First look at LEGO Star Wars Visual Dictionary Updated Edition highlights all sorts of errors

An early look at the updated LEGO Star Wars Visual Dictionary offers a closer look at the new (old) Darth Maul minifigure – and highlights numerous errors throughout the book.

If you’ve picked up any LEGO-adjacent literature in the past few years, you’ll already be accustomed to the mistakes and errors that often plague the copy and images – especially in visual dictionaries and encyclopaedias. The inaccuracies will likely only be picked up on by those hardcore fans who know their stuff, but that sort of defeats the point of these books, which is surely to offer a reliable resource for casual fans to reference.

The 2024 edition of the LEGO Star Wars Visual Dictionary is now the latest victim of these errors. As revealed in a first flick-through from YouTuber Ashnflash, the book is full of inaccuracies, and examples spring up straight away in the title’s timeline: from incorrectly identifying Jek-14 as the first original LEGO Star Wars character (we won’t stand for this Jedi Bob erasure) to describing the T-6 Jedi Shuttle as a ‘Rebels-era craft’. (It’s actually from the Republic era.)

Ashnflash picks up on one of the most puzzling editorial decisions in the book too, which is that the 25 years of LEGO Star Wars timeline actually only covers 24 years (it stops at 2023). The rest of the book then takes a mostly surface-level dive into the different eras of LEGO Star Wars, from the Fall of the Republic and Galactic Civil War to the Rise of the First Order. Additional chapters include Specialist Sets and Beyond the Brick, each exploring a specific segment of LEGO Star Wars products and fandom.

Perhaps the biggest reason most of us will be picking up the LEGO Star Wars Visual Dictionary Updated Edition is not for its written content, though: it’s for that exclusive Darth Maul minifigure included with the hardcover version. A reprint of the character’s 2007 design – notably not the 1999 original, which featured slightly different eye printing – it’s absent the head-topping horn element that’s now standard for Maul, and features exclusive 25 Years of LEGO Star Wars back printing.

That places it beyond the remit of the rest of the LEGO Star Wars 25th anniversary minifigures, which are otherwise standard interpretations of brand new characters for the theme, such as Darth Malak and Saw Gerrera. To that end, Maul doesn’t come with a stand with printed tile – like the ones you’ll find in 75379 R2-D2, 75383 Darth Maul’s Sith Infiltrator and so on – but he is equipped with a hood, cape and double-bladed lightsaber.

For many LEGO Star Wars fans, the original Darth Maul face print has yet to be beaten, so this throwback minifigure will likely stir up just the right amount of nostalgia (even if it is technically a slightly later variant). And it looks pretty good in the flesh, expertly recapturing the retro printing of the original minifigure, though that printed cape will be just a little jarring to those of us who handled our original LEGO Star Wars minifigures enough to end up with permanently frayed robes.

“This figure is really awesome, this takes me back to the videogame,” Ashnflash says, though notes that the difference in design language 17 years later stands out immediately. “Even just seeing how they did the printing back then, seeing this in 2024 is kind of strange.”

You’ll be able to get your hands on this new-but-not-new Darth Maul minifigure in the LEGO Star Wars Visual Dictionary Updated Edition when it debuts on April 4. It’s available to pre-order at Amazon now.

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