart vendor at or above eye level height so it would be relatively difficult for the popcorn vendor to actually vend popcorn.
L: Or even the customer to pick up their popcorn from the side of the cart, especially if they were a child, because their face would be directly against the sign.
M: I think that was strategic on the part of the popcorn cart vendor that the goods were so high that they couldn’t be stolen by children. That’s my assessment of that. Then the balloons, the Mickey ear balloons, which I’m calling the lead balloons, because they…
L: They weigh a ton.
M: They weigh a ton, yeah. I would have thought that making those out of transparent plastic might have been a little more inviting than the opaque plastic.
L: And also many of the balloons that I personally had seen at Disney World were a transparent purple with things inside them or blue or random transparent colors, whatever they felt like. And there was stuff in there, like smaller balloons.
M: That’s probably, that’s probably beyond the capacity of LEGO to recreate here at this scale. Oh, the other early observation you had was that the fire truck didn’t fit in the firehouse and especially didn’t fit if the truck driver was in the truck.
L: He whacks his head on the on the top of the door opening. And they noted in the instruction book that the fire truck is still available for passengers to ride in, but the actual capacity of the truck is about four minifigures. So you could get all the Dapper Dans in and nobody else aside from the driver.
M: The other early comment while making the build that I thought was funny was that you said: “It’s true to form. All the kids are miserable and all the parents are happy.”
L: Yeah.
M: Post build, I noticed…and this is not the first time I’ve noticed something like this…the Emporium has a street address of 101 and it is connected directly to the Arcade section which has a street address of 107. However, the Fire Department, which is not between the buildings…is it positioned at the opposite corner of the street or around the corner…that’s 105. So I think there might be some confusion there with with 911 services as the sequence is kind of nonsensical. Maybe the real street is numbered is that way, but little things like that tend to bother me. Like it should be 101, 103, 105, 107.
L: Perhaps they’re pulling from a different park for the 107 for the Crystal Arcade.
M: It looks like the pictures in the book seem to show the assembly like this. We’ll have to look and see if there are other reference pictures, but I don’t know, it just seemed odd.
[Note: after some researching, the Fire Department is located on a loop which leads onto the street, not on the street itself and the numbering is apparently correct.]
And you noted there were pinholes to attach the Fire Department to the other buildings on the street but…
L: No pins.
M: No pins, yes. And the Fire Department sits further back on the plate than the other stores.
L: You can sort of do it, but the tree in front of the fire station has to be positioned so it doesn’t crash into the corner of the other building.
M: Okay, other comments?
L: Just that there’s…it feels kind of…I don’t know…soulless…if there’s no…if…to, to be blunt.
M: It feels soulless? What do you mean by that?
L: It…it…
M: What it is it?
L: The…the…the…uh…the Crystal Arcade to Emporium as well as the Fire Department it’s, it’s very much the consumer aspect of the Main Street USA, which granted that’s what Main Street USA is for. It is for people to buy stuff.
But it doesn’t have any of the other things that I would expect for Main Street USA. There’s no, there’s no food stall aside from the popcorn machine. There’s like, I would associate Main Street USA with a restaurant and shopping and not just purely shopping.
M: Well you’ve been there. Is that the case while you’re there?
L: Yes. There’s, there are definitely large shopping sections, but there are also frequent places to get like chocolate or lunch or hot dog stands around or a larger luncheon place or dinner place.
M: Well certainly the model is edited down from the actual place. The thing that struck me about the model was I…I found the colors to just be…discordant.
L: That is kind of what Main Street USA looks like at Disney World at least.
M: It is a little…it’s just uh… uh… ugly. Just [laughs] it’s just ugly.
L: LEGO’s color palette compared to what I can remember of Main Street does does not, they don’t…
M: Doesn’t really do it justice?
L: No. It, it’s, it’s more pastel there than how sort of bright LEGO is.
M: Let’s let’s move on to the interiors. I noted the presence of many point-of-purchase credit card terminals there.
L: Yeah, there’s two payment terminals.
M: The decorations. As with most of the LEGO interiors I’m familiar with, there’s…there’s scant room to actually put minifigures in the interior and move them around. The spaces are tight. Wheelchair boy can fit almost nowhere. There’s another plethora of…
L: You might have to pop a wheelie to get through some places.
M: …ears, mouse ears, all over the place, various kinds of mouse ears. Decorations around the top.
L: Yeah, the model train section.
M: Yeah.
We’ve been having a debate over what the various mountain things are and you’re suggesting Splash Mountain and…
L: There’s like the jungle river boat connected to Splash Mountain and like Thunder Mountain Railway is sort of tucked in the corner of the Emporium and Matterhorn is just kind of a pancake in the Arcade area.
M: And I…I…I think there’s Mount Laurel Camden. That’s a joke for people in New Jersey.
L: And that and we did not know if the thing that we are thinking is Space Mountain was actually a Disney cruise liner or not.
M: Yeah, that I still don’t know.
Can’t decide if this is a mountain or a cruise ship or what.
© Disney Cruises
L: Some of the microbuilds are instantly recognizable as attractions.
M: The microbuild on the Wall-E, there’s a compromise there because LEGO doesn’t have a 1x1 plate with a clip on either side, so Wall-E has a shoulder deformity.
L: He’s trying to pick up something at a strange angle.
M: I don’t know what the point of putting this camera…there’s a film camera up on the roof here of the Arcade that’s hidden from the street side.
L: I my guess is it’s likely to be a reference to cute little old film cameras.
M: Disney made his money in film to begin with, but I don’t know. Treasure Island, the first live action film, was 22 years after Steamboat Willie.
What else do we have? I mean it’s, it’s kind of nicely appointed, typical kind of nice appointment of interior spaces with many micro builds but it seems like it’s always at the expense of playability.
L: Yeah. There’s also only one shopkeeper for three shops if we’re counting the mini jewelry store as a separate shop.
M: Struck me as a little peculiar that they were using typewriters as cash registers. Quite the juxtaposition, contactless payment terminals next to manual key typewriters.
L: Yeah. There’s the the new mouse ears parts, like all two of them, one coming in three recolors, the Minnie ears, being used quite liberally across the women guests in the park as they’re all using Friends® hair pieces so they can have Minnie ears.
M: The set’s rated for adults. It’s an adult set. So I suppose that gives LEGO a pass on playability.
L: But aside from the popcorn machine which has the [quickly jabs repeatedly the lever that makes the popcorn pop] popping, but that barely works sometimes.
The instruction booklets have the…the fun little notes throughout them telling you interesting things about the sets, which has been a more common thing in these adult oriented sets, but some of the comments are a little peculiar, like when they talk about the new Disney balloon molds, they say the minifigures can, you know, take a…take a photo with them, but there is no character in the set…
M: Yeah, it says you can take a selfie, but there’s nobody with a selfie stick. There’s…there’s not a phone or a camera in the set. So there’s that.
L: And along with that, the other Mickey ear hat piece they say that the guests, you can put it on your guests that come in the set, but the hat is so short it doesn’t cover any of their alternate face prints.
M: Yeah, the dual sided heads you get, you get smiles on the backs of heads.
L: So, the Mickey hats don’t really work for them. The only characters that are included in the sets that can actually use them are the fire truck driver and the Dapper Dans, but I’m not sure the Dapper Dans would give up their straw boater hats for Mickey Ears.
M: So what’s your take if you wanted to summarize this set?
L: I don’t know. I guess it’s for…I guess it’s for Disney fans only. Well, specifically fans of the Disney Parks and not much of the greater Disney properties as this is more focused on…
M: There’s…there’s an inordinate amount of greebling on these buildings, which puts the part count up quite a ways, but value-wise for whatever dollars? Four hundred?
L: Four hundred dollars.
M: I, I don’t know. I’d have a hard time swallowing that. The part count is 3900 pieces and over 1100 of them are 1x1s of some ilk. Not really anything special here for parts.
I don’t know how you’d display this. I mean the there’s certainly more visual interest on the inside of the stores than on the outside.
L: Except for the Fire Department which is basically empty on the inside.
L: Especially if I wanted to put this on my shelf. I don’t know how I would, because it’s a very tall, deep and long set, and there’s no…
M: Well it’s long. It’s long, it’s not terribly deep.
L: No.
M: It’s not as deep as the regular, you know, the regular modulars. But the…
L: It takes up a lot of horizontal and, well, vertical space.
M: It’s not, doesn’t take up much vertical space. Christ, you’ve got the Avengers Tower there…that takes up vertical space.
L: Well…
M: Daily Bugle…
L: It takes up vertical space only. It doesn’t take, it doesn’t take much of, of, of other space. This is just a long strip.
M: Well I…It’s easier to go on a shelf. Like a standard shelf, you certainly can’t put Avengers Tower on a standard shelf.
L: Yeah.
M: You need a like a bookshelf. Bookcase.
So yeah.
This is…uh…this gets a big whopping meh from me.
L: I thought that the build itself just…kinda felt…like…like actually constructing the set…just felt…painfully vanilla. There wasn’t much interest I had in the techniques that they were using. It was mostly just plate stacking and brick stacking.
M: Well, I, I disagree. The lanterns… Of course, we built different parts of the model so there’s some…
L: Maybe the Arcade has.
M: …build techniques in my section that weren’t in your section. Yeah, the Arcade has some, some wacky stuff going on in there.
L: The Emporium is…it has the whole diagonal tower section, which was the interest there, had an interesting build from the onset of the box, but it was basically just stick it on a turntable and build sideways.
M: I was, I was thinking that when I first started assembling the Crystal palace section I thought, “Jesus, this is awful simple” you know, I don’t know why this is rated for 18 other than you need to be an adult to afford it.
But then the, the, the, there’s just a lot of little tiny, tiny stuff, fussy assembly bits that when they’re together they read, you know, these microassemblies read fairly well. But I…I don’t know where the real age relative to skill would come in on this. I suspect an eight year old could do it. You know, reasonably.
L: I mean maybe over the course of a few days, but yeah.
M: Well, it takes a long time, but I don’t think that there…this is not like…
L: It’s not terrible. It’s not Avengers Tower level of weirdness or Sanctum or any of those Marvel modulars that have, those, you know, those some, some kind of thing.
M: This is a lot of stack on top. A little bit of SNOT, not particularly a lot, but it doesn’t get into the kind of complexity… I think the the base of the Colloseum had some technic stuff going on in there that was that was pretty wild. You had to stick your fingers in between parts and push pins in…and disassembling that was near impossible because of the pins slid flush into technic parts.
L: Right.
M: Once they were done you really didn’t have access to them again.
L: And even smaller, in smaller sized ones like the Legend of Zelda Ganon fight set that had some interesting stuff like building upside down and building on multiple different directions for like the tower section. And this is just sort of…
M: Yeah, this is stack on top. You know, probably 95-98% stack on top.
L: With multiple sections of just stack five bricks on top of each other and cover them with plates.
M: Well. They’re buildings. They’re not trying to be spaceships or something that are odd shape. They are buildings which are essentially…
L: They are pristine buildings.
M: …stack on top.
Need to thank LEGO for providing the set, thanks LEGO.
L: Thanks LEGO.
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