New images released for LEGO Lord of the Rings

LEGO recently released a number of new images for its upcoming line of Lord of the Rings toys. First, an image of the entire fellowship of the ring mini-figure set.

Then there are some villainous mini-figures:

Every detail I see from these new sets has me looking forward to the release, though the image I really wanted was Smaug. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen any material from The Hobbit at all yet, though it has been confirmed there will eventually be sets from that story as well.

As you can probably tell, the sets are based on the Peter Jackson films, not the books, so we won’t see anything that didn’t appear in the films (that’s right: no Tom Bombadil), but there are still quite a few characters that I’m looking forward to see how they depict. The only one here who is not a typical minifig is Gollum. I want to see the Ents and Eagles.

Also missing, at least, thus far, is any look at what kind of structures we will actually build with these sets. I know a lot of collectors really focus on the minifigs, myself included, but we can assume that that’s not all we’re getting from LEGO Lord of the Rings. The boxes on the shelves will be full of neat Middle Earth structures, and if they do it right, it could be the most compelling sets yet (sorry Star Wars fans, but the only really interesting set you have is the Deathstar).

In addition to the above, we also got this poster of Gollum in the style of the protagonist posters we’ve already seen:

LEGO Lord of the Rings will hit stores sometime this year.