LEGO confirms Avatar’s longer minifigure legs aren’t the same as Toy Story’s

The LEGO Group has confirmed that the long minifigure legs in the new LEGO Avatar sets aren’t the same as those used for Toy Story more than a decade ago. 

Across both the first wave for the 2009 movie and the upcoming Avatar: The Way of Water LEGO sets, the LEGO Group has reintroduced an element long thought retired: longer minifigure arms and legs, which originally debuted in the Toy Story range in 2010. They’re used exclusively for the Na’vi, demonstrating the difference in size and stature between the Pandora natives and their human counterparts (although they weren’t the first consideration for illustrating that contrast).

But while those elements are functionally identical to the long legs used for Pixar’s Woody and Jessie, they’re not exactly the same pieces. That’s partly because the original mould is actually retired after all (as long suspected), but also because the element design team had to navigate a decade’s worth of changes in standards and best practices within the LEGO Group.

“It is basically making an element from scratch,” LEGO designer Niels Mølgård Frederiksen revealed to Brick Fanatics and other LEGO Fan Media. “Of course, we still have the former geometries from the old Toy Story minifigures. But there’s a variety of aspects that have been developed over the years – the moulds, materials, standards, and so on. The combination of all these will add valuable knowledge from past years.

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“We had the old element. I don’t actually think that we had the old mould, but we had all the data and geometry. The element designers and engineers decided to basically do it all over again, based on the experience from the old [minifigures], to make sure that it adheres to our updated standards.”

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If you place the Avatar legs side-by-side with those from the Toy Story minifigures, you’ll see that there’s a visual difference between them, too: all four anti-studs in the newer versions are completely hollow, where the upper holes in Woody’s legs are much shallower in depth. It’s a tiny tweak that opens the door to a greater range of connections for the Avatar minifigures, potentially speaking to the updated standards Frederiksen mentions.

You can check out the new LEGO Avatar minifigure legs across the theme’s first two waves, one of which is available now. The next five sets – inspired by Avatar: The Way of Water – will arrive on shelves on January 1, 2023.

Every LEGO Avatar set launching in 2023

LEGO set	Price	Pieces	Release date
75575 Ilu Discovery	£19.99 / $24.99 / €24.99	179	January 1, 2023
75576 Skimwing Adventure	£29.99 / $34.99 / €34.99	259	January 1, 2023
75577 Mako Submarine	£49.99 / $59.99 / €54.99	553	January 1, 2023
75578 Metkayina Reef Home	£69.99 / $79.99 / €79.99	528	January 1, 2023
75579 Payakan the Tulkun & Crabsuit	£89.99 / $99.99 / €99.99	761	January 1, 2023

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