The Lego Death Star
By Kip Nash

There are few of us (in my gen­er­a­tion at least) who don’t remem­ber their first intro­duc­tion to the Star Wars movies. The bril­liance of the spe­cial effects and the con­tin­u­a­tion of the story as a 3 part tril­ogy, con­spired to make Star Wars more than just another movie. It was part of an era. The pop­u­lar­ity of the Star Wars fran­chise has been con­tin­ued suc­cess­fully in recent years with the pre­quel movies, Star Wars I, II, and III. In the mer­chan­dis­ing depart­ment, Lego has also kept Star Wars at the fore­front of toy and game devel­op­ment, in a wide vari­ety of for­mats, includ­ing the Lego Death Star 10188 model which was intro­duced in 2008.

There is more than enough in this Lego set to keep you occu­pied for hours on end as you con­struct this amaz­ing project, a task not to be under­taken lightly, as it con­tains well over three thou­sand Lego pieces. Even the instruc­tion man­ual is excep­tion­ally large, at over two hun­dred and fifty pages. As it has been designed to be a playable piece, the Lego Death Star is rel­a­tively sturdy and can be moved rea­son­ably well once con­struc­tion is com­plete. How­ever, there will always be a few, small, fid­dly bits that may fall off.

The four level Death Star con­tains a com­bi­na­tion of the scenes fea­tured in two dif­fer­ent Star Wars movies. The half con­structed Death Star in Stars Wars IV– A New Hope and the com­pleted Death Star from Star Wars VI — Return of the Jedi. The model fea­tures the iconic scenes from the movies such as the Death Star Con­trol room, the Deten­tion block, the Hangar bay and, of course, the Emper­ors’ Throne room for the block­buster finale. The com­pleted project is a large sphere that does not have the outer shell, but rather leaves each inter­nal loca­tion eas­ily avail­able. The set is designed in detail and there are spe­cial touches to make the Death Star more fun, such as the rotat­ing guns and the spin­ning chairs.

A great advan­tage of this model is that it is not just visual project that sits on a shelf once it is fin­ished. This Lego 10188 Model is con­structed to be an item of play, and is approx­i­mately 16″ high and wide when it is com­pleted. The set includes 24 fig­ures allow­ing you to re-enact some of the most mem­o­rable scenes from the movies.

Some of the fig­ures in the Lego Death Star 10188 are exclu­sive col­lec­tor items in their own right, in par­tic­u­lar the new ver­sions of Han Solo and Luke Sky­walker dressed in Storm Trooper gear, and both the inter­ro­ga­tion and death star droids which have never fea­tured in any of the pre­vi­ous sets. The Dianoga trash crea­ture is also made avail­able for the first time so you can play the scene in the trash com­pactor where Luke, Han and Chew­bacca help Princess Leia escape from the deten­tion cen­ter in the orig­i­nal Star Wars IV.

The Lego Death Star is not a cheap toy, but rather one of great intrin­sic value. It is value for the con­struc­tion time, role-playing fun and a cer­tain nos­tal­gic value that sets it apart from most other toys.The price tag may be high, though it is cheaper now than when it was first launched, but this par­tic­u­lar model is very spe­cial and worth every cent!
http://www.lego-deathstar.com

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