Cheating the Collection, As Ever: LEGO Minifigures Series 25

 For a toy that's driven so much of my life, you'd think I'd have given LEGO its own post sooner!

I talked about my history with Playmobil last year in a series of posts I'm proud of starting here, and now it's time to talk about the next phase in my childhood toy journey. LEGO probably needs no introduction. It's the most famous Danish product in the world and everybody's seen it and likely owns a thing or two they made, at the least. I never paid much attention to LEGO until I was eight years old and saw the Power Miners sets on the shelf at Target.

LEGO stock photo of the Stone Chopper, my first LEGO set. 

The theme was a re-imagining of an older mining adventure theme called Rock Raiders, and the sets featured unusual rock monster antagonists which were figures with hinged jaws that let them eat a crystal piece! I had to have that figure.

And here's Meltrox (LEGO's name for him), the figure that started it all. 

He reminds me a little of a trash bin with a pedal-controlled lid! 

The rock monsters would be succeeded by lava monsters as the miners went deeper into the earth in the second wave of Power Miners sets. The lava monsters had the same body sculpts, but their rock features were black, and their heads were translucent with a spikier sculpt. The rock monsters were crystalline, but the lava monsters were molten. 

After discovering these weird little guys, I latched onto LEGO's next round of weirdos with the Space Police III theme, featuring futuristic cops rounding up bizarre alien criminals. Optically, the whole "humans chasing after aliens who are all crooks" thing does not age well at all, but the villains were such enticing figures to collect. I then went on to collect things like the new Harry Potter sets (I disavow today) and collected some hauls of older collections from garage sales, which is always a treasure trove. I got the LEGO books and learned everything about the brand's history and the coolest things from its past. Among the cardinal things I learned? If you want to be a hobbyist, LEGO as a brand is to be styled in all caps, and LEGO is an adjective or modifier for the product, and not a noun by itself unless you're referring to the company. Officially, there is no such thing as "a Lego" or "Legos". There are, however, "LEGO bricks", "LEGO pieces", "LEGO sets", and "LEGO minifigures". People will naturally speak colloquially and nobody's at all wrong for using the brand name more casually, but as a fan, the LEGO-preferred grammar has been hard-wired into me!

Also, it'll come up, so the four most basic aspects of the LEGO building brick system should be gone over--

• Studs--what most LEGO attaches with. These are the round bumps on top of bricks which fit neatly into the round holes and corners under LEGO pieces, and the units by which pieces are measured--a 2x2 brick would be a brick in a square shape with four studs on top. Round 1x1 plates are also commonly referred to as studs, as they look like studs which have been disembodied. Studs also offer an atachment between them--a 2x2 grid of studs allows a round 1x1 piece to fit in the space in the middle of the four studs. Tubes under larger bricks with at least two rows of studs give the pieces support, but can also fit in these gaps when the bricks are attached to a studded surface.
• Bricks--the standard building elements. Can come in various shapes (rectangles, circles, wedges, etc. and are referred to by their stud footprint. Bricks can be 1x1, 1x4, 2x3, etc.
• Plates--Plates are 1/3 the height of a brick, and come in most of the same shapes. Plates can be used for roofs or ground surfaces, as well as paneling and wings for machines and the like--basically anything that needs a thin assembly. Three plates in a stack can substitute for a brick, and colors can be mixed within a brick's height if you fill the same space with plates in different colors. Stacked 1x1 square plates create a seamless approximation of a 1x1 brick, but 1x1 round plates have ridges that create a texture when stacked. Round plates greater than 1x1 can stack and match the shape of an equivalent round brick. Some plates are not studded in the same way as bricks, like "jumper" plates which are 1x2 but have only one stud in the middle, departing from the typical grid, or plates that are 1x4 but only have studs on each end. 
• Tiles-- the same height as plates, but with no studs on top. These can be used to make a surface smooth and to display pieces without using a stud connection. Using tiles on top of two stacked plates of the same shape essentially gives you a brick with no studs.

That might sound confusing, but it will hopefully make the rest less confusing.

I don't buy sets very often now, since character collecting has always been my main drive, but I have built things on my own for fun, and two years ago, got back into building with what I had to some fun results. I might talk about that another time. 

The big presence that I've never dropped is the LEGO Minfigures line. Debuting in 2010, the line introduced a blind-bagged gimmick to sell individual minifigures with accessories. 

These characters introduced archetypes or more personable, distinctive renditions of archetypes that were unique, and the minifigures helped raise the bar for personality and production value across the LEGO brand as they featured more detailed prints and started receiving higher proportions of new accessory and hair/headgear sculpts to make the LEGO world more vibrant. Series 1 introduced the longest-running format of sixteen characters packaged in foil packets. Nobody I ever saw bought into the blind-bag surprise gimmick, and a whole widespread culture of feeling the bags and identifying the pieces by touch developed. Everywhere, people would sift through packets and feel them to try to get the right figure, and it became an acquired skill to hone. Even in LEGO brand stores, employees would offer to feel the bags and ID a figure if a customer asked, and customers of all ages would hunker together around the cases to ID figures and hand them off to people who wanted whichever one they'd just figured out. Nobody I observed played LEGO's game of buying blind and swapping with friends, but it still remained an option for those who wanted that. The first few series of Minifigures had bump codes on the back of the packets that corresponded to the contents, but that was soon removed, leaving no visual tells. Early Minifigures often came with spare parts for small pieces, like regular sets, but this practice was phased out for a while before coming back. 

Minifigures ran steady in their original format until after Series 8, with the first divergent series. Just known as the Team GB series, it was a set commemorating the 2012 London Olympics, with nine generic figures representing different sporting events, and each wearing a gold medal accessory which debuted with the Series 7 Swimming Champion. The Team GB series had limited release, and I never saw it in the US. To date, it is the smallest series in the line. Series 9 then resumed the regular series until after Series 11, when the series based on The LEGO Movie was made, in a set of sixteen. Right after that was the first fully external license, with a series based on The Simpsons. Other licensed series have been regular releases since, with standard series being spread farther apart, likely to their benefit to reduce the rate of ideas being spent. The other licensed series have been the second Simpsons series, the three Disney series (each series had eighteen figures), the two LEGO Batman Movie series (each series had twenty figures), a limited-release series of twenty based on real German footballers, the LEGO Ninjago Movie series (twenty figures), the LEGO Movie 2 series (twenty figures), the DC Comics series, two Wizarding World series (the first series had twenty-two figures, the second had twenty), a Looney Tunes series, a Muppets series, and the two Marvel series. Some of these series have unique base colors and prints for the figures to stand on.

Series 10 represented a milestone event for Minifigures, which LEGO decided to create huge debacle for with Mr. Gold. Mr. Gold was a vac-metalized chrome golden dapper gentleman who was produced in a quantity of 5,000, and was a rare chase figure included in Series 10. 

LEGO render of Mr. Gold.

This created a massive Willy Wonka-esque craze of people raiding their local Series 10 cases to try to feel for him or even tear packages open to obtain him unscrupulously, ruining the intended fun for a lot of kids, but also getting hopes up with artificial demand for a cool figure most people wouldn't get to have. Unlike Wonka's Golden Tickets, the minifigure was the end reward and not linked to another prize. Not that you'd need any nore reward from such a coveted toy! I never got Mr. Gold myself, but Medusa was my real favorite from that series, anyway. LEGO hasn't repeated a fiasco like this since, though they have included more mundane extra chase figures in Series 17 (that one was part of the total of sixteen), Series 20 (that one was an extra seventeenth figure) and the first Harry Potter series (two added onto the twenty others).

The Minifigures line has also had a few divergent series without licensing involved, themed more on a consistent genre. The first example was my very favorite series--2015's Series 14, "Monsters". This was the first series I chose to collect every figure in, because duh. I'd like to look that collection over in another post because they're still great. Later, Series 18 and 23 were themed on the popular recurring costumed characters in the theme, each presented as a costume party of varying suits. And upcoming, there's been leaks of a space-themed series of characters and all of them look incredible. That might be my number-two favorite series! I've made it clear I'm a collector of fantasy characters, and those are the ones I gravitate to in every series the most consistently, so genre series that give me all fantasy characters have me completely suckered. The Space series will certainly be on the blog.

 

Over time, the Minifigures line has undergone other changes. The prices have risen, making them riskier purchases blind, and the series size shrunk consistently from sixteen to twelve figures starting with Series 21, excepting the third Disney series. Perhaps LEGO found production costs or ideas too precious to keep the prior standard of 16, or else got burned out on the extra-large series. I don't know. It might also be a way to make completing a series less costly with how much more the figures add up than they used to. The minfigures still have their nickname/archetype names, but LEGO stopped writing little bios for them ages ago, which were cute and humorous ways to establish a personality for the figures, as well as make references to older series' figures and pieces of LEGO history.

And the last change? For sustainability (admirable), they switched to fully-blind cardboard boxes (tragic).

The first time LEGO did this was with its flopped recent Vidiyo theme, which was built around an augmented-reality app, something LEGO insists on doing despite multiple failures to integrate tech into their toys. The Vidiyo theme was a fantastical collection of wacky musicians who fell into different genres, and its collectible figures, while sub-Minifigures in production level, were still enticing...but they were blind-boxed in cardboard, leaving purchases risky. The line failed so hard I never saw the second series of figures in person and still need to get a few online. People were worried this was the future of Minifigures, which was later confirmed. Marvel series 2 debuted the fully-blind boxes. This change is understandable and respectable, but it also makes in-person buying or buying blind untenable for me by removing the informed-buying option the previous setup allowed. I guess I'm a full-series collector now, because my method has now shifted to buying a complete set of twelve from eBay. It's the most efficient way of getting what I want now. With that, we have a full series to review!

Series 25 uses yellow for its theme color, much like Series 1, 10, 12, and 16. Many colors have been reused for series, and it actually took until Series 24 for a single series to be coded with pink! None have been purple yet, and it feels like an anti-feminine bias, like LEGO is scared the toys won't sell with boys if the packaging is pink or purple. The boxes are cardboard with a flat front panel that's larger than the chamber containing the parts. 

As usual, only some of the figures appear in the art on the individual units, while full cases have art of each of the characters. This is no longer meaningful in a series that you can't feel out, since the images can no longer serve as visual guides for tactile identification.

The boxes tear open pretty easily, and the figures are disassembled per LEGO standard. 

Figures with cloth components have those packaged in cardboard envelopes to keep them from getting bent, like in sets. Later series with foil bags packaged cloth elements in their own plastic packets, which was an instant way to narrow down which figure you had because the rustle of the plastic inside was very distinctive.

The stands debuted for the Minifigures, and are one thin plate high, 4 studs by three studs in footprint when placed on a brick surface, and are smooth except for a line of four studs across the middle. These are good for standing most figures, but a few have had a 1-stud footprint and thus cannot center on the base, and quadruped animals cannot attach very well to the bases because they attach strongest to bricks when both their front and back feet are attached to studs.

The collector sheet follows the same style as it always has, though the CG1 renders in the early series had some mismatches from the produced toys. These renders depict the toys one-to-one.

Later in the game, the backs of the sheets started including instructions for some of the more intricate assemblies, teaching how to wrap capes and cloth skirts and showing the assembly of smaller elements. This continues today. 

Alright, let's commence! Order is in the order these were opened. 

Triceratops Costume Fan

I'm not the biggest fan of the costumed-character trend in the Minifigures, and especially not of the ones where the mask is a hood that leaves the whole face open, because you can't pretend they're anything but a costume. The first costume was the Series 3 Gorilla Suit Guy, a classic in real life. 

...but then costumed characters gradually became a staple, and far too many of them have open faces for my liking. The Triceratops guy is still nicely-done. I like his olive color and printing, and him being older is fun. Maybe he's a natural history museum employee, or else just a goofy hobbyist.

The tail is on a bracket that slides over his leg pegs and his torso locks it in. Many tails like this now exist, and this is probably a new sculpt. The mask definitely is. Tails like this are all made in a softer flexible plastic.

He has a second face with an open-mouthed smile.

This figure does nothing for my sensibilities, but with the right olive-colored head, you could make a full reptile creature from his body. 

Goatherd

If you're not in the LEGO community, you won't understand, but this guy is a huge deal. 

The main attraction making this guy important is the inclusion of the goat, an animal sculpt that was debuted, scarcely used, and then went out of production for ages many years ago. 

People have been clamoring for the goat to come back ever since it went so underutilized and went M.I.A., and this is its triumphant return. It's been reported to be slightly different, indicating they might have re-created the mold with a couple of tweaks (I think the official story was a damaged mold prevented LEGO from trying to bring the goat back for so long), but the goat is here again for those who wanted it!

The goatherd himself is pretty simple and classic, fitting into the mundane side of LEGO's classic "Castle" sphere of sets that's been a mainstay in their catalogue. LEGO Castle comprises medieval history and medieval fantasy alike, depending on the theme.

 The Goatherd has a simple peasant costume and holds a short bar as a walking stick. On his back, he has a common open sack piece, and he includes two 1x1 round tiles to serve as goat cheeses he's made!

The sack slides onto his neck before his head pops on.

The Goatherd has an alternate face print showing him with closed eyes, perhaps napping on the watch.

While he came with two "cheeses", the second might just be a spare part. Both fit in his sack regardless.

This isn't the most exciting figure, but he's cute and gifts us back a nice LEGO animal. 

Harpy

This one feels fairly overdue. 

I'm a Greek mythology nerd and I've dutifully collected the Minifigures series' previous entries into Greek myth, but it's been a while since our last direct one, the Faun in Series 15, and a harpy feels like it should have been here sooner. (There was a centaur in Series 21, but she felt more like a woodland fantasy character than a Greek myth.) A harpy was even one of the figures I wrote on a list of things I wanted LEGO to do! I'm not totally sold on the actual Harpy's blue, pink, purple, and gold colors, but she looks vulture-like and nasty!

The Harpy's wings are attached to a clear neck bracket with two studs, and are clipped into purple clips that let them turn to "flap". Her legs are an animalistic sculpt debuted with the Faun which reflect a digitigrade stance. The legs move much further backward than forward, in reverse of the norm, and have no holes to attach to bricks on the back, unlike normal legs.

The talons are handheld accessories, debuted with Marvel's Wolverine.

And here's my mythology collection, including the Series 6 Minotaur, the Series 12 Battle Goddess, the Series 7 Ocean King, the Series 9 Cyclops (green), the Series 13 Lady Cyclops (blue), the Series 15 Faun, a centaur I put together myself, and my favorite, the Series 10 Medusa.

Color palette aside, she's still one of my favorites in this series. 

E-Sports Gamer

This is the third gamer character in the Minifigures line. The first example in Series 10 was more like an at-home gamer, the second in Series 19 was like a Let's Player or content streamer, and this is the first e-sports competitor. 

Her hair sculpt might be new in this pink color, and she has a lime headphones piece that goes between her head and torso. Her colors are quite bright, and her shirt design references the old Black Falcons faction from LEGO Castle history. She comes with two tiles decorated like a rainbow-LED gamer mouse and keyboard, and she has a golden trophy for winning, and an overjoyed face to match!

The back of her shirt has a Vita Rush logo, a fictional brand that appears a lot in modern LEGO City sets.

I like this figure okay, but I feel like this was a big missed opportunity to create a new hair sculpt with cat-ear headphones on top. That's the most immediate visual marker/stereotype for a modern gamer girl, and would make the figure feel like she was bringing more new to the table, since none of her sculpts debut here. Maybe that was deemed to be overly gender-stereotyped, or just too frivolous for a competitive setting. I do like the hair and it might be useful, but this one feels a little underbaked to me.

Film Noir Detective

A Sherlock Holmes-style detective was done in Series 5, so now the later noir genre is being covered with a black-and white figure!

He certainly looks hard-boiled, and the greyscale look is great, though I might have preferred higher contrast, like a darker grey suit and a black mustache so he looked more chiaroscuro, and younger. Maybe his skin could have been light grey and his costume and mustache could have been black for a more moody look.

The magnifying glass piece has been around for ages, but it's always fun to see it working!

His trench-coat collar is just a fabric piece that folds over itself like other capes.

My favorite thing about him, though, is his second accessory-- a classic LEGO fish that depicts a literal red herring!

LEGO has a very lovably silly sense of humor, and I love when it really shows through. 

Here some other greyscale figures I have--all of them are meant to be spooky horror characters, unlike the Detective.

Left to right--Series 12 Spooky Boy, Series 16 Spooky Boy, Series 25 Film Noir Detective, Series 18 Spider Suit Boy.

The only other greyscale characters that come to mind are Peeves the Poltergeist from the old Harry Potter sets, the Series 2 Mime, the Series 10 Sad Clown, and the two renditions of the "Steamboat Willie" Mickey characters, made a couple of years back-- when LEGO required a license for them!

I don't think this guy is the best execution he could be, but he's still wonderfully creative.

Dog Groomer

This is the first real "City" figure, depicting a new niche of life. 

The Dog Groomer looks like a friendly older lady, and I like the colors of her uniform. She has a new hair sculpt which features a cochlear implant on her left side. In the past couple of years, LEGO has committed hard to depicting disability in its minifigures with some really respectable diversity, and this is just one of three disabled characters in this very minifigure series. The Dog Groomer is the first LEGO minifigure I've owned depicting a facet of the Deaf community, though she's not the first to represent that sphere--several figures now have head prints that feature hearing aids on the side of the face.

She has a second facial expression with a close-mouthed smile, and her apron string is printed on her back.

The Afghan hound is a new dog sculpt, and it looks great.

Train Kid

This is a vehicle-costumed character, of the likes debuting in Series 18. Here, it's a small boy in a train.

 

The figure itself features an engineer's costume and has the medium-length legs, which are shorter than normal but still bend. These are a recent minifigure innovation that have become ubiquitious since their introduction a few years ago. The boy also has a visible eyepatch, suggesting he only has one eye, or else needs a patch for other reasons, and is intended to be another disabled character. 

The locomotive itself slides over his leg pegs and his torso goes in the top. Here's what it looks like bare.

And here it is completed.

The wheels on the ends actually have rotating axles, and they're taller than the fake middle wheels so the train costume can roll across the ground when it's not being worn. 

This is a cute idea executed well, and the train alone could work for some miniature builds, but the figure itself isn't one I would have gone out for. 

Fierce Barbarian 

LEGO often does opposite-gendered counterparts to prior Minifigures, and this is one of them--she corresponds to the Series 11 male Barbarian.

LEGO render of the Series 11 Barbarian.

I really like the Fierce Barbarian's primary-red hair, giant claymore, and grey eye paint. The hair is new to her, and the sword might be too. If the sword isn't debuting here, it's still a recent piece. On the other side, her face isn't as ferocious and doesn't have the intimidating face paint.

Just like the Series 11 Barbarian, this wasn't one I would have sought, but I do really like and appreciate the figure. 

Vampire Knight

Okay, this is the big ticket right here. My number-one "need" of the series. I wasn't alone, because he's not only awesome--he's a nostalgia figure!

Sometimes, LEGO remakes and references older figures, and this guy is a direct remake of Basil the Bat Lord, the overlord antagonist from the horror-fantasy Fright Knights theme in the Castle range in 1998. 

Photo of the classic Basil minifigure from Brickset.com.

Not only is Basil an awesome figure, but the Fright Knights theme means a lot to me personally. Co-starring in evil schemes alongside Basil was LEGO's very first witch, Willa. 

Willa is my most prized minifigure. She's older than me and represents LEGO's first run at my favorite monster archetype, as well as looking great in general. 

Using this photo of the witch house I built her to show off her cape print!

These are enough to make her precious to me, but it's the story of acquiring her that makes Willa priceless. 

As mentioned, I often took in garage-sale or donation hauls of LEGO collections. People knew I was the kid to drop their LEGO off with during clearouts. One garage sale lot came in a bag or two, and had lots of goodies, as well as a brick I knew was meant to be a dress. Up until a few years ago, dresses were depicted with roof bricks that had weak attachments to the torsos and were a little taller than legs, since the bricks weren't designed for figure bodies. This brick was even more unusual, though, since its texture was all smooth (modern roof bricks have rougher slopes) and had no tube support underneath--it just attached onto four studs with the inner edge. I knew this was an old piece, and eventually learned it belonged to Willa, which was exciting, but I didn't have the rest of the figure and the outdated print style didn't fit any modern pieces, so the dress just sat around disused for multiple years. Then, my local church fair happened as it did every year, and there was a rummage-sale table. There was a bucket of LEGO, which I bought immediately on principle. I carried it over to the picnic table and sifted through my gains, and my heart about stopped when I saw the entire top half of Willa, the nicer caped version and all, in that bucket of pieces. It was only her top half, as well. No dress in the bucket. I immediately put her together when I got home. It was as if I had collected a single source copy of Willa in two halves from two different hauls across multiple years--and to this day, I think it's still a possibility. It sounds impossible, but the odds of me building one Willa from two halves of two separate figures and not getting any duplicate parts feel even more unlikely to me. The two hauls were both local, so each coming from the same household was possible. Maybe I got two LEGO hauls from the same family at different times and places, or else Willa got split across families when kids swapped pieces around. Who knows. I feel like circumstances smile upon me with witches from time to time, and nothing can top the magic of getting a grail figure in the most unlikely way I can think of. 

So Fright Knights carries value in my mind. And the Vampire Knight is an awesome remake of Basil. The figure explictly frames him as a vampire this time, and trades in standard human yellow for white skin and red eyes in typical LEGO vampire fashion, and adds detail to his prints. His cape is now red inside, and features the same as Basil, but more, on the back.

While I think it works for a witch to be in a spooky fantasy theme alongside a non-supernatural overlord, I like the reinterpretation so both villains are explicitly monsters. 

The other face of the Vampire Knight has an awesome two-toned red glow around his eyes like he's using magic. I like the way this fills the eyeholes in his helmet better.

I don't love the grey eye shadows on the other face because it makes the eyeholes grey. The figure would remind me more of the original Basil if there were higher contrast from the white skin inside the eyeholes, but the red does work great and the darker eyeholes give the helmet more of the feeling of a dramatic monstrous head.  The helmet itself is a little sleeker, and doesn't have a stud on top anymore. I do miss that. The older helmet also more clearly mimicked the LEGO bat animal sculpt that's still in use today, which isn't the case on the new one.

Here's all the LEGO vampire figures I currently own. There are a couple from Vidiyo Series 2 that I need, one of whom breaks the white-skinned mold. 

Top row: Monster Fighters Vampyre's Bride, Scooby-Doo Dracula, Studios Vampire, Minifigures Series 2 Vampire
Middle: Vampire Knight
Bottom: Monster Fighters Lord Vampyre, Minifigures Series 14 Spider Lady

And here's all of my Castle villains.

Top row: Castle 2013 Evil Wizard, Minifigures Series 7 Evil Knight
Middle: Willa the Witch, Vampire Knight
Bottom: Minifigures Series 5 Evil Dwarf, Minifigures Series 13 Evil Wizard

And just the two Fright Knights villains, reunited across the decades and art styles.

LEGO referenced Fright Knights in the Minifigures theme previously, with a great meta-concept--this Fright Knight is the lingering ghost of an original Fright Knight in aged armor, still wearing the suit and ready to serve.

LEGO render of the Fright Knight from Series 19.

Only one Fright Knight in one Fright Knights set wore this helmet sculpt, so the Series 19 figure might be this exact guy beyond the grave:

A Fright Knight from set 6047: Traitor Transport (photo from Brickset.com).

It's a very loose remake and doesn't feel super authentic (the breastplate sculpt wasn't around back then, the color contrast doesn't map up, and the face looks nothing like the older soldiers), but I still appreciate it. This figure introduced the updated Fright Knights bat sigil that the Vampire Knight also uses. 

I think the two modern Fright Knights make sense together--vampires are essentially immortal if they don't get murdered, so Basil could wake up from hibernation to command the soldiers who died under him eons ago!

Well, that was disproportionately-discussed enough! I love this figure and it's the best in the whole series. 

I'd shoot myself out of a cannon into Denmark if they revealed a Willa remake in another series, just to get one that early!

Fitness Instructor

This is the Minifigures line's second character with this title, and the second woman with it as well. The Series 5 version was more of an eighties aerobics gal with a boombox, while this one feels like a modern gym worker.

I like her arm tattoo and the small builds that create her drink bottle and kettlebell weight. The hairpiece is common, but not in that color, which might be new for it. The bottle has the same Vita Rush branding as the E-Sports Gamer's shirt.

Her alternate face looks pleased with a tough workout.

I can't relate to her lifestyle even remotely, but she makes it look fun!

Mushroom Sprite

This adorable classical fairy child is the female counterpart to the Series 21 Forest Elf.

LEGO render of the Forest Elf.

The Forest Elf is taller due to having medium legs (the Sprite has the original static short legs at the smallest height), and his mushroom accessory lends him a more cartoonish tone than the Mushroom Sprite. The Sprite has a wonderful cap with dots and gills, and her dress uses a small plastic skirt piece and features a print that looks like a mushroom frill! Her accessory is a beautiful butterfly.

Her cap has a pin hole that fits pins for LEGO hair decorations like tiaras and plumes.

Her alternate face looks like a joyous giggle.

She has eyebrows that get covered by her cap.

She's just a sweet and magical little figure, capturing vintage wonderment and fairy-tale fantasy. I adore her. 

Sprinter

This is our last figure--a star athlete who sprints like a champion with prosthetic legs.

The prosthetic leg sculpt debuted just recently, and now we've got a sculpt for each side with this figure. Previously, only the left leg sculpt existed. The Sprinter has Black-textured hair (standard minifigures, regardless of racial coding, share the same yellow color) and he's earned a gold medal, as well as a spot on the winner's platform, represented by a brick. He's competing in this year, as indicated by his badge, and his alternate face is strained with the running. The prosthetic legs attach to studs and the top half has holes to let him sit while attached to studs. 

Unavoidably, I get grim connotations from a champion runner with two legs like this because it recalls Oscar Pistorius, who was a beloved athlete and an inspiration to many until he murdered his girlfriend, losing his reputation in the process. I have every hope that the LEGO man is pure of heart, though, and he does stand for nice representation when that connotation is discarded. The legs can easily go to any character as well.

These were all the spare parts from the twelve figures, if you don't count the second "goat cheese".

Conclusion

So that's Series 25...and I don't at all regret my approach of buying a complete set. Every figure was done really nicely, and there was a really high proportion of must-haves this time, with four of twelve being characters I couldn't pass up.

My top favorites in descending left-to-right order.

The only character I really feel like I don't have use for is the Triceratops Costume Fan, and even his parts can be repurposed. This was a really strong batch of figures, so this shift in buying proved worthwhile--this time. I know this will also be the case for the Space series which is essentially a solid-gold assortment, and we'll see what happens from here. I worried that the shrinking series sizes and cardboard packaging would spell doom for the Minifigures line, but this is really good material coming out, and if the quality of figures is so good, then I think there's life yet in the line to come.