The new LEGO Ideas 21367 Tintin Moon Rocket set has been revealed by the LEGO Group – and it includes a cast of minifigure characters.
Inspired by beloved Tinin stories Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon, LEGO Ideas 21367 Tintin Moon Rocket is available to preorder now and will launch on April 4. The set is made up of 1,283 pieces and is priced at £139.99 / €159.99 / $159.99.
Six LEGO characters are included in the set, all wearing orange spacesuits –Tintin, Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus, Thomson and Thompson, and Snowy. Tintin’s quiff and Snowy are new pieces.
While it is primarily a display model, the top cone section does open to reveal a small cockpit inside, with control panels and a view of Earth.
The original concept model was created by LEGO fan Alexis Dos Santos. He submitted it to the Ideas platform, 10,000 fellow users voted for it and then the LEGO Group approved it for an official release. Since then, Design Master Ellen Bowley has designed the official model that has been unveiled.
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“Creating the Tintin Moon Rocket has been an incredible journey,” says Alex. “I wanted to capture the spirit of Tintin’s iconic rocket in a way that celebrates both its engineering elegance and its place in pop culture.
“Recreating its curvature and connecting the three floors pushed my creativity, and seeing it finally come together with all the minifigures in their space suits has been incredibly rewarding. I hope the build sparks the same sense of imagination and adventure that inspired me from the very beginning.”
“One big challenges we had along the way was to make this like spherical shape with six sides, this curve all the way down, with curved legs, with curved feet, with a curved top,” says Ellen. “I have a really interesting core build, it was quite a journey to go on to get to this shape.”
Discussion with Tintinimaginatio helped her to nail down some of the key details in the Moon Rocket. “Of course, the chequered pattern is super iconic. That is something that the IP partner was very strict on. When we first showed them, I had it like wrong by one sixth, so the chequers didn’t match up to how they are in the actual comic. So they asked, ‘can we change that?’ We were like, ‘yeah, sure, let’s change that, easy.’
“We came back and we were like, ‘that’s not easy.’ That was quite an exploration.”
There was also a discussion about which outfits the characters should wear. “We had a lot of back and forth discussions about which version, because there was feelings in the team that we should do the classic characters,” says LEGO Ideas Creative Lead Jordan Scott.
“But for them, it made more sense to do them in the spacesuits because it is related to Destination Moon and they were totally happy with that, we just worked with them on how we could get the iconic look.”
“You might be wondering why the Thompson and Thompson characters have green hair,” says Ellen. “That’s because at a particular moment in the comic, when they’re in their spacesuits, the twins are having a reaction to a medicine they took in the previous book, which changed the colour of their hair. Of course, the IP partner were like, ‘well, they have to have green hair.’”
When working with a new IP partner, the LEGO designers find it helpful to visit them in person and discuss a model like 21367 Tintin Moon Rocket.
“We took it to them in person in Belgium, so we got to sit with them and really talk through it,” says Jordan. “It’s simpler because then you can have those difficult design discussions with them and really show them the model and show them the limitations that LEGO bricks have. That was part of the introduction we gave, we’re not making one-to-one scale replicas or diecast models. We are making a LEGO product, so there will be angles. They were understanding that that’s our limitation.
“And that was the same with the minifigure design. They wanted it as close to the original comics as possible, but that’s not a LEGO style. We had to take them on that journey and say, this is how we translate IP characters that are very realistic or very stylised into our own stylised version of the minifigures, and that’s where the balance kind of came with the characters.”
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