Lego Unveils New Spring Festival Sets, Shanghai Theme Park Plans
After the Spring Festival dinner, dragon dance troupe, and dragon boat race sets from this year, Lego has two new China-focused creations coming our way for Spring Festival 2020: a lion dance troupe and a bustling festival complex. We were kind of hoping for a full Journey to the West set, but we’ll take these for now.
The lion dance set seems kind of an obvious go-to after the dragon dance one for the Year of the Pig, but when put together with the Spring Festival-time temple fair offering it looks pretty exciting. That’s how they’re marketing the sets — recognizing that they probably look more impressive as a combination — as this image (from Lego’s official Weibo account) shows:
You can see the temple fair up top there, also from the account, and this is the lion dancer set:
And here’s a video exploring both of the Spring Festival 2020 sets in a bit more animated detail:
Take my money.
The new additions come with plenty of festival trappings and crowd-pleasing Chinese characteristics such as new years greetings banners hanging on trees, fireworks, a shadow puppet show, mantou, and a toy panda for sale at one of the temple fair stalls. There’s also a guy dressed as a rat to go with the “pig man” figure from 2019.
These will be on shelves in China on December 26 and worldwide from January 10.
In related plastic brick news, it was also announced this week that a Lego-branded theme park will be opening in Shanghai in 2023. A Legoland China has been in the works for some time now, but it's finally been confirmed for the Jinshan district of Shanghai, with artist impressions showing a whole host of themed rides and a Lego hotel. Bricktastic.