This will be a LEGO Review of the 43179 Buildable Mickey and Minnie Mouse.
This will be a LEGO exclusive set and has been released for sale at LEGO stores since July 1st, 2020.
Box Experience
The boxart continues on with the 18+ scheme seen with the LEGO Haunted House and Star Wars Helmets released earlier with a predominantly black background to a no frills, fully built content of the set clearly laid out at the front. Mickey and Minnie stand on film cell bases with their respective signatures holding a box guitar and daisy flower bouquet together with accompanying accessories of a photobook and an old skool film camera on a tripod
Contents of the box
1) One sticker sheet containing 4 stickers
2) Two instruction manuals (One each for Mickey and Minnie)
3) 15 numbered bags (Numbers 1 to 9 with two bags each for bags 1,4,5,8 and 9) and 1 un-numbered bag
First impressions/Instruction Manual
There are two instruction manuals so this could easily be made into a tandem build with one person building Mickey and another building Minnie. Instructions manual retains the same colour scheme as the box. Unfortunately the content pages are black as well making it hard to clearly identify the sizes of certain coloured elements like Black and Dark Brown. The white outline helps somewhat but we would have preferred a lighter page colour like light grey to enable a better contrast.
The Build
Main Build
Instructions for Mickey is outlined in Instruction Book 1
Instructions for Minnie and the side builds are outlined in Instruction Book 2
Mickey and Minnie share similar SNOT build techniques so we’ll describe what we did for Mickey and highlight some of the main changes for Minnie Mouse.
Builds start off with the base of the figure which is made to represent a film cell. The base uses a Technic frame and surprisingly, the colours for the frame of the base used for Mickey and Minnie differ, with Mickey having bright coloured insides and Minnie having a more pastel-ly colour scheme on the inside. We are curious to know if this decision was made for technical reasons (some parts not available in certain colours) OR purely for cosmetic reasons as there are some differences in the frame to cater for the different poses of Mickey and Minnie.
The base employs a lot of the new window element colour 363 – TR. Brown with Opalescence to mimic translucent brown photographic film and also features a plaque tile with their respective signatures for each of the anthropomorphic mice.
The next steps are to build the legs and body of Mickey. The legs do look a bit flimsy from the outside in comparison with the body and head but it’s surprisingly stable. The curves of the hands are realized with a new LEGO element which we will call the 2×2 bigger Macaroni piece for now. The body is also held in place with a new Brick 1x2x1 with studs on 4 sides which adds another element to the growing bricks with studs on sides introduced after Brickheadz . Stay tuned to The New Elementary to deep dive into these new interesting elements.
The final touch with the head is a SNOT affair too with the colours of the parts frames done up in a similar method with the base. The nose is realized with the reintroduction of the black Classic Space helmet, last appearing in 1987.
The completed build of Mickey and Minnie along with the side builds are in the gallery below. Mickey’s head is connected with a portion of a #3 angled connector and fastened securely with the help of the weight of the head while Minnie’s head is connected using 2×2 round bricks with plates with axle holes.
We notice some small wobbling when transporting Mickey for photo taking or storage so we did some un-scientific study on the stability in the video below. We are sure that LEGO themselves have ensured that all builds survive a systematic structural stability study themselves but it’s a bit of fun 🙂
Side Builds
There are 4 side builds in this set with 2 side builds meant to be held by the Buildable Figures and 2 more are meant to be free standing.
- The bouquet and the box guitar
The daisy flower bouquet for Minnie looks great with a bunch of 4 daisy flower stalks held together neatly. There is a even a small peak of the ends of the stalk showing at the base of the bouquet. Connection with the main build is achieved with an inverted 1×2-2×2 bracket.
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- Back/Connection
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- Front
The box guitar has the sort of janky look, reminiscent of the original Mickey cartoons and might be misconstrued as undersized by some judging by the length of the strings but we like it. Once again, simple SNOT is the name of the game here and connection with the main build is achieved with an inverted 1×2-1×2 bracket.
- The camera and the book
The classic camera in particular looks great, with prominent visible features like the lens and attached bulb flash. The back of the camera includes a viewfinder window as well as the film door. As an aside, we think the “Ansco Colour Clipper” and the “Kodak Brownie” were the inspiration for this camera design. We forgot to mention that the camera comes with a tripod. The design choice to use a steering wheel to hold the tripod legs in place with mechanical claw pieces makes perfect sense visually. It looks as though that could be the cranking mechanism to raise/lower the tripod.
However, we think the tripod legs would have benefited with a 1×2 plate holding the 1×1-1×1 bracket to the main plates.
The book contains memories of Mickey and Minnie. The build is excellent, with enough resistance to keep the book closed when it’s closed, and also not too much resistance to be opened up easily. This was achieved with the partial 3 stud connection from the 4×4 modified tile with studs on side. Front and sides of the book are well featured with decorative 1×1 heart elements as well as a nice book clasp and completed with 4 decorative pictures of Mickey and Minnie.
Building tips
1) The first few pages of the instruction manual clearly warns us not to pick Mickey up by his head as the head is held in place solely with a small portion of a technic axle onto a #3 angled connector.
2) The building of the set employs a lot of SNOT (Studs not on top) techniques, be mindful to always notice the “flip” symbol on the instruction book and the colours of the corresponding connections as a small mistake may necessitate the dismantling of the whole subassembly. LEGO frequently uses different colours as visual cues to help with the building process whenever possible so you can use that to help you along.
Other Matters
There is an iffy part of the build of Minnie Mouse though. During the build of Minnie’s shoes, to achieve the angles, there is one area where it seemed that the parts are forced in. It’s not a big deal as the tiles on the exterior does hold it together just fine after this area is completed.
Summary
This is a great LEGO Disney display set.
Would be buyers might be slightly put off by the large price tag but many might not realize the size of these buildable figures is pretty significant standing at approximately 30cm in height. It makes for an attractive decoration and has already been spouse-approved for display in our living room!
The set used for the review was sent to us by The LEGO Group for the purpose of a review. Provision of sets do not in any way influence or guarantee a positive review.
