Iron Felix, labeled as "Iron Fenix" (if only).
Salvador Allende nearly exactly how he looked in his last picture, but labeled just "Mr President"
I have this Stalin custom for a few years:
I've been planning to make more since so I'll post it when I'm done, had no idea they're making them. Are there Tito and Lenin figures by any chance?
Awesome Stalin, i searched there for Stalin, Lenin and Tito but only minifigures clearly based on real socialists i found are those two above.
Oh in the same link i posted there's also Lidya Litviak, as "White Lily", first female fighter ace:
That's neat! I also found this Lenin:
Nice, definitely handpainted with some green stuff on his head visible too.
Since I'm currently doing some of the harder customs, is it better just to order printed custom pieces?
No idea, i'm not even really into Lego, from what i seen it's pretty expensive in Poland, so the best option would be probably to buy something similar on aliexpress and convert like in your picture. Socialist figures would be mostly pretty easy, since they don't involve any weird or huge pieces (though it would be fun to convert Kakashi to Stalin).
Yea it's expensive everywhere during the last years, which is especially atrocious on sets containing dinosaurs and such and completely unjustifiable since they just reuse the old pieces for designs. But as far as the minifig customs go, yeah some can be done with normal Lego pieces, but then there are ones who would require custom printing. I'm currently making some for Halloween so maybe I'll post then if I finish, real bummer that they don't do sets from rated R franchises since there's huge potential.
The history of Chinese Lego is btw really fun. Lego for years hesitated to build a factory in China, but ultimately stonks syndrome got them and they did. Shortly after, Chinese started to produce strangely similar bricks which are only minimally different by plastic composition, just enough to avoid lawsuit. Since then they also expanded offer on miniblocks (75% of size of ordinary) and microblocks (50% and still look great but dammit they make the fingers hurt).
And most importantly, they got not only copies of many rare lego sets but also many sets Lego never had, like the military including Soviet ones (tanks, planes and helis are relly good). They also make some from animes, movies etc, yesterday i seen complete model of Thousand Sunny from One Piece with all crew or the famous Pirate Ship from old Lego, but even bigger.
Yeah I saw the Soviet stuff, real shame Lego doesn't want to delve into military and R content in general, I also saw many anime and movie customs which legit look official. Is there a specific reason why Chinese Lego does this stuff with no problem but Lego is so reluctant about it even if we already got a number of sets which are intended to be 18+ and we have many themes which aren't so kid friendly.
Probably for the same reasons any other corpo is sitting silent about China:
Lmao, but I hope eventually one day they let go of that rule since they're going there more and more recently. One can dream...
....Nostalgia Critic....?
What's the comp pic for Allende?
do you have a link?
i found the one for Allende.
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/N109-116-Line-Infantry-Wehremacht-Micah_1600948742005.html
What else can we find on AliExpress?
I keep looking for books, but Amazon so far has the best discovery and search options for such.
I don't know if I'm using AliExpress right or not.
Is Alibaba any better?
Alibaba is Aliexpress, at least in Poland. Other huge online portals are Wish (it sucks, not recommended), Temu (they have slightly different things than Aliexpress so it's worth a check) and Shopee (closed in Poland so idk how it is).
Afaik they don't have many books, i barely found Little Red Book there and it's shit edition with boxes, typos and weird fonts. For books unfortunately Amazon seems to be best option, especially in Poland where we had literally 5 socialist books published in last 35 years.
True enough.
Or just get it from the original publisher or your local library.
But yeah, Amazon > Alibaba when it comes to books, at least.
I think Alibaba / AliExpress is only good for electronics and gadgets.
For the dankest of all memes