Erstwhile Muse

A step up from your average minifig scale monkey, this Monkey is quite well articulated for a model of this size. The legs pivot both at the hips and the ankles, the arms rotate at the shoulder and bend at the elbows, while the head rotates at the neck and the mouth opens for pre-poo-flinging screeches. The tail is also mutli-segmented to allow it to bend up behind the Monkey and help him keep his balance. This is also the first of the mini Designer models that I have seen that comes with accessories to the main model, in this case a wall of leaves as a jungly backdrop.

Like some of their previous mini-robot sets, the palette here is largely a mix of blue and white. Movement is a bit restricted compared to the Monkey; while the Robot can freely pivot at the waist, his legs and arms are significantly restricted in motion by his design, and there is no head to speak of, at least not in any distinct sense. The Robot does come armed with his own mini-blaster, but unless he can pivot to get a bead on you, it's really not that dangerous seeming.

Well, the Monkey can instead be built as a Turkey (or, if you combined two of them, perhaps a Turkey-Monkey), or as brownish,er...sluglike, spinedy—something. Honestly I'm not sure what in the hell that third model is supposed to be in this one.

The Robot can be built either as a shorter hunchback Robot with huge, over sized fiddler crab-like claw, or a creepy dino-bot looking sort of Robot. All in all though, more Robots, less indistinguishable slugs.

77 pieces, including a lot of brown and tan, always a good thing.

77 pieces, mostly blue and white, with a bit of red.

Every Lego set inevitably has extra pieces due to the way they are packaged. The Monkey ended up with three 1x1 round plates, one each in white, black and tan, and one black Technic friction pin.

The Robot ended up only having two 1x1 round plates extra, one each in Trans-Neon Green and Trans-Orange.

Part #6148 - Palm Leaf Small

This set comes with two pieces of vegetation for the monkey to hide behind, unusual includes in a non-minifig set this size. Brickfilmers, dioramists and other large scale builders can never have enough vegetation in my book.

Part #167 - Bar 1x3

While the part name is unassuming, for my money this is the winner. Known also as a radio handle or telephone handset, while largish for minifg scale it is still useful and harder to get. Two of them in Dark Bluish Grey clinch this category for Robot.

Silver and translucent yellow plastic storage box package similar to the Tiny Turbos sets. Overall, not a welcome change from previous sets similar to this.

Same as the Monkey, but red instead of yellow. Which makes more sense than yellow did for the Monkey as the Robot has a least a few red components, but is visually jarring.