LEGO recently announced set 21062 Trevi Fountain, revisiting the same subject that was previously featured in set 21020 in 2014. Revisiting subjects of sets by LEGO is more common than you may realise. It is done in a number of ways and for a variety of reasons.
21020 Trevi Fountain from 2014
21062 Trevi Fountain from 2025
You’ll be amazed how often some subjects have appeared as sets. (I was, while I was researching this article!) But before diving into those stories, let’s talk, somewhat paradoxically, about what we’re not talking about.
Set Re-Releases
Space Shuttle set 10231 from 2011. Image via Brickset
LEGO sometimes re-releases sets. By “re-release,” I mean the LEGO offering the exact same model, or with minor changes, for sale again. For example, between 2001 and 2004, LEGO tapped into the nostalgia of a new group of customers known as AFOLs with the “Legends” line. The re-release of USS Constellation from 1978 received a lot of criticism because headlight bricks replaced the 1×1 windows that had long been out of production, highlighting a problem with bringing back sets after a long time.
Another example is a Maersk container ship that was first produced as a promotional set for the Maersk shipping company and was later released to consumers by popular demand.
There is a different story behind the re-release of Space Adventure set 10213. It was originally aimed at adults, but the space shuttle proved popular with children, too. Having been designed as a display model, it couldn’t cope with intense play. So LEGO decided to improve it. It was reinforced in a number of places and released the next year as Shuttle Expedition set 10231 (BTW, as a numberphile, I love that number).
The Technic theme in 2002 only consisted of three re-releases, probably because the designers were busy developing the first wave of studless Technic sets for 2003. While this is not a comprehensive list of rereleases, others that come to mind are the comebacks of the Winter Village Toy Shop, Taj Mahal, Saturn V, Guarded Inn or Death Star.
Before we go too far down this rabbit hole, let’s go back to today’s actual topic: revisits.
The Play Cycle
Fire and Police are the staple sub-themes of LEGO City. There is a seemingly never-ending supply of fire stations and police chases. For many years, though, there was a clear pattern as can be seen in this chart of the number of Fire and Police sets released each year. (Note: these are just the regular Police and Fire sets, not including things like Swamp Police or Forest Fire, etc.)
The release cycles of LEGO City Fire and Police sets, 2005-2024
As you can see, every three years there was a wave of Fire sets, then a wave of Police sets the next year, and the third year was something else. And then the cycle continued. For example, in 2009, there was a wave of Construction, and in 2012, there were Mining sets. What’s also visible in the graph is that the pattern was abandoned after 2020; there are now similar numbers of Police and Fire sets every year.
This three-year pattern is based on what’s called the play cycle. Children grow up and grow out of their clothes and toys. For toy makers, that means every few years, there’s a new audience. A child who was too young for the fire station in 2008 will be in the prime age range to receive the next fire station for Christmas in 2011, and will most likely have outgrown City by the time the next one comes around in 2014.
For City trains, the cycle is four years. Whether that’s because children play longer with trains or train sets need longer recoup the development cost is LEGO’s secret, but the pattern is clear: a City passenger train and a City freight train come along every four years, regular as clockwork. (Which hopefully means we will be getting another next year in 2026.)
Regular LEGO City Train Sets released from 2006 to 2022. Images from Brickset.
There are other recurring sets in City as well—it’s not just the trains and the boys and girls in uniform. Tractors, sports cars, camper vans and food trucks all make regular appearances. And they keep getting better. All of these are revisits of a concept though. Let’s look at more specific recurring subjects.
Star Wars revisits subjects mostly for the same reason as the Police and Fire sets in LEGO City; every few years, there’s a new generation of Star Wars fans who want to build the iconic ships, and LEGO is, of course, happy to supply where there’s demand. The difference, of course, is that where City designers have a lot of freedom to produce another fire truck, Star Wars designers are more restricted when they design the next version of Luke’s X-34 Landspeeder.
So the designers update the previous version for each release—sometimes slightly, sometimes a lot. Luke’s X-34 Landspeeder has been released (only looking at minifigure size) in six regular sets. After the first one in 1999 (which is fairly crude by today’s standards) and the second (which was in the short-lived sand-red colour), the designers settled on a general design, and they all look very similar from then on. Look closer, though, and you’ll find different ways to show the engines.
Four iterations of Luke’s X-34 Landspeeder, 2010 – 2020. Images from Brickset.
The T-65 X-Wing from the original trilogy can be found in eight sets, and with a wider variety of designs and minifigures. There’s only one Luke’s X-34 Landspeeder, and it only appears in the first movie, but there are many X-wings, with different wing markings and different pilots, and it is a slightly larger ship, making it easier to vary the design. It has appeared in four movies, giving designers even more freedom. See, for example, set 4502 where it has Dagobah weeds hanging off it. There’s even been a Christmas X-Wing as an employee gift!
The release patterns for Star Wars are not as clear as City for obvious reasons. You couldn’t do Jedi and Rebel sets one year and Sith and Empire sets the next. There are also too many individual ships, and their popularity varies a lot. You can’t go too long without a Millennium Falcon, but a B-Wing is a different story. And then there are the releases of movies and streaming series that affect the selection of models for each year.
So in 26 years of Star Wars, we’ve had a lot of revisits; Eight T-65 X-Wings and a further four T-70 X-Wings. Nine regular TIE-Fighters and a whopping fifteen TIE-Bombers, TIE-Interceptors and other TIE craft. And that’s just counting the play sets with minifigures! And of course there have also been numerous Millennium Falcons, Snowspeeders, Y-Wings and other popular ships. Sometimes there’s only a year between updates—sometimes the wait is longer. With The Mandalorian, Ahsoka and other Star Wars TV-series taking up slots in the release schedule, there have been very few “classic” Star Wars ships in the last three years. The last minifigure Y-Wing was 75249 in 2019!
Evolution of Sets
The range of available parts is ever-growing, which opens up many new possibilities for designers, both for cosmetic details and for functionality. In 2001, LEGO released set 3451 Sopwith Camel, a fighter from the first World War. It was followed in the next two years by 10024 the Red Baron’s Fokker tri-plane and 10124 Wright Flyer. A few years later, there was the very different 10177 Boeing 787 Dreamliner and unfortunately that was the end of this short-lived series.
Eleven years later the Sopwith Camel was revisited with set 10226 (oh LEGO, so close, why couldn’t this be 10224?). The new set featured a different colour scheme and had working controls for ailerons and tail flaps. As designer Jamie Berard said in the designer video, “When we redo a model we want to make sure it’s above and beyond what we’ve done before.”
3451 Sopwith Camel from 2001. Image from Brickset.
10226 Sopwith Camel from 2012. Image from Brickset.
Looking beyond vehicles, the Architecture theme has changed a lot since the start in 2008. Sets have shifted from exploring shapes and volumes in a limited colour palette to becoming bigger, more detailed, more colourful scale models. At the same time, another branch developed the Skyline series. These are small sets that look almost like postcards, with representations rather than scale models of a handful of landmarks from a particular city.
21036 Arc de Triomphe, 2017
21019 Eiffel Tower, 2014
21024 Louvre, 2015
21044 All together now, 2019
Many of the larger Architecture sets have been revisited for the Skylines like the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Big Ben in London, and Sears Tower in Chicago. Some have also been revisited at a larger scale within the Architecture theme, like the Guggenheim Museum, the Empire State Building and the Trevi Fountain. As Trevi Fountain set designer Mary Wilson said at the launch, “The architecture line has evolved since the first Trevi model. This set is larger, allowing us to include more detail.” That’s similar to what Jamie said years earlier.
21005 Fallingwater from 2009, one of the early Architecture sets. Image from Brickset.
But why do we need another Trevi fountain? Mary said, “Not everybody has been a LEGO fan for 10 years. The first set is not accessible to everyone. It would be a shame to only touch it once because so many people haven’t had a chance.” While that is true, if you extend that logic, Architecture could stop looking for new subjects and just keep revisiting the existing range. And while I would love to see Fallingwater in the current style it would also be a shame to just keep revisiting popular subjects. There are so many great and interesting buildings in the world that have not yet been reproduced as a LEGO set.
Going Bigger
The number of pieces in sets has gone up a lot in the last 20 years. In 2007, the UCS Millennium Falcon was the first set with more than 5,000 pieces. When it was revisited ten years later, it was the first set over 7,500 pieces. Another five years later and another revisit, the Eiffel Tower, contained 10,001 pieces. The year before, the World Map mosaic contained 11,695 pieces (even if 11,130 of them were 1×1 round plates and tiles). The point is that set sizes that were unthinkable only a few years ago are within reach now, so it’s no surprise that many revisits are not only more detailed but also bigger than their originals.
It was the Star Wars “Ultimate Collector Series” that started the arms race. The first two were the TIE-Interceptor and X-Wing in 2000, with piece counts of 700 and 1,300—now considered modest for a UCS set. Sales of these two sets must have convinced LEGO that the adult audience with more pocket money than children was worth exploring further; the UCS sub-theme is still going strong today. Both of the first two subjects have, like many other early sets, been revisited within the UCS subtheme! The TIE Interceptor in 2024 with 1,931 pieces, the X-Wing in 2013 with 1,559 pieces, and again in 2023 with 1,949 pieces.
Cuusoo set 21103 The DeLorean Time Machine from 2013
Ideas set 21108 Ecto-1 from 2014
Shifting from Star Wars, the Ecto 1 from Ghostbusters and the Delorean time machine from Back to the Future were among the first LEGO Ideas sets. The DeLorean was actually the last set released as “Cuusoo,” the initial name of LEGO Ideas in 2013, and the “Ecto-1 was the first branded as an “Ideas” set the year after. Both have been revisited in the Icons theme; in 2020, Ecto-1 grew from 508 to 2,352 pieces, and in 2022, the DeLorean grew from 401 to 1,872 pieces (and losing “DeLorean” from its name in the process).
Advanced Models set 10274 ECTO-1 from 2020
Advanced Models set 10300 Back to the Future Time Machine from 2022
The Eiffel Tower was the first LEGO landmark, produced in 2000. It was mostly made of stacked standard bricks, but at 3,428 pieces and 42” tall, it’s an impressive model. 22 years later it received an update. The new set is 50% taller and has three times the piece count! Between these two, it was also featured in the Architecture theme in 2017 at a much more manageable size of 12” tall (not counting the Skyline series). Sydney Opera House was one of the early Architecture sets in 2012 in a set with 270 pieces. The next year it was released in the Creator Expert Landmarks series and grew to 2,989 pieces.
Architecture 21012 Sydney Opera House from 2012
Creator Expert 10234 Sydney Opera House from 2013
Going Smaller
Bigger isn’t always better though. Not everyone has space in their house or apartment for large sets, and not everyone has room in their budget for expensive sets. So sometimes sets are revisited at a smaller scale. For example, the original 2008 Advanced Models Taj Mahal set (and its 2017 Creator Expert re-release) contained nearly 6,000 pieces, had a footprint of four baseplates and cost $300. Revisiting the famous landmark in 2021 in the Architecture theme reduced it to one baseplate, 2,000 pieces and $120, bringing it within reach for a wider audience.
A similar thing happened to Hogwarts Castle. After many play sets of various rooms and towers, the first full Hogwarts Castle set released in 2018 is a fabulous set—but it’s huge, and costs $470. Five years later it was reduced to a bookshelf-friendly two-baseplate footprint for $170.
71043 Hogwarts Castle from 2018
76419 Hogwarts Castle and Grounds from 2023
Another set from the Advanced Models theme is the VW Beetle from 2008. At 20-studs wide, it was bigger than the Model Team cars that came before it. It’s hard not to see it as the grandaddy of the Creator Expert cars. That theme started three years later with the Beetle’s iconic cousin, the T1 Camper Van. That set was produced for 10 years, one of the longest production runs ever for a LEGO set.
In 2016 the Beetle itself was revisited at the now regular 14-wide size. A year later a 4-wide promotional “polybag” version was released in the Creator Expert theme. Those mini versions were done for a number of the Creator Expert cars, but unfortunately they stopped after a while. Some of the cars from Creator Expert, like the Ferrari F40 and the James Bond Aston Martin DB5 have themselves been downsized for Speed Champions, much smaller again.
10187 VW Beetle from 2008
10252 VW Beetle from 2016
40252 VW Beetle from 2017
Since Speed Champions evolved to 8-wide cars, we’ve seen a 5-wide polybag version of one of each year’s cars. I see them as teasers or appetizers. And of course, they are collectable. 😉
Speed Champions Appetisers
If we keep going smaller, then we must mention Star Wars Microfighters too. These pocket- and pocket money-sized sets look like a cross between Chibi and fairground ride vehicles. In 11 years, 38 sets have been produced.
Smaller again are the Advent Calendar versions of Star Wars ships. It takes a lot of skill to create recognisable representations of well-known ships in literally a handful of pieces. The smallest possible representation though, has to be Lady Liberty in the New York Skyline set, represented by just a single sand-green microfigure.
Tributes
40504 Redbeard XXL
There’s one interesting category I haven’t mentioned yet: revisits of LEGO sets that were not based on real-life prototypes. Small tributes are, for example, the four sets in the 60 Years of the LEGO Brick gift with purchase set including the Yellow Castle, Galaxy Explorer, Black Seas Barracuda and Airport Shuttle monorail. Slightly bigger are the trains in the 50 Years on Track employee gift from 2016.
Then there are scaled-up tributes like the Icons Galaxy Explorer, Blacktron Renegade and Eldorado Fortress, and LEGO Ideas set Pirates of Barracuda Bay that is a tribute to the Black Seas Barracuda.
Bigger again is the LEGO House Minifigure Tribute set of Redbeard, the first minifigure with a different face, scaled up to six times his original size.
First and Last and Always
The first revisit I could find was 384 London Bus in 1973. It was first produced in 1966, but seven years later a set designer decided to use four new parts to create an improved version with spoked wheels, 1×1 windows, 1×6 arches and stickers.
313 London Bus from 1966, Image from Peeron
384 London Bus from 1973, Image from Brickset
You could be forgiven for assuming that that 1966 London Bus was also the first to be revisited and you’d be close. However the year before, set 320 depicted LEGO’s Piper PA-23 plane, which was also the subject of an Insiders Tour set in 2012, a full 37 years later.
You could be forgiven for assuming that that was the longest gap between original and revisit, and you’d again be close. The Concorde was the subject of set 346 in 1970 and it was revisited, quite spectacularly, in 2023, a whopping 53 years later—a record I imagine won’t be broken any time soon.
Set 346 “Jumbo Jet” from 1970
Set 10318 Concorde from 2023. What a difference 53 years makes…
So what is the most depicted subject of a LEGO set? It won’t surprise you that it’s one of the most iconic spaceship designs ever, the X-Wing fighter. Across play sets, promotional sets, Advent Calendars and three Ultimate Collector Sets, it’s been the subject of a total of 37 sets so far. The Millennium Falcon is hot on its heels with 32 sets.
Outside of Star Wars, you’re probably thinking Architecture might have the most rereleased models. The Burj Khalifa and Eiffel Tower each have a respectable three sets and a skyline, while the Eiffel Tower also appears on a fridge magnet, a postcard, and in Gustave Eiffel’s apartment. The Apollo Lunar Lander was the star of the show in four sets plus it had a cameo in the Saturn V set. Lady Liberty is a regular, helped by a few fridge magnets—based on a single minifigure design, she has featured, or rather has been represented, in 14 sets since the year 2000. Her head is in two more sets, Welcome to Apocalypseburg from The LEGO Movie and the Spider-Man Final Battle.
And then there’s NASA’s hero workhorse, the Space Shuttle. From four Duplo pieces to 2,000+ pieces in an Icons set, it’s been featured in LEGO form 25 times across 11 themes! And that’s just counting the shuttles that are based on the NASA Space Shuttle—there are even more “inspired by” sets.
LEGO Space Shuttles come in many sizes
Conclusion
There are many more revisits than I could mention in one article. Brickset has started adding “Re- imagined as” and “Re-imagined version of” in their related sets notes, but they still have a long way to go. It is done for a variety of reasons, and how valid those reasons are to you is a very personal thing.
One thing is for sure, revisits are not going away. I would love to see an updated Rolls Royce from the Hobby sets and a full minifigure size version of a Douglas DC-3. What would you like to see? Let us know in the comments!
What LEGO set would you like to see revisited in the future? Let us know in the comments below.
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