It seems that for Mar10 Day the LEGO Company is celebrating by announcing a collaboration with Nintendo to make LEGO sets themed around Mario. All we've seen so far is what ever that Mario thing is.
I'm personally excited, purely because I love building LEGO.
The LEGO Company posted their own version of the above announcement, and it features a better look at the Mario featured in the first tweet.
I'm really excited for this, as long as they do a good job of it. Apparently there are going to be thirteen sets, though one of them is listed as a blind bag, so come on Mario Lego Minifigures series!
If you've put the ugly in brackets because you don't like Funko Pops, you may be pleased to hear that I read a news article from early last year saying that the creator of them had been trying to get the license- and no Mario ones have surfaced yet. I really hope that means Nintendo isn't giving them the license, I think Funko Pops are really creepy and I hope they don't make Mario ones.
Edit: Hold on a minute, I've just had a thought. I don't think we know any sort of release date yet, but I might have a theory on when this lot could be expected. Assuming that the blind bag is a Lego Minifigure series and not a random one-off other thing like the Unikitty set from last year, I think I can use the theory of Minifigure release dates to put a guess in at late August/September. We usually get three Lego Minifigure series a year, one in late December/January (At the moment, that's the DC set), another in April (Already confirmed to be standard series 20) and the third is usually late August/September. More recently, this schedule has been a mix of both the standard series and licensed ones, and these dates are usually fairly consistent, and have only been moved before as a tie-in thing (i.e. The Lego Movie 2 set was shifted to a February release to tie in with the movie's release date, I think the original Lego Movie set may have been the same but it's too long ago for me to remember now), so unless there's a big upcoming game release that they want to tie in with, I reckon we could be looking at an August/September release. Don't hold me on that, though.
Huh, I could have sworn I saw them in stores as recently as last year or so, but that must've either been unsold stock or it was farther back than a year.
Anyways, if these sets end up being good (and they should, because they're Lego), I'll probably pick up a couple of the less-expensive ones when they come out.