Review: 41752 Sea Rescue Plane
Posted by MeganL,
One subtheme featured in the second half wave of Friends this year features a familiar theme - wildlife rescue.
There are three sets in the Sea Rescue mini wave, and we'll start by taking a look at the smallest of them, 41752 Sea Rescue Plane.
Summary
41752 Sea Rescue Plane, 203 pieces.
£17.99 / $19.99 / €19.99 | 8.9p/9.8c/9.8c per piece.
Buy at LEGO.com »
A high level of play set for a low price
- Lots of play value
- Adorable white whale
- Unrealistic plane proportions
The set was provided for review by LEGO. All opinions expressed are those of the author.
Inside the box there are two numbered bags, an instruction book and a nominal sticker sheet. There isn't a real need for the sticker - I wonder if it's a requirement to have a sticker in each set?
Minidolls and animals
There are two minidolls in this set. Dia makes her first appearance here (we'll see her in another set in this wave), and she's dressed in a wetsuit - ideally suited for performing rescue work in the sea! Her top features the logo of the Rescue Centre (review forthcoming), and matches quite smartly with the teal leggings. Zac from the usual crew is also here, and is similarly attired for seafaring. According to the set description, Dia is Zac's mentor.
The target of Dia's and Zac's heroics is an adorable white whale, so those who keep talking about their "LEGO white whale" can literally find it in this set.....
There's some nice printed detailing on the back of the minidoll torsos. Zac's features the Rescue Centre logo, and Dia's has the accurate detail of having a zip in the back. The white whale is still adorable.
The completed model
What's a sea rescue plane without something to rescue? The whale seems to have gotten themselves in quite a predicament the midst of the wood and rocky debris. There's also a wayward bottle that's found its way close by.
Here comes the rescue plane! It's an attractive plane with brightly coloured features.
The only stickers of the set are used to decorate the tail, which looks massively underproportioned for an aircraft of this size. For that matter, so do the propeller and the windscreen.
There is, however, enough room above the floats for some storage, in this case a paddleboard on one side and a paddle on the other.
There's even room for two minidolls, though the fit is a little tight. It's a good thing that Zac and Dia are Friends!
While there's only room for two minidolls in the plane, other hitch-hikers have been known to make an appearance.
(Note: wing-walking sloths not included in this set.)
Overall thoughts
This is a super fun little set, especially for this price. I really like that this hits the $20 price point, since so many of the smaller sets for Friends seem to be creeping up to a $30 price these days.
For a small set, there's a lot of story here, with the whale rescue, and Dia mentoring Zac. I can forgive the silly proportions of the plane - for a $20 set, there has to be a lot of restrictions for parts choice. The designer has done a great job of maximizing use of parts.
This bodes well for the other sets in this mini wave, but I'm guessing we won't find the white whale again.
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27 comments on this article
@MeganL clicking on the first picture give me a 403 error.
"It's a good thing that Zac and Dia are Friends!"
Aren't they all?
:-)
Incidentally, this set is currently available for 10.99 Euro from Amazon Germany.
The sticker is just here because it's part of the Sea Rescue subtheme, the boat and headquarters use the same logo : https://brickset.com/sets/subtheme-Sea-Rescue .
Surely it could've been a print, but leaving it off completely would just make it a generic seaplane, unrelated to the 3 sets + polybag released the same year. And especially this set explains the Whale logo, whereas the other sets rescue dolphins or sea otters.
It's like how in City, all the vehicles from https://brickset.com/sets/subtheme-Exploration have a similar logo on the ships, subs, lab and ice vehicles.
Nice review! This is a charming model with very fun, clever shaping and part use (even if the proportions are rather cartoony). The colors are striking, but still nicely balanced and distributed. The plane's control yokes are brilliantly constructed, and it's neat that the proportions of the mini-doll allowed them to fit both a pilot and copilot in such a compact fuselage.
On that note, I'm a bit surprised that the review didn't mention the little storage area in the back of the plane that can be accessed by lifting the tail! I was very impressed with that when I first saw it in the official pictures. Again, it's a very impressive use of space for such a compact vehicle, almost like if a 6-wide City sports car had an opening boot/trunk.
The beluga is a good reuse of the mold introduced for the narwhal in the previous wave of Sea Life Rescue sets, and its color certainly feels more realistic. That said, the debris here is a little "messy" for my taste, as odd as that is to say! I preferred how the rescue scenarios in the 2019 wave made it clearer what the stuff trapping the animals USED to be (ship wreckage, an old wooden shack, etc). Here the miscellaneous bits of wood, plant life, and garbage feel more random and don't really form a cohesive-looking build.
Thanks again for the review! Eager to read your reviews of the other sea rescue sets!
"There's...something...on the wing!"
Ah, perhaps the colour scheme that those who didn't like the Olive Green Natural History Museum were hoping for!
Those tiny wings seem to be holding up a lot of weight!
This is, so far, the only appearance of that tail fin in Teal/Dark Turquoise/Bright Bluish Green, so I like the stickers instead of a printed part.
Moby Dick adaptations are getting interesting...
Nice set. I love the storage area Aanchir mentioned.
That said, I'm just here waiting for Ridgeheart's take on Nova and a distressed animal appearing in the same set again. Surely she has good intentions with the stuck creature, right?
EDIT: that's not Nova. False alarm, no animals will be harmed in the building of this set.
I really like the plane and its SD look
@Aanchir said:
"On that note, I'm a bit surprised that the review didn't mention the little storage area in the back of the plane that can be accessed by lifting the tail! I was very impressed with that when I first saw it in the official pictures."
I could say that it's because I wanted to keep it a surprise for builders, but the reality is that this is what happens when I write a review over a week after building the set!
@HAL_9001 said:
""There's...something...on the wing!""
"Something that can only be found in.... The Twilight Zone."
"[S]o those who keep talking about their "LEGO white whale" can literally find it in this set....."
I don't see 6990 anywhere. Seriously, with regards to the proportions, this is far from the first Lego plane with unrealistic proportions, and I'm sure it won't be the last.
Nice review, as always!
I’m surprised you mentioned the tail being seriously undersized (it looks about right to me)…..
but nothing about the comically small & stubby wings!!
There’s no way this craft could ever fly, with so little lift from those tiny wings!
I'm a collector of most Lego icon sets, or the older ones known as Creator Expert, and like the vast majority here, I hate stickers. That said, I'm a father of two, a 7-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy, and I can assure you that every time they open a Lego set, be it from City, Friends, or any other, the first thing they do is look for the sticker sheet. I think in these kids' sets, it's not just a matter of cutting costs by avoiding printed pieces, but they add something to the product that kids love. Particularly, my kids can't wait to get to the part where the sticker needs to be applied, and I love that they have that enthusiasm.
I apologize for my poor English.
@lemish34 said:
"There’s no way this craft could ever fly, with so little lift from those tiny wings!"
Lift is a function of air speed and wing area, so it just has to go really fast to fly with small wings, like the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter.
Now all we need are Friends-themed JATO bottles!
@ramnicros said:
"I'm a collector of most Lego icon sets, or the older ones known as Creator Expert, and like the vast majority here, I hate stickers. That said, I'm a father of two, a 7-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy, and I can assure you that every time they open a Lego set, be it from City, Friends, or any other, the first thing they do is look for the sticker sheet. I think in these kids' sets, it's not just a matter of cutting costs by avoiding printed pieces, but they add something to the product that kids love. Particularly, my kids can't wait to get to the part where the sticker needs to be applied, and I love that they have that enthusiasm.
I apologize for my poor English."
I'm glad some kids love stickers! I hated applying them when I was a kid, and I still don't enjoy it.
@ramnicros said:
"I'm a collector of most Lego icon sets, or the older ones known as Creator Expert, and like the vast majority here, I hate stickers. That said, I'm a father of two, a 7-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy, and I can assure you that every time they open a Lego set, be it from City, Friends, or any other, the first thing they do is look for the sticker sheet. I think in these kids' sets, it's not just a matter of cutting costs by avoiding printed pieces, but they add something to the product that kids love. Particularly, my kids can't wait to get to the part where the sticker needs to be applied, and I love that they have that enthusiasm.
I apologize for my poor English."
There is nothing wrong with your English!
@lemish34 said:
"Nice review, as always!
I’m surprised you mentioned the tail being seriously undersized (it looks about right to me)…..
but nothing about the comically small & stubby wings!!
There’s no way this craft could ever fly, with so little lift from those tiny wings!"
So they said about the bumblebee. Yet here we are.
;-)
@ramnicros : if your English is bad, then so is mine. ;-)
BELUGA WHALE <3
You havent mention best thing about this set - the tail can be moved and there is great ammount of cargo space there!
This set's use of color produces a disorganized feel IMHO. Three neutrals (white, l-bley, black) and four hues (orange, yellow, green, violet) equally divided -- none of them serve as accents. Some readers may recall an AFOL guideline from decades past in mecha and space: a neutral, two solid hues (contrasting or complementary), a transparent, and possibly accents (lights, warning stripes).
I'd like to say "too many colors, like many recent Friends sets" but, scrolling through the database by year from the theme's debut in 2012, I'm reminded that it's *never* had a unifying color scheme, within sets or years. Before this year there was a slight bias to neutrals as the dominant hue in buildings.
Four copies of the ellipsoid on the pontoons -- that's design 1744 "sphere 3x3x3, w/ knob" (2023). The 3x3 circular family is growing, and this design currently exists in only two colors (bright orange, tan), but it may eventually be useful in rockets, aircraft, microscale blimps. Siblings are cone (6233 "rocket step 3x3x2" 2002) in 17 colors, tile (67095 "tile 3x3, circle, no. 1" 2020) in 13 colors and multiple prints, and hemisphere (49308 "sphere 3x3x11/3, w/ knob" 2021) in 10 colors and four prints. Is there a cylinder? --I wasn't able to locate one.
It just needs a baby Ahab to go with that white whale...
@gearwheel said:
"Now all we need are Friends-themed JATO bottles!"
Excuse me while I salivateat the thought.
@Darth_Dee said:
"It just needs a baby Ahab to go with that white whale..."
Said in as squeaky a voice as you can imagine: "For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee."
@lemish34 said:
"There’s no way this craft could ever fly, with so little lift from those tiny wings!"
Tell that to bumblebees... they also aren't supposed to be able to fly, but they do it anyway. ;-)
@sjr60 said:
"Ah, perhaps the colour scheme that those who didn't like the Olive Green Natural History Museum were hoping for!"
High-vis yellow teal museum would have been AWESOME.
I'm just here for the running gag/appearance of the sloths!
Ah yes, the joys of high school, ballspitting through straws in the cafeteria, flying planes into the deep ocean to rescue beluga whales, and so on.