2012's Monster Fighters was LEGO's first and only supernatural horror theme based on the classic horror monster archetypes. Studios was artifice, all being produced on sets for movies, though could be played as real if desired, while the supernatural Hidden Side theme afterward is fully ghost/possession-centric and closer tonally to Ghostbusters than traditional or Halloweeny horror. Scooby-Doo, the thematically and temporally closest successor to Monster Fighters, is all about monster hoaxes.
The Monster Fighters theme interrupts the run of Minifigures because I'm doing this discussion chronologically, and the theme directly interacts with the visual text of some previous horror Minifigures designs and kind of splits the Minifigures cast of horrors into a "before Monster Fighters" and "after Monster Fighters" arc in my mind. At least, Monster Fighters designs feature significant iteration on the Minifigures which preceded, and one Minifigures character was released at the same time, serving as a supplement/counterpart to this theme, and thus wouldn't make sense being discussed before these sets.
Monster Fighters is also relatively grim for LEGO in terms of tone, featuring dark or muted colors, an ominous visual style, and designs for some of its spooks that are plainly "the Minifigures version, but scarier". As such, the Monster Fighters rogues gallery offers a lot of conversation with the Minifigures crew that came before, but also has some shared traits with the aesthetics and settings of the Studios theme, with a couple of sets being conceptual adaptations. Not every preceding Minifigures monster was adapted for Monster Fighters or has a specific counterpart in the theme, and Monster Fighters introduced a couple of monster archetypes to the modern LEGO era or the LEGO brand altogether.
I would just like to note that the name of the theme is not very elegant. Oh, well.
The plot of Monster Fighters stars a crew of monster hunters: rapier-wielding gentleman Dr. Rodney Rathbone, pith-helmeted rifleman Major Quinton Steele, tough crossbow-deadeye Ann Lee, pistol-firin' cool-dude Frank Rock, and burly hammer-swinging Jack McHammer. None of the Monster Fighters were exclusive to one set, with Rathbone appearing in three sets and the others appearing in two sets each. (It's worth noting that McHammer appeared in only one widely-available set; the other was a whole big thing we're going to get into!)
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| Left to right: Rodney Rathbone, Quinton Steele, Ann Lee, Frank Rock, Jack McHammer. |
Rathbone introduced and was the exclusive user of a new right-leg mold depicting a ribbed metal prosthetic, likely mechanical to some degree. The prosthetic leg has no stud holes on the back, making it harder to sit Rodney on a surface (he requires a tile under the metal leg since studs would get in the way) and I don't see why stud holes would have been infeasible. Maybe the leg was just narrowed enough to make them structurally unviable. Rathbone's black hair and mustache may liken him slightly to iconic LEGO Adventurers hero Johnny Thunder. The Adventurers squad served as a clear template for the Pharaoh's Quest theme which basically reworked and action-fantasy'd up its famous Egypt line of sets, but that group of heroes can also be seen influencing Monster Fighters too.
I needed to reorder the rifle base wielded by Steele since I'd lost it, though I still had the gold parts to build onto it as officially directed. Steele's eyepiece suggests a mechanical replacment eye for one he lost. His safari pith helmet, age, and mustache recall Dr. Kilroy of Adventurers, but also the more recent Minifigures Series 2 Explorer (himself likely consciously invoking Kilroy). Steele is indicated to be an African hunter who's probably not indigenous African, so I think we can all say it's best he's directed his hunting talents to monsters rather than animals that need to just be left alone, please.
Ann Lee has a facial scar attributed to a "witch nail", which is slightly ambiguous syntax (is it a fingernail or a cursed piece of metal?), but to me, sounds like she was physically clawed by the fingers of an unseen witch enemy who has no other presence in the theme beyond Lee's bio (a damn shame; give me a witch!). Lee was the holdup on finishing this already large post; I'd lost her head somewhere/somehow and needed to order a new one...and that order was taking so inordinately long that I covered my bases and ordered another from elsewhere to ensure I'd get it in time. Naturally, both Ann Lee heads arrived on the same day. It's a good useful face print, though, so I see it as an asset to have gotten two. Lee has garlic strapped to her leg, but I'm surprised it's not Rathbone instead, seeing as he's the most set against the Vampyres.
Frank Rock is the least scathed, having scrapes on his face, but no visible deeper damage from his fights with monsters.
Ann Lee and Frank Rock have dual-sided heads, and all have back printing.
The Monster Fighters journey through a fantasy Translyvania-style horror realm to claim magic moonstones from their monster guardians before the villainous Lord Vampyre can claim them all to plunge the world into an eternal night where monsters may rule supreme. LEGO was big on collect-them-all trinkets in sets at the time, like the portal keys in Atlantis or the golden weapons in Ninjago, so the sets with the monsters were designed to let you collect the moonstones as well as the figures. (I wouldn't focus on collecting portal keys in an Atlantis minifigure collection, though, because some of the designs on the keys are specifically matched to the sets' brick-built creatures as their guardians, rather than all keys being able to map to the minifigure sea creatures. There's a crab key and a turtle key with no matching minifigures, only brick-built models of giant creatures. The keys also had multiple appearances each, including in sets without their designated matched guardians, so they're not as tidy as the moonstones.)
The flagship Monster Fighters set, Vampyre Castle, includes all of the main moonstones anyway, so you don't need to buy the separate sets to make the climactic setpiece complete, but the monster figures are mostly exclusive to one set, save for the Ghosts, Lord Vampyre, his Bride, and his Driver, who all appear in multiple sets. The Monster Fighters theme also had a Haunted House set which is widely beloved. I liked it, but have always seen room for improvement, and have undergone a long project to rebuild and upgrade it. That will be its own post!
The Mummy
In one of two smallest sets of the theme was the resident Mummy, guarding the purple moonstone. Rather than being defined by a location, the Mummy drives an Egyptian chariot pulled by an undead skeleton horse, and he wields a sharp blade--though it's not one of the curved Egyptian khopesh swords that were made for Pharaoh's Quest beforehand. Probably should have been.
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| Set 9463, "The Mummy". |
The Mummy is opposed by Ann Lee, but is not her designated nemesis in the bios. No Monster Fighter has it out specifically for this guy; Lee just happened to be there.
Like the Series 3 Mummy, this monster is fully unadorned except for his wrappings, and while the bandages are the same color, the corpse is scarier, with rotten grey skin and red eyes like most LEGO zombies. He has a nasty evil grin.
The Monster Fighters mummy suffers from less printing than the Series 3 figure, and I'd probably have welcomed either more Egyptian theming or some aged tan wrappings instead of the white. He's not one of the most interesting figures in the theme.
Wait a second...I just took another look at his set's box art. Do you mean to tell me this figure glows in the dark and I never once realized this???
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| Well, dang. |
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| Back side. |
I knew other Monster Fighters figures glowed because of their telltale glow-cast plastic, but this is glow paint, and it's darn undetectable. I can't think of LEGO ever doing a glow paint design like this before or since--it's always been visible glowing plastic casts, not a selective paint application.
Okay, fine. You saved it. You're actually cool, Mummy. Happy?
Here he is with his Minifigures counterpart.
The Swamp Creature
This is the first monster archetype introduced to LEGO's repertoire through this theme, and I could hardly imagine a more perfect rendition. The Swamp Creature is a fish monster in loose homage to Universal's Gill-Man and guards the neon yellow moonstone. He's opposed by Frank Rock and is designated as Rock's official nemesis.
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| Set 9461, "The Swamp Creature". |
He's quite colorful for the theme, but I like it. He uses a special mask piece with fish fins that surrounds his eyes and divides his head into medium green with the mask and lime with the head. His face is printed with a wonderful scowl with huge yellow fish eyes and sharp teeth, and his torso is green with lime accents and lots of scales.
The figure carried a spear in his set, but I ended up giving him a golden trident somewhere along the way, which suits him, but wasn't officially his. I only just got corrected on the spear being his official accessory by looking at the box art again. The trident was used by the next swamp monster in this discussion.
This figure could have had worn green minifigure flippers for webbed feet, like so:
It's actually a really good look, but the flippers don't connect to studs on a base, so I don't mind their absence. You could construct a stand for him with these flippers by using 1x1 "circular stamp" pieces which are like tiles that have a small bar connection sticking up instead of a stud. These would go through the heels of the flippers while the flipper studs become the studs the minifigure stands on, but picking the figure up would separate him from the flippers.
Trying to get the flippers off the "stamp" pieces is also difficult and the stamps come off the plate in trying to do so.
Alternatively, you could use a brick with studs on the side to connect to the holes in the back of his legs. This works remarkably well, and his feet only barely hover above the tile below.
I'm not keeping him in flippers or displaying him on his feet in them, but display of a minifigure in flippers is an interesting design problem to consider.
All that aside, the Monster Fighters Swamp Creature is an excellent debut of fish monsters to LEGO.
A later swamp monster, who was actually LEGO's third go with the archetype, is closely based on the Monster Fighters figure. This version featured in the post-apocalyptic comedy world of The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, with the physical minifigure coming in the movie's Minifigures series.
While I suppose it's not impossible to fit him into the horror genre if you decide this is the Monster Fighters Swamp Creature after having joined up with the heroes, canonically, this LEGO Movie 2 character's context is no longer horror. His minifigure head looks to be essentially the same print, but his torso design is incongruous with the Monster Fighters version. I do believe this is meant to be the very same minifigure "gone apocalypse", though, since there are multiple characters given that treatment in TLM2, including most characters from the first film and "Chainsaw Dave", an edgy post-apoc reinvention of the distinctive Minifigures Series 2 Surfer, called Surfer Dave in the LEGO Movie world. I have no desire to get this Swamp Creature figure at the moment, and wouldn't count him in this blog series if I did, but he needed acknowledgment.
The Werewolf
The Werewolf's set is one of the references to Studios in the Monster Fighters theme, with the scenery of a spooky tree and the werewolf monster paired together mimicking the Studios "Werewolf Ambush" set.
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| "Werewolf Ambush". |
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| "The Werewolf". |
The Werewolf is opposed by Quinton Steele, and is the Major's official nemesis.
This monster follows the Studios precedent more than the Minifigures one, with a full dog head and flannel.
The head mold for this Werewolf is a creature head, not a mask, and was used once here and never again, getting replaced afterward by the mold that debuted in Minifigures Series 14. I think it would have been fun to have a human form of this monster too, but the Monster Fighters theme was more about action spooks than the dramatic implications of a monster's existence.
I think this version of the head sculpt is pretty good, though I can see the S14 sculpt being a slight bit truer to LEGO style. I like the colors and visuals here. The Werewolf uses the handheld Marvel Wolverine claws in glow white, which isn't a fully convincing visual and prevents him from holding other things, but it's fun enough.
He's able to photograph really scary!
Of LEGO's werewolves, he's not my favorite, but there's nothing wrong with him.
The Crazy Scientist and his Monster
These figures are very direct darker remakes of the Series 4 Minifigures, with only print and color changed. These two share a set, which loosely mimics the Studios "Scary Laboratory" set by depicting a lab and reanimation table setup where a table is moved under a beam device.
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| "Scary Laboratory". |
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| Set 9466, "The Crazy Scientist and his Monster". The monster-fighting car has a slide-out side seat vefore Ghostbusters: Afterlife did it! |
I prefer the drama of the Studios lab, which uses beam arms to lift the table up to the device, while the Monster Fighters set uses a short gear track to roll the table back under the device at ground level, and the device has a red LED light brick inside to simulate the energy passing through.
The Crazy Scientist's Monster is written to be Jack McHammer's official nemesis in the bios, but McHammer isn't in the set. He was intended to be in an earlier phase of development, leaving the connection in the bios after the set cast list changed.
The Monster Fighters Crazy Scientist uses the same hair as the Series 4 figure, but his face is different, with goggles that have translucent lenses and a mustache which is just the right touch. One expression is calm with the red lens retracted and the other is grinning in a sinister manner and the red lens is on show.
His lab coat has a hanging top flap and a belt with shears and a vial in it, with back printing showing pliers and more vials in the belt behind him. There's no awkward color-blocking with his hips, which I like. I wish he had a different hairstyle to set him apart more because I think he has a serious tone to him that another hair sculpt would flatter more. The hairstyle brings down the figure for me by making him too derivative.
The Monster switches sand green for a slightly more repulsive olive tone, and his costume is a darker brown.
Continuing the gag of weird scar closures, his forehead is printed to be closed with safety pins! His face has an open-mouthed scowling grimace and looks a lot more grotesque, and his shirt under the jacket is patchwork while the jacket itself has patches and stitches on it too.
I think the Monster here is a more appealing figure than the Scientist as his tonal shift feels strong compared to the Series 4 figure and it makes sense for him to keep the same silhouette.
The Ghosts
Ghosts are a more indistinct foe in the theme, and are represented by multiple identical figures, but I'm just showing one because that's what I have left. Ordering a second copy to replace the one I lost was an idea I left for another time as it wasn't essential to me. The Ghosts are also the most plentiful monsters in the theme, with one very small polybag set featuring one, their starring set, "The Ghost Train", featuring three, and the Haunted House featuring two. I only have one now. Hm.
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| "The Ghost Train"--a super fun model! |
Ann Lee marks the Ghosts as her nemeses, making her role in this set appropriate.
The Ghosts in the train set have minifigure legs, while the Ghosts in the polybag and Haunted House have a brick and plate instead of legs. Regardless, this design is very much like the oldest LEGO ghost figure, just with a new shroud sculpt giving the face a mournful frown and giving the sheet a folded little point on the back of the head rather than a round dome.
These ghosts glow in the dark too.
This ghost design was the third figure in the Halloween accessory set that reissued the Series 1 Zombie and Witch (so I think I actually had three of this figure at one point) and was very closely copied for the Scooby-Doo theme too, but a third standard cartoon ghost shroud has since been made and has likely replaced this mold. These are simple figures, but effective ones. The Ghost in the polybag set has a ball and chain, so I put one with a copy of my representative Ghost.
Here's the two sheet ghosts together. The original sheet's glow plastic is more obviously off-color and perhaps more mucous in visual, while the newer sheet camouflages a bit better with flat white ABS. The older ghost glows a bit more yellow, while the newer one glows more blue.
The Bat Monsters
These minifigures only appeared as a duo in Vampyre Castle and have no associated moonstone. They have to share the vampire stone with the lord and lady, if they even are counted as vampires. It's not fully clear who or what they are in the grand scheme of things. They're never indicated to be transformations of Lord Vampyre and his Bride; they're separate entities. The figures are completely identical brown bat humanoids with a radically different arm sculpt molded in an upward arc with bat wings, and ending in normal rotating minifigure hands. Both arms are the same symmetrical mold, since the molding stamp appears on the front on the right wing and on the back on the left wing in the manner of one mold used for both sides. This arm sculpt is effective and got plenty of reuse, such as for DC Comics' Man-Bat, mutated Dr. O'Neil in the TMNT theme, and as a glider membrane for Marvel's Ghost Spider...but the pose only works super well with the arms in this rotation, and the arms are otherwise awkward.
Here's the back printing.
We've since seen another wing-arm sculpt in this vein for the Pterodactyl Costume Fan in Minifigures Series 27.
I kind of wish there was a feather-wing version too, if only because the Series 25 Harpy would probably be much improved by such a piece (even if she had to keep her messy colors).
The Bat Monsters would probably work fine with bat wings detached from their arms, but the Harpy would definitely work better if her wings and arms were the same.
I like the Bat Monsters. They're memorable little weirdos--not an obvious inclusion, but a fitting one.
The Zombie Driver
This is the first and most prominent of Lord Vampyre's three undead servant staff. The Zombie Driver appears in two small polybag sets with different small car designs each, and is the chauffeur for Lord Vampyre and drives his Vampyre Hearse hot-rod, as well as also appearing, for some reason, in a certain graveyard set we'll talk about soon--a set to which he has no relevance beyond simply being a zombie.
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| "The Vampyre Hearse". I still have this model, with a few pieces that need reattaching. Levers on the side raise the hearse bed with the coffin attached and push open the roof, with the force launching Vampyre forward out of the car to attack. |
I do like the Driver's visual design. The classic LEGO cap suits a chauffeur well, and his face demonstrates a much scarier take on zombies with white eyes and a nastier, meaner grimace than the cartoony Series 1 Zombie had. This minifigure head print got a lot of use in the theme, being featured on him and the Chef below, as well as on the zombie heads in the pillars of the Haunted House's porch. I think the Driver's dark blue ragged uniform and single brown glove look great for a decayed chauffeur.
He's a good design for what he is.
The Zombie Chef
This figure appears only in the Haunted House, and he's fairly basic and doesn't have a unique head print, but good lord that unique torso suggests some awfully gruesome things. Either this chef gets clumsy with tomato sauce...or.
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| Look, his cooking is murder, 's all I'm saying. |
LEGO absolutely knew what they were doing here, and it's a daring move, making this figure honestly more disturbing than the Studios Vampire and his invocation of blood. I only wish the Zombie Chef had his own head print (give him a big curly mustache!) or more detail elsewhere.
The Monster Butler
This is clearly LEGO's unlicensed take on Lurch of the Addams family, and the designers of the Haunted House said as much in a promotional video, directly calling him such. Like Lurch, he walks an indistinct line between "zombie" and "Frankenmonster" in connotation. His face is not rotted and horrid like the other Monster Fighters zombies, and he uses the Frankenmonster head extension with stitches on his brow. His face design is quite similar to the Monster in this theme, and is visibly a modification of the same print graphic, but his skin is grey like the zombies, Vampyre's other servants are definite zombies, and the figure is sometimes named the "Zombie Butler" depending on where you look. Mysterious.
I do like the dour expression of the figure and it's fun that he counts as a greyscale figure when he's not holding anything, though his "tray", a 2x2 round plate with four studs, didn't stay well on his hand. I replaced it with the round shield with stud you see here, in the same dark brown color, and moved his bottle to that shield. LEGO themselves have used this shield mold as a waiting tray in the Parisian Restaurant set.
This figure uses stitches on his forehead, and he quietly ended the running gag started in Studios where the monsters had wacky forehead closures. We had to get to the expected stitches eventually, but the monsters with this head extension afterward also have typical stitches. I feel like LEGO could have extended the creativity a little further than they did. Why not sewing buttons closing up the forehead? Toggle buttons and loops? Or just more varied stitching patterns now that the monsters entered the stitched-head era? I liked the weird forehead closures before, especially since they were in conversation with the first LEGO Frankenmonster to do it--the gag started with Studios and wasn't repeated by the next two monsters, so Studios was fully part of the running joke and I thought that was really cool.
A licensed LEGO figure of the actual Addams Family Lurch has since been made as a minidoll in the Wednesday theme. Wednesday's Lurch arguably looks better than any of his prior incarnations, but the minidoll still looks more mundane than the show character.
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| Promotional shot of the figures in the "Morticia's Cottage" set. |
Lord Vampyre
The chief villain of the theme is a marginally spookier take on the Minifigures Series 2 Vampire, bearing the same silhouette. Vampyre's differences come from his more scary faces, featuring a scowl and an open-mouthed sneer, and his head is glow-in-the dark for extra spook factor.
Vampyre's costume is a different design, too, but his colors aren't any darker than the Series 2 Vampire, who also used dark red. There'd be more fun tonal contrast if the Series 2 Vampire used bright red instead, and that kind of difference might have helped me like both designs more.
Here's Lord Vampyre with the Studios hair. I prefer this one with his original hairpiece, though. I don't love the Count Dooku sculpt in most cases, but it suits Lord Vampyre.
I think Lord Vampyre is okay, but of the close Minifigures redesigns present in Monster Fighters, he might be the least distinct to me. All the same, I end up more bothered by the similarities present in the Crazy Scientists, so perhaps Vampyre is the better design despite being arguably as derivative.
Vampyre's Bride
This is our first female LEGO vampire, and one of two simultaneous first female LEGO "monster-movie"-type horrors in this theme. (Willa is outside that niche, but was LEGO's first female classic spook). In classic-horror (but also pretty reductive) tradition, the monster is named as the Bride to her man and isn't developed much as her own entity. Even calling her Lady Vampyre would do the character better respect. Vampyre's Bride has a glowing head and black hair too, but she has a more wild look with long waves and a dress whose front is symmetrically ragged so as to expose the costume layer underneath. The pink is actually laid over the torso before going under the skirt! Her collar section isn't as opaque white as it should be, but we can pretend there's sheer pink fabric there.
I always thought the brocade-style pattern on the pink parts of her dress looked like brains; it's not, but it's close enough in color to give some gory Gothic suggestion to the print, intentional or not.
Vampyre's Bride is seen with a chemical flask element in both of her appearances, suggesting she works in potions or poisons, possibly witchcraft, but she's not the most characterized. Her alternate face is a snarl to match her husband, and neither face has red eyes, unlike the prior LEGO vampires or her spouse.
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| They look like a toxic couple who harass strangers and back each other up and amplify each others' anger. |
Admittedly, the Vampyres and the Mummy make zero sense glowing in the dark and the effect is a little kitschy in a way I don't think was intended. I imagine their figures, if made today, would speak for themselves without the glow gimmick (the Ghosts would keep it, though). It's been worse, though. LEGO had previously given glow-in-the-dark heads to the early minifigures of Professor Snape, who is a gloomy sinister man but in no instance ever glowed supernaturally. Baffling choice. They did it for Voldemort too at the time.
I like Vampyre's Bride as a minifigure. While there have been other female LEGO vampires since the Bride here, only one of them scans as a direct visual descendant of this specific minifigure instead of coming from the broader generic vampire-woman aesthetic.
The Zombies (Bride and Groom)
Ever had a number burned into your brain? For me, that number is 9465- the set number for "The Zombies". I didn't have to look up the set to remember the set number because I never once forgot it. This has been a point of discontent for over a decade of my life. Why?
Well, I saw this set once at Target on the shelf, and I mean once. I kick myself for not getting it then because it immediately vanished and I would learn the set had an extremely scarce release that rocketed its price on the aftermarket and made its star figures, the specific unique wedding-couple Zombies who guarded the pink Zombie moonstone, inaccessible. To some degree, the limited release seemed to be by design, as the set appeared to function as a bonus Target-exclusive entry in the line-- the Zombie moonstone is also exclusive, and is something of an "extra" given that the complete wheel of moonstones in the Vampyre Castle flagship set was filled when every other moonstone was added--so the Zombie stone was optional and had to take the place of another moonstone if you wanted to use it in the castle device. The climax of the story represented by the Vampyre Castle set has zero dependence on the events of set 9465. Essentially, LEGO had designated the "Zombies" set to be inessential to the narrative of the theme and maybe banked on the zombie craze or scarcity making it successful regardless. It's lived in my head rent-free ever since, and I finally decided to be that sucker and order an inflated copy of the set online. Having the two Zombies and their moonstone was something I needed to get done and put to rest and bury with a headstone planted on it. After this long, I was beyond certain I'd never stop wanting them. The set had become a major collector's item, and I'm the collector it means the world to.
My copy of the set was unboxed, but parted out in bags into the two main models-- Jack McHammer's hammer truck, and the crypt and sarcophagi in the graveyard. Things were divided a little further than that by the LEGO factory and instructions, but the build flowed well.
First, let's look at those precious rotted lovers.
Both Zombies are unique prints, with the Groom having a different head print from that used by the Driver and Chef, though it's in the same style and the three could be brothers. The Monster Butler's head is designed more like the Crazy Scientist's Monster's. There ought to have been five unique zombie heads in the theme rather than four, but at least the Groom has one and thus feels a bit more worth this ridiculous commitment.
The Bride herself is ghastly and probably one of the most disturbing LEGO minifigures ever made, especially because "disturbing" and "LEGO" are usually never in the same sentence.
Her mournful face, her drippy-looking mouth, her mismatched red and white eyes, her moldy lank once-blonde hair (I believe this ponytail sculpt has never otherwise appeared in this color) mold printed on her face, and her tattered white dress all make her look horrific and scary, particularly this face where her wide drooping red lips almost look like dribbling blood. The red eye also comes across as looking like it's pooled with blood in this context, rather than representing a red iris. She's genuinely unsettling, and possibly LEGO's creepiest minifigure. The white eye has some subtle lighter markings in it in grey which suggest a pupil or reflection, perhaps. It doesn't look like a print error.
Her dress is spare and possibly the fancier bits are already completely lost--she has no veil--and her torso is printed on both sides with scuffs and tears. Most of the dress is still white, but it looks like her belt would have once been another color, like her hair.
The back of the torso is also printed.
The Bride has a second face which looks much more focused, giving her a nasty determined smirk that reduces some of her eerie factor, but it depicts her left eyelid being more slack than the other in a fun way.
The Zombie Bride has no visual relation to the Series 7 Minifigures Bride.
The Series 7 Bride is one of those few Minifigures who has an obvious counterpart character idea that just never happened so far. We still don't have a Minifigures Doctor to pair with the Series 1 Nurse (we did get a female Surgeon in scrubs in Series 6) and we never got a wedding partner for this Bride--the expectation would be a Groom, of course, but LEGO could give her a wife too if they dared. A Groom minifigure would be so easy, too. Give him a top hat and the LEGO ring piece and he's all set.
While the minifigure bouquet piece the Series 7 Bride and Hippie simultaneously debuted hasn't come in a dead brown color, I used a plant stalk that works similarly to accessorize the Zombie Bride. It's not as good as the smaller, tidier-shaped bouquet with its longer bar grip, but it's what I had available.
The Zombie Groom is a bit less spectacular to me. I might have preferred him in a black tux, but he has a waistcoat and dress shirt with grey pants. He uses the original top hat sculpt and his face print is very similar to the Driver and Chef, just with a different expression. I like that his left arm and torso print create the impression that one of his sleeves has torn off, like the Series 4 Werewolf, and his bowtie is fully undone.
He has detailed back print.
For an addition of mine, I say he gets the ring accessory I was talking about--the mold which debuted as the One Ring in the Lord of the Rings sets!
Now let's talk about the set! In a couple of these images, some parts will be missing because I didn't realize they were absent before taking the pictures. I've also been unable to successfully upload videos to Blogger for months now, with the uploaded video not processing and presenting as an error on the published posts, so I had to rewrite this section without video clips to illustrate--at least until I get an answer and a fix. My preference is to keep the clips contained to this blog.
The set stars Jack McHammer on the good guys' side, driving a heavy truck with spinning hammers on the sides. When the back wheels turn, the hammers twirl to knock over the zombies.
The top of the truck has a rack of "flick-fire missiles" which are build on modified Technic stud pins with a bar at the back. These were everywhere in LEGO sets at the time, before finally getting replaced by more effective projectile features. The theory is that you can flick the bars at the back to dislodge the Technic pin portion from the housing, firing them forward, but this was always a little harder, clumsier, and more painful than it should be...and on this model, flicking just dislodges the missile housing from the roof.
The main model is an atmospheric graveyard crypt behind two symmetrical stone sarcophagi. The crypt has some nice spooky detail and a stained-glass window at the back, and the moonstone is held at the front.
Inside the crypt is a standard LEGO cauldron filled with two bones and two 1x1 neon green translucent studs representing liquid. This might suggest the presence of a witch, but I think it's actually part of a remnant idea LEGO evidently had for the theme.
In supplemental material, the Zombies are described as being resurrected by a character known as the "Voodoo Doctor", who has zero appearances and no established character design. I'm guessing this cauldron is an allusion to that character, or a leftover piece from when that character was planned to be a minifigure in this set. Perhaps they omitted them (though, let's be real, it was almost certainly going to be a dude) for reasons of sensitivity and stereotyping concerns, or just because logistics didn't allow the designers to put in another unique figure. Zombies do come from Vodou mythology, but I can see how LEGO might have wanted to step aside. Were they criticized for their Pirates of the Caribbean sets' tribal/voodoo "cannibal" imagery enough to make them step away? (That subject matter is the fault of the source material foremost, but it's still uncomfortable and didn't strictly have to be in LEGO's sets.) Theorizing further, perhaps the Zombie Driver's inclusion here is done to fill the minifigure slot that would have gone to the Voodoo Doctor if they'd been made. It would explain why he's here and feels so out of place.
If the Voodoo Doctor had looked something like this, I don't think we'd have much of a problem. LEGO probably could have gotten away with this then, even if perhaps there would be concerns with the concept on its face.
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| Pieced-together sketch of what the unseen character maybe could have looked like, using official LEGO minifigure parts. |
The cauldron, sans sorcerer, has a play function. A lever at the back of the crypt trips a Technic pin under the plate the cauldron is mounted on, which will disconnect the cauldron from the studs and spill its contents. LEGO suggests the cauldron and contents fly forward out of the crypt, but it mostly just makes a mess inside.
But what about the coffins? Well, this is the only Monster Fighters set where a moonstone is used as the activator for a mechanism. Turn it, and the lids simultaneously spring open with a figure standing inside.
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| Crunched screengrab from the video clip I want to share! |
I like this concept, but not much of the execution. It doesn't make sense to me that the zombie is framed basically clung to the ceiling of the coffin. The visual you want is the Nosferatu thing where they seem to rigidly pivot from flat on their back to standing on their feet. The coffins also aren't built perfectly to accommodate the figures. The Bride doesn't fit right to let the sarcophagi close properly.
Maybe that's why the Driver is in this set, so both zombie men can justify the presence of two coffins...but why are they buried together? Are they actually brothers and this is a family plot, or are they unrelated and the Zombie Bride was not actually the Groom's true love? (Let's be real; the latter would never have been intended.)
The other issue with the mechanism is that the coffins are able to swing down and rotate on their axles when the crypt is lifted, making it harder to carry the model.
I decided to take my hand to reworking it. Here's my transformation!
The big thing was reworking the coffins. Surprisingly little about them is mechanically different, and the crypt and axles are untouched. I just rebuilt the coffins in black and white his-and-hers style and I raised the sides of the coffins by one stud to guarantee the figures fit under the lids. As a compromise for the figures not being able to fit in the coffins holding the accessories I assigned them, I built spots for them on the coffin lids. On the Bride's lid, I built a clip for her flowers, and the Groom's lid has a stud for his ring. The coffins are also simply turned backward with the mechanism otherwise unchanged so the figures rise up from lying on their backs. While this new placement of the coffins makes the crypt setup more compact, there's something believable about them being lined up in a row with it. Because the lids would now block the Zombies from view being attached the way they were, I tried the mechanism with the lids loose and slotted in so the Zombies would cast the lids off the coffins when they rose, but I liked the full reset ability of the previous mechanic, so I figured out an answer. I added hinges with low-friction Technic pins to attach the lids, which let the lids fall forward and expose the Zombies when they rise, while also being able to fall back closed into a full reset when the moonstone turns the other way.
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| The Zombies risen from their backs with the lids fallen open--posed for the photo, since they need their hands empty and by their sides to really use the function. |
The lids don't always fall closed in sync because they need a bit of force to both be jerked backward, and the lids sometimes fall off the hinge plates, but it's good enough for me. The Bride needs to be attached to the studs by the back row of her 2x2 dress brick, which has her standing one stud in front of the Groom placed on his coffin's studs. It just works out to close up that way, and the coffin won't shut right if the Bride is placed using the front row of her dress brick. I also needed to replace the Groom's legs with an identical pair (easy given how basic they are) which had stronger clutch on the studs of his platform, because the legs he came with weren't gripping well and he kept disconnecting after retracting back into the coffin, being unable to rise again on the next turn as a result. The back panels of the coffins also got extended by one more stud in length to give them a "backboard" that helped align the coffin lids a little better when falling back closed.
I also, you'll notice, mounted the crypt and coffins on a base. Fortunately, even with the irregular attachment of the coffins to crypt with the axles, the build is fully within a standard stud grid, so I was able to use some olive green bricks to build a hill under the model so the bases of the coffins were fixed on the same plane as the crypt. I used some more plates underneath in dark tan with some olive piece blending into it, and added some angled octagonal plates with A-frame parts played here as tree stumps. On the left, there's a wedding arch decorated with skulls, and on the right, there's a cake table with a moldy masterpiece and some glasses of ick.
I could name this rebuilt model "Wedding at a Funeral" and leave Jack McHammer entirely out of it!
I'm very glad to have this set and these minifigures.
The Zombies, by definition, must be up there with Willa as crown jewels of my personal monster minifigure collection for the commitment to getting them and the long resentful gap in my collection they fill. Go figure. I'm not a huge zombie guy, but zombies ended up as some of my most precious figures.
Let's lastly take a quick look at all the moonstones!
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| To think I could probably sell this handful of small parts for over $100...yikes. The Zombie stone is most valuable, followed by the Ghost stone. The Ghost stone only appeared in the two largest playsets that weren't the Haunted House, while the Zombie stone is by far the scarcest. |
The moonstone mold sits on a single stud, and there is also a short Technic cross-axle connection inside which the moonstones used to slot onto the axle connectors of the castle's moonstone device.
I know LEGO geometry when building Lord Vampyre's moonstone device likely forced there to be only six stones on the wheel, but it's a shame because assembling all seven stones allows you to visually loop through the rainbow configuration, linking the purple and red ends of the spectrum with the Zombies' pink stone. Maybe only six stones being essential helps the Zombies set feel more like a bonus in a way that reduces regret of missing out, but the color wheel feels more complete with it present. I think further moonstones could have been made in translucent yellow and medium translucent "sapphire" blue if the theme were to be expanded. Regular translucent orange or another shade of translucent pink would be less distinct, but translucent yellow and medium blue would stand apart well enough against the colors we got.
Most of the moonstones' graphics are black designs and most are silhouettes. The Werewolf stone shows a wolf head howling in front of a full moon, the Vampire stone depicts the classic LEGO bat, and the Swamp Creature stone depicts some wavy water plant and bubbles. The Zombie stone depicts a minifigure arm bursting from the ground (I love that they kept it minifigure-style), but is shaded rather than a silhouette. The Ghost and Scientist (or is it Monster, or both?) moonstones use white print according to the associations of the imagery--ghosts and lightning are white; fair enough. The Mummy's moonstone depicts an Eye of Horus design and is the only moonstone printed in gold, suiting an Egyptian treasure.
Today, the Werewolf and Swamp Creature moonstones would have to be different colors because the neon orange and neon yellow-green translucents have been discontinued from LEGO's palette. They'd be regular translucent orange and translucent Bright Green today.
The moonstone mold saw three applications after this theme.
In The LEGO Movie, the LEGO world sometimes comes across small human objects, which the minifigures treat as unearthly artifacts with great power. Vitruvius has a crystal staff that is quite visible to the audience as being a mostly-eaten human lollipop with just a bit of candy still on the top of the stick.
To imitate this with actual LEGO parts for the sets based on the film, real toy Vitruvius's staff is a white pole topped by a translucent bright-green moonstone for the candy part, unprinted.
In the Jurassic World theme's first wave, a translucent orange moonstone printed with a mosquito was used to depict an ancient insect amber.
Since this was printed, it could have made a great second "bonus" moonstone for Monster Fighters if there was a minifigure who matched it. The Fly Monster from Series 14 comes closest, but he's a different kind of insect. The Alien Mosquitoids from Galaxy Squad aren't "horror" enough, but do suit the design better just for being the right species.
Both of these post-Monster Fighters moonstones were cast in translucent colors that the Monster Fighters pieces weren't, expanding the palette for the mold twice.
The third use of the moonstone was a reappearance in the Mummy stone's translucent purple, but without print, as trim for the hovering disc platform of the lead villain AntiMatter in the Ultra Agents theme.
I've seen a listing on BrickLink for a translucent light pink moonstone, a single copy, but that must be some factory test piece because the color was never produced in sets.
Six minifigure-related molds were debuted for Monster Fighters--the werewolf head, Rathbone's metal leg, the Swamp Creature mask, the bat-wing arms and ears/hair and the moonstone. Only Rathbone's leg and the werewolf head saw zero reuse for future applications, with the leg disappearing altogether and the Werewolf's head being swiftly replaced with a similar sculpt that's still in use today.
The Monster Fighters Display
I used to have the majority of my monster minifigures on one encompassing collection display base, even after I'd separated out the "old classics" onto the earlier draft of their own display stand. As my collection expanded and the design shifted to a tiered stand, the model became extremely unwieldy, though I did what I could to maximize space by building it with hollows running through the back so it wasn't fully solid bricks and storage was possible inside the base.
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| The tombstone placard build came from my original Series 14 display plate--more discussion on that in time. |
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| Removable doors to the hollows running down the back. The one marked with a minifigure stand is a compartment for more of them, while the skeletons were for excess minifigures and the arm with the torch was a compartment for accessories. |
There were definite problems with this display. The bloat in size and weight was obvious. It was inelegant and impractical. I was also getting fed up with having collection archives/libraries clumped together so that I needed to reorder everything once I added something new. I remember planning minifigure displays back in the day with placeholders I would label and put on empty stands for figures I intended to get, so I could prevent the reshuffling, but that never amounted to anything and I went back to putting everyone I had in order. I've since gotten determined to avoid, whenever possible, having collections that need perpetual reorganizing. I got great satisfaction from building my FATALogue binder of LDD death certificates in a static order that just needs to be filled in by designated spaces with no reshuffling, so that convinced me that I should aim for more closed collections when organizing my minifigures, where everything had its place pre-set and tidy to fill in. (I can't do the same method for the LDD doll collection itself, so I take my wins where I can.) This meant building separate displays for separate subsets of horror minifigures, which also had the advantages of making the Old Classics stand part of a series, while letting me explore and celebrate the unique qualities of each distinct category of LEGO horror. It does the toys more service as things I cherish to build them custom displays, moreso than plopping them into a generic display in a perfunctory manner. I appreciate any chance to re-engage with and honor the creative spirit of the things I collect to prevent owning them from being a shallow endeavor. So...what was a Monster Fighters stand?
I took the approach of creating a microcosm of the entire theme, with each monster having a spot on the board which is dressed akin to the setting they're found in in the sets. A castle environment dominates the back half with an arch and stairway for Lord Vampyre at the back, a balcony for his Bride, and a kitchen turret for the Zombie Chef, while the Monster Butler stands further down the stairs. The Zombie Driver is in a small car build that fits snug into place without being attached by any firm connections. I put the Werewolf by a small tree and bushes and the Swamp Creature in a pond, connected by his torso as if submerged in the tiles of blue water. In front of them is a pair of tombstones for the Zombies to emerge torso-up in front of, the last to arrive but certainly the most deserving of the foreground. The layout is logical and worked well. The Bat Monsters got some spots, with one on the archway roof and the other "flying" with a clear beam attached to the back and his legs, while the Ghost stands on the tower. The Moonstones are all on display as well, with Vampyre and the Ghost holding theirs, the Swamp Creature and Werewolf's beside them, and the Zombies' between them.
To solve the dilemma of where to put the Scientist and Monster, I repeated my trick with the Old Classics display and built under the surface, here with a fully attached build of an underground tower and room depicting the laboratory. The tower above the lab room is hollow with a door opening on the back to let me store the lower bodies of the Swamp Creature and Zombies inside, while the lab has a small raised table for the Monster and an outside door, as if part of a castle ruin in a subterranean cave. I realized I totally forgot about the Mummy in all this, so I threw him into the underground area. Here's my display before the Zombies arrived.
I was getting unhappy with the Mummy's afterthought placement, and thought I could maybe waste less space with a more compact parts storage, so I took the model down for a major revision.
I took out the tower cell with the minifigure parts and made a much shorter tower as a hollow open-top box in the same vein as the Monster sculpture on the Old Classics stand. The top of the display was too back-heavy to make me confident about this, though, so I made several changes. I rebuilt the castle portion of the model with less density, leaving some hollow space and using bricks with cutouts wherever I could. I also built a "sleeve" of bricks to enclose the top of the "storage box" section and reduce the possibility of the top piece falling off the bottom, even leaving gaps for the two pieces to interlock in spots for more stability. With the castle rebuild, I reimagined the chef's area to be a small pavilion rather than a tower with the front missing, which let it integrate into the arch better and make the stud connection between the two roofs less awkward. The other thing I did was change the laboratory room to not be the base of the build, instead building an Egyptian tomb below that as a third layer for the Mummy to occupy. We see no such place in the sets, but it suits him.
This tomb took some tweaking to incorporate the pieces I wanted and keep it from being too tall and spacious, and I declined to have a staircase or ladder to the laboratory layer after finding it to be too bulky and a cause of unneeded asymmetry. The tomb is partially enclosed by the rock detail from above, and has room for the Mummy and his skeleton horse as well as a sarcophagus lid, which ultimately got added later when it arrived. The other thing I did was tweak the vignettes so the Monster Fighters were in the scenery and every moonstone had a designated display spot rather than just the Zombies'. The vampire moonstone got built into a new arch in the center spire, the ghost moonstone got a floaty stand of two pieces to make it hover, while the Ghost did as well. The werewolf moonstone got put onto a branch in a revision of the tree build, and I messed with the pond to add some plants the yellow moonstone could be put on. The mummy moonstone is placed on a table in the tomb. Every Monster Fighter is with a foe they'd faced in the sets. Quinton Steele faces the Werewolf, and Jack McHammer is by the laboratory door below.
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| Before I got the correct rifle back. |
The Swamp Creature and Frank Rock also got a more dynamic display.
I put the Zombie Driver's car on a hinge-top brick attached to the second tier of the display to make the top level less choked for space, and it works to show the Driver barreling a corner underground.
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| If you look at the top of the lab tower, the light grey plates are interlocking with the dark grey wedge in the middle as part of the "sleeve" holding the top around the lower piece of the display. |
Rathbone is approaching the stairs to his nemesis Lord Vampyre while the Monster Butler is now on the edge of the pavilion ferrying things between the Zombie Chef and whatever dining area he serves.
Ann Lee was assigned to the Mummy since she's his foe in the Mummy's set, though her designated nemeses are the Ghosts, who she also fought in the sets. I was still waiting on her, though, so I didn't yet have her ready to display.
Even then, I couldn't stop. My chief concern behind this next revision was rethinking the connection of top and bottom regarding the storage compartment. I realized if I instead built up columns and a platform on the lower part to support the weight on the back of the upper part, I wouldn't even need an interlocking sleeve system around the storage box and could go back to the simple ring and plate nesting system on top, so I built up some columns which are bridged at the top and the whole thing is tiled at the right height to expand the surface the top of the display rests on and take its weight in the back.
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| The 4x4 square plate that fits into the top of the built-in storage cup. |
I had also decided the laboratory was unacceptable and to rework the middle section.
The laboratory got expanded sideways to have some more room for scenery and better accessibility for the figure posing. The Monster's table in the first lab was far too fiddly and cramped. The wider lab got rid of some of the arches in the wall, and the bigger space didn't require me to break my back for light to enter the space as much. I tiled the floor in black and white studded checks, now having a checkerboard design somewhere on each layer of the display, and built a hinged table for the Monster with upturned brackets by the neck where I could attach some green hoses, themselves built into the crenellations on the top of the lab tower, which also now features lightning accents. One hose comes through a window in a wall panel, and the other through the window in the door. It's not logical or practical, but I needed the door on the right rather than on the back wall so Jack McHammer would be visible from the front, and a crazy scientist will do whatever. The door isn't functional anyway thanks to Jack and the tile border blocking it from using its hinge. The lab is trimmed with lights and printed tiles of electrical instruments and there are a couple of levers--a must for any spooky lab. The top got trimmed with studded brackets for more of an industrial look, and the chain is attached to one stud with both ends stacked on the same point so it doesn't obstruct the view. I really like the visual of the lab tower now with its gadgets and tubes and the central visual of the reanimation table with the hoses pulsing right at the Monster's neck.
I also wanted to add a black tile border around the base of the second tier to tidy the stand more so all three layers had a bordered tier, though the middle is not a separate piece and I had to have just one tile layer without any black plates below it for it to work in my build. I couldn't make an overhang of black plates and didn't want the tile border to be vertically parallel to the tile border on the bottom layer. I wanted it to be a smaller border for the middle tier and a larger border on the bottom.
Belatedly, I got a copy of the newer short flower stalk (or Olaf's twig hair in the Frozen sets; same mold) which suits the purpose of a handheld bouquet accessory for the Zombie Bride better. The pegs are so short that putting more than one flower on is trickier, but this is much tidier. I'm guessing the Minifigures bouquet piece is retired, but this is a fair replacement.
Ann Lee got stationed in the Mummy's tomb as planned, standing in the doorway.
Here's the finished display.
Ultimately, the Monster Fighters display is a labor of love and a visual testimony to how much this theme meant to me. It's less a visual summary of a theme than a distillation, because I didn't stop until I was satisfied I'd explored the visuals of each monster and their scenery within the model. It's not dismissive of any of the figures and honors all of their contexts, just in abbreviated form.
It goes without saying that I'm very passionate about LEGO Monster Fighters.
Even if it doesn't have my all-time favorite takes on all of its monsters, it was still an all-timer of a theme just for its concept and tonal choices, and I'd love a true successor to emerge. Of the theme, my favorite minifigures are probably the Zombie Bride, Swamp Creature, and Bat Monster(s). My least favorites are probably the Crazy Scientist and Mummy--the former for being detrimentally similar to his predecessor (just a change in hair sculpt would have done the trick) and the latter for just being a little dull, though the surprise glow print is an asset.
Lastly, here's a concept sketch sheet by artist Alexandre Boudon, which contains a lot of Monster Fighters DNA, though I'm given to understand this was part of Boudon's application portfolio to LEGO rather than being an official design brief once the theme began developing. It's said to be from the year 2010, two years before Monster Fighters. It's obvious much of this page went into the theme and that Boudon was pitching his pre-existing material when that development occurred. This is fascinating.
We can see there were thoughts of closely emulating Scooby-Doo with the hero characters above being transparent stand-ins for the Mystery Gang (who LEGO would then make officially!) The Vampyre Castle set and Haunted House are visible in early form. We also see a van and campsite, pribably for the not-Mystery Gang, and a tree full of LEGO parrots as creepy birds--maybe envisioned to be cast in black as crows? That'd be fun.
Designs for a vampire and Frankenstein monster here looked much more like Studios, and with context, it's likely this sheet was drawn before the Minifigures versions of those monsters, upon which Monster Fighters' were based, released. If this is a 2010 drawing, it's definitely before the Series 4 monsters, but also could precede Series 2's Vampire as well. The zombie sketch isn't easy to identify as coming from before or after the Series 1 Zombie, though. Boudon would have been drawing from the most recent versions of those LEGO monsters, which were the pre-Minifigures originators. We can see a ghost pirate and ghost ship, which is an extremely obvious setting for the theme and one we may have gotten if it got a second wave. The dour sheet ghost basically matches the final design save for facial proportions, though I wish we'd gotten the humanoid rococo spirit! We'd have to wait a little while longer for fully humanoid horror ghosts. No animate skeletons like on this sketch sheet appeared in the theme. The skeleton is sketched with the droid arms, while the Ninjago arms were already around by the time Monster Fighters released, but probably weren't when this was drawn. We still got ball-joint skeleton arms within the Monster Fighters theme, so the Ninjago arms hadn't become the universal skeleton standard even by 2012.
It looks like flippers were considered for the Swamp Creature, which otherwise made it to official design beat-for-beat, as well as "angry mob" peasant types or possible hunchbacks which never made it past the page. The Crazy Scientist here looks a lot more wacky and interesting here. Did...did this sketch coin the name? Boudon wrote "Crazy Scientist", which is not the typical phrasing. Did he name the Series 4 and Monster Fighters minifigures with this sketch?
The Crazy Scientist's bionic look and helmet might have been adapted into the transformed evil Professor Brainstein in the Ultra Agents theme.
I also noticed the antenna sketched on that dome helmet looks awfully familiar...
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| It eventually became its own pin-accessory piece! Coincidence? |
And then there's a sketch of a Medusa minifigure. I'm delighted we live in the world where we got her, later in Minifigures Series 10!
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| And she matches Boudon's sketch pretty well! |
..should I count her as a horror minifigure in this series? Gorgons have their place in Halloween, and if she was intended for a horror theme even for a moment, maybe she needs to be here. Noted!
The sketch sheet also shows a thought of a Ghostbusters angle (another property LEGO would officially license afterward!) and a sketch for a wolf tail add-on before such minifigure tail pieces would be implemented for real, including on later werewolves! Boudon has a lot of influence that can be traced from this one sheet! I'm happy with what we got overall, and it's cool to see that a rookie's concept portfolio went on to have such an influence.
After Monster Fighters, LEGO horror briefly returned to Minifigures exclusivity, so we'll discuss a little run of those figures next.
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