The dark side of the brick

Back in the day, Lego TIE fighters were blue.  I've never understood this design choice from Lego as I don't believe that they ever featured much blue in them in the films!  Still, it doesn't look too bad and they now form a distinct subgenre in the Lego Star Wars universe.  Anyway, I reckon there were a total of 8 unique sets, though some of these appeared multiple times in different sets.  Here's my list: 7150 : TIE flighter (with Y-wing) from way back in 1999.  This is actually a Darth Vader (or Advanced) TIE and did indeed come with Darth himself.  Very simple.  Later reappeared in 7152 and 7262. 7146 : TIE fighter from 2001.  This one came with a TIE pilot and a standard stormtrooper but usefully a stan to precariously balance it on 4479 : TIE bomber from 2003.  This one really harks back after 7150.    10131 : TIE fighter collection (2004).  This introduced a new version of the Darth Vader TIE and a slightly remodelled version of the standard TIE (later released a

New sets released today - and on order.  But in the meantime, I've taken delivery of a load more plastic boxes to store all my deconstructed parts in and am continuing with the grand deconstruct: after 6 months though, I'm still only 31% of the way through the collection!  Hmm Yesterday, I started on my box of cube dudes and Brickheadz.  The cube dudes are clearly a forerunner of the brick head, sharing quite a few design features.  The dudes are, however, based on a 3x3 plan and are pretty fragile whereas the the 'headz are 4x4, plus generally two plates worth of detailing around the head.  And are much much more sturdy. At the time of writing, there are I think 18 Brickheadz out there with a 19th (Ahsoka Tano) to be released soon: 41485: Finn 41486: Captain Phasma 41489: Rey and Kylo Ren (also released as singles) 41498: Boba Fett and Han Solo in carbonite (I own a mint version of this set and it's one of the very few I will never build to retain its value) 41608: Han