Lego Purists may hate this… unless they are remotely open minded.
I, like many Lego enthusiasts, won’t let my pure blood, pedigree Legos mix with any other sort of fake Lego knock offs. That includes Mega Blocks, Tyco, Countless oddities, and of course Lepin and its band of similar outfits from China. (From here on I’ll simplify and lump all Lepin like companies (POGO, GUDI, Enlighten, HSANHE, XINGBAO, Legcool, etc) in together and just call them Lepin). The notorious difference between Lepin and the other fake Lego companies like Mega Blocks (etc) is that Lepin full on clones Lego bricks, sets, and minifigures. Mega blocks has compatible bricks, but they do their own design work and their figures are usually quite different. Mega blocks and the other above board companies also procure licensing before creating a figure in the likeness of Bender, Star Trek figs, Mario Brothers, etc. Lepin is likely not licensing anything, and its clones are so egregious that they even copy the official Lego kit’s box art. Lepin has been cloning official Lego sets, Lego Ideas failures, and community entries and even custom figures from small custom fig operations. It is easy to be outraged by the straight up cloning.
Lego is of course always attempting legal action but that can be tricky in China. It is my opinion though, that Lepin could fill some niches that Lego will leave open indefinitely, and that tiny little space, is where even I have buckled, swallowed my pride, and purchased some Lepin artifacts.
Themes Lego won’t touch:
The first hard to pass up opportunity is minifigures for themes that Lego does not and will not cover. One might consider these “Custom Figures”.
Top of the List:
Predator, Alien Xenomorph, Voltron Minifig, Godzilla, and Hellboy:
To start out, Lego is never going to cover some of these themes from horror movies like Alien or Predator, or adult movies like Watchmen or V for Vendeta. But I’ve been wanting a custom Xenomorph and Predator for quite some time. Lego is making a huge brick built Voltron (via Ideas contest), but it is unlikely that they are going to do a minfigure of the fully assembled Voltron robot with custom parts because of the rules stipulated in the Ideas Contest. As for Godzilla or He-Man as themes, there is currently no Lego version, but its not impossible that Lego would consider them in the future (Although Mega Blocks currently has a deal with the He-man people).
A lot of these examples contain custom parts, not just printed figures. Predator has 4 parts not available in Lego. The Xenomorph has 3 non-lego available parts (the jaw is hinged and can open/shut). Voltron has 5 custom parts including two for the helmet, the wings, lion hands, and awesome sword. Even Skeletor has a custom staff and sword. The blatant rip off of the Lego Minifigure body is still in full swing however. These figures range from $0.75 to 2.50; so they are considerably cheaper than Lego figures, which likely means they are completely unlicensed. There are a dozen or so other Custom Lego outfits/websites that offer Minifigs from themes like Breaking Bad, Kiss, Movies, Musicians, and Horror movies. There figures are usually $20 or more each but still seem to be unlicensed based on the fact they give their figures strange names like “Chemistry Enthusiast” instead of naming it Walter White.
In a perfect world, in my idealistic mind, Lepin would stop cloning, get some form of agreement with Lego to use similar minifigure body parts, and licensing from the various property owners, and produce some interesting figures that we would never see from Lego. This is unlikely to ever happen.
Rare Lego Knock off:
Another market Lepin and custom fig makers have stepped into is making knock offs of the incredibly rare Lego figures.
Seasoned Lego collectors can tell in a matter of seconds that they are knock offs, so its not likely many people will be fooled…. but if you don’t want to spend $1500 to $3000 for Mr. Gold, there is a knock off for about a buck. And the $800+ exclusive DeadPool Duck (Dang nabbit do I hate it when Lego produces figures that are exclusive to events…I hate it); well, there is a dollar knock off readily available.
If Lepins are ever attempting to be sold as authentic Legos, then I see no gray area there, and say shame shame. But when it comes to making knock offs of insanely overprice-gouged rare Lego figures for a buck or two, then I can see my morals becoming more flexible.
Despite all this, I would still never let knock off figures intermingle with my genuine Legos. And I would never be able to get the same collector’s satisfaction from trying to fill a hole in my Lego collection by bringing in a knock off substitute… In the end though, some of these unique figures have caused me to swallow my pride and suspend my outrage.
