Lego Ideas - Ghostbusters Ecto-1 ... ...

"If there's something strange in the neighbourhood, Who you gonna call?"

I've mentioned before that I grew up not owning a single Lego toy as they were simply too expensive for my parents. As an adult, Lego has never caught my interest but these days, they are doing something right to make me part my dollar for these super non-articulated figures aka minifigs. In my previous entries, I have been indulging the bootleg market with cheapo fake minifigs but the Lego Movie did have its effect on me when I bought some of the minifigs. However, this time, it's the ECTO-1 that had me sold.

It was quite a blast getting this set done and it really brought back quite a bit of memory of watching the movie.

Speaking of the movie...the theme song just kept singing in the head when I'm fixing it or taking photos of it. For those uninitiated, tutorial video is right below and more information about who the Ghostbusters are here.

All right...now that you have the music in your head on repeat mode, let's take a look on how much fun I had.

This isn't your regular commercially mass produced Lego product. It's a new product (Lego Ideas) line that allows MOC (My Own Creations) creators to poll for public interest for Lego to mass produce the creation.

The original submission of Ecto-1 is can be seen here. This is #006 and by far the most number of peices (508).

How does Lego Ideas work? See the picture below.

Open the packaging up and you see bags of bricks and pieces and what I like is that the instructions manual provides quite a bit of information to Lego Ideas, the creators, the engineers at Lego and background on Ghostbusters and Ecto-1. I've included a few of those mentioned pages below.

I started off with the 4 minifigs and they are customised to look different. The connector for the Photon Pack will block out the names on the suit.

Here they are, the Ghostbusters! From left, we have Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler, Peter Venkman and Winston Zeddemore.The display stand is really a very nice touch for collectors.

There are 4 Photon Packs, 2 radios and 1 trap.

Backview of the Photon Pack. The building of Ecto-1 begins below.

The completed Ecto-1 and I've used the extra pieces to modify it a little but decided I will keep to the original look later.

With the extra parts, I gave Egon my very own MOC P.K.E (Psychokinetic Energy Meter) sensor.

The side window design is interesting as you can flip it upwards and creates a wind down look. See the picture below.

There have been unhappy fans lamenting that the Ecto-1 doesn't have proper sitting positions for all 4 minifigs. Well, it's really quite a bummer...guess they have to squeeze.

Well, they sure do look happy...

I can even dump 2 Photon Packs and the trap at the back.

The minifigs come with 2 facial expressions and all 4 here look "scared".

Ghostbusting!!

Who you gonna call?