LEGO IDEAS submission : Ship in a Bottle Flagship Leviathan and LEGO IDEAS retail set : 21313 Ship in a Bottle
The IDEAS platform has been the de facto place where an AFOL’s dream of their mocs being made into an official set, could potentially become reality. Some have also used the platform to promote their brand or showcase their creations to the world.
However, our basic understanding is that the IDEAS platform is for users to showcase an interesting idea not previously thought of or previously deemed not viable by the people at LEGO. Improvements over current themes or great building techniques are definitely not the biggest concern of the platform. Rather, it’s to discover a publicly popular build that TLG missed out on or initially reason for one reason or another.
The Ship in a Bottle set is soon to be released and the original IDEAS submission was done by Jake Sadovich. (See our previous article here) and we’d thought we’d do a quick article to showcase the original IDEA and the eventual end result, the retail set as pictured by Mr. Sadovich after his build of the retail set.
Mr. Sadovich is pretty active on Facebook groups without which; by his own admission, he probably wouldn’t have submitted his moc to IDEAS. He decided to share a side by side comparison between his original submission and the final retail set after he built his set.
First off, the difference in scale is quite stark. Jake mentions that his original build was approximately 1,400pcs and the official retail set weighs in at 962pcs (inclusive of 280 1×1 water elements)
Mr. Sadovich’s original idea was probably to have an impressive battleship (The Flagship Leviathan) and we believe the bulk of the piece count difference boils down to the ship immortalized in a bottle changed from the original to the final version in the retail set. You can see how detailed Jake’s original ship was.
The focus of the build can also be seen in the naming of the set whereby they dropped the Flagship Leviathan name from the set title but kept the Leviathan nameplate in the retail set.
The retail set has a more modest ship which isn’t bad looking but just doesn’t compare.
Other than that, its very clear that both the base and the design of the neck and cork is very much refined in the retail set.
However, personally, the printed “wax seal” tile could have contained both the initials of the original fan designer(Jake Sadovich) and the LEGO designer(Tiago Catarino) but that’s just us. Mr. Sadovich might have been consulted beforehand by courtesy for all we know and gave the green light.
Designers themselves must be proud of the set that they refined too and lest we forget, all LEGO designers love LEGO as much as we do, if not more.
All in all, we believe the LEGO designers did a great job translating the original set into the final retail set which is designed to fit the taste of the public and is also slightly kinder on the display space area. We believe that retail considerations are the main reason why it was dramatically reduced in scale as is the norm.
Will we be getting it? You bet we will, immediately after it’s released.
Here are some bonus shots from Mr. Jake Sadovich including a shot of the holding base which is missing from the official marketing pictures. That’s a pretty neat compass bulid.
