20 years of the LEGO Star Wars range: some fun facts for the road ...

Today is where LEGO officially launches the offensive "20th anniversary of the LEGO Star Wars range"and the manufacturer provides for the occasion a whole kit of contents. Rather than distilling you all this over a week while drinking fun facts and more or less interesting visuals, I've gathered it all here.

In summary, it's been 20 years since the LEGO Star Wars range was born. Launched in 1999 with the five boxes above, it now has nearly 700 sets and more than 1000 minifigs, five video games, animated series, hundreds of content broadcast on Youtube, etc ...

Below is a short video summarizing it all:

In 2019, LEGO is therefore launching the five collector boxes that you already know, vaguely inspired by the first sets on the market and a new sub-range called "Action Battle"(the thing with the darts and the targets).

Below, some galleries showing the evolution over the years of the minifigs of different characters in the range:

On the side of the inevitable fun facts specific to the LEGO Star Wars range, here is what to remember to shine in the evenings between AFOLs:

• Jar Jar Binks minifig marketed in 1999 is the first to have benefited from a new specific head molded from a block.
• Zam Wesell's minifigure of the set 7133 Bounty Hunter Pursuit (2002) is the first to benefit from a pad printing on both sides of the face.
• In 2000, the first version of Chewbacca is marketed in the 7190 Millennium Falcon set, the designers having finally found a way to reproduce the character in minifig format.
• From 2002, Yoda and the Ewoks were among the first figures to be fitted with short legs.
• The Jedi "Bob", so named in the first edition of LEGO Star Wars Visual Dictionary, only appears in the 7163 Republic Gunship set released in 2002.
• La minifig of Darth Vader has evolved a lot over the years and ranges, but its helmet remained unchanged from 1999 to 2015.
• Le Millennium Falcon UCS from set 10179 (2007) was locked in a sauna for a whole day to test its resistance to heat because it did not fit into the equipment usually used for this type of test.
• La X-Wing UCS cockpit visor of set 7191 (2000) is based on the mold of a Battery Box 4.5 V used for a LEGO train.

Finally, LEGO also provides some examples of working sculptures and intermediate prototypes used during the design of various accessories and minifigures from the LEGO Star Wars range:

Bonus: The poster with the timeline shown in the video above, to download in high resolution (3500 x 4900 - 1.7 Mo) by clicking on the image below, then right click and "save Image As...":