There’s no escaping it now! We’re in the holiday season, and Thanksgiving is this week! By now, you’ve probably started bingeing all of your Christmas classics or maybe some of the oddities in my recent YouTube list. There’s no doubt you’ll be watching Home Alone soon, too!
This past week, we took the time to build the LEGO Ideas Home Alone sets. We even installed a lighting kit we found on Amazon! Was it all worth the money? Check out our review below!
We must start by addressing a grave issue we encountered when the Home Alone kit arrived. Set 21330 comes in a huge box filled with over 20 bags of parts, 3,955. That box was in terrible condition. It looked like it had fallen down the Exorcist stairs multiple times.
Although the seals were still intact, we noticed loose pieces in the box. The store we purchased it from did not have another Home Alone kit in stock, and they were now on backorder. So, we decided to roll those dice and hoped our box of spare parts would save us in a pinch.
One of the packages had, indeed, lost some parts. After checking the instruction booklet, I saw that this particular bag affected the exterior decor and Kevin’s treehouse. So, we would assemble the rest of the kit and see how things went.
The McCallister house consists of three levels and a half levels, kind of. While it does not have a dedicated basement level, some windows give you an obscured view of the mechanics that go into one of the play features. However, the furnace and laundry shoot are included but cleverly placed. We’ll get into that later.
The primary three levels include the first floor, with the living room, dining room, kitchen, and staircase. The kitchen is part of a detachable building that gets built later.
The second level includes the McCallister’s main bedroom, bathroom, Buzz’s bedroom, and a stairway into the attic. Oddly, the main bedroom is blocked from view unless you remove the third level when displaying it.
The top section of the home consists of a narrow attic section. It contains a giant spider web, a bed, Kevin’s home defense plan, and a gumball machine.
The first two levels feature winged hinges that open up to reveal most of the interior detail. The roof features a lid-like opening to see inside the attic.
The only way to see the kitchen’s interior is to rotate the home and separate the two-story section from the rest. This gives you access to the basement section where the furnace and laundry shoot are located.
The play features aren’t as extensive as expected but capture some of the film’s iconic moments. The living room and dining room are staged to act out the scene where Kevin tricks the Wet Bandits into thinking a party is going on. A knob at the side of the house can be turned that spins the train carrying “Not Michael Jordan” and the dummy on the record player.
On the second floor, Buzz’s room has a collapsing shelf system with many loose items. A paint can complete with rope is staged on the second-floor railing.
We finally came to the part I warned about at the start of this review. We were missing pieces. Kevin’s treehouse is not directly attached to the building except for the zip line string. Thankfully, this is all optional.
Whatever damage the box had seen resulted in us missing several parts to create the treehouse. So, we ditched that effort entirely and focused on the upcoming task of lighting the home.
The exterior of the Home Alone house isn’t anything special. There’s a noticeable lack of Christmas decorations. The only “lights” are translucent yellow pieces on the front snow-covered lawn. It’s nowhere as decorated as it appears in the film.
However, we solved that a little with the light kit. Even though this add-on didn’t light up the entire front of the McCallister residence, it brings more life.
The lighting kit itself can be a chore to install. It is best to build the entire LEGO model first, then back in and disassemble the necessary portions. This keeps you from accidentally damaging the LEDs or thin wires.
Some wires will be noticeable and are hard to hide. The best option in these cases is to find an obscured corner of the building and run most of the cables down that way, like in the master bedroom. Once lit up, though, this thing is a beauty.
MAJOR WARNING:
If you pick up the lighting system I linked to earlier in this review, do not use the small circuit board for the flame effect. I noticed a burning smell after the lights were on for a few minutes. It turns out that this lighting board was getting WAY TOO HOT and had started to melt the bricks it was next to. Luckily, since we weren’t lighting the treehouse, we had spare expansion boards to cover the orphaned wires.
Since it’s the holiday season, 21330 is getting hard to find. The LEGO store won’t ship it for another 60 days because it’s on backorder.
Best Buy sells it for $259.99, but you can only get it if the Home Alone kit is available at your local store. However, I would advise against getting it from this big box retailer due to the state of the box and all the missing pieces I had to deal with. I’m not sure what Best Buy employees do to the packages … but this sucked.
You can stream Home Alone or its terrible modern adaptation on Disney Plus! Honestly, you’ll probably need to watch all six films in the franchise before you’re done with this LEGO kit. The house is made of over 3,000 pieces, after all.
Pirates & Princesses (PNP) is an independent, opinionated fan-powered news blog that covers Disney and Universal Theme Parks, Themed Entertainment and related Pop Culture from a consumer's point of view. Opinions expressed by our contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of PNP, its editors, affiliates, sponsors or advertisers. PNP is an unofficial news source and has no connection to The Walt Disney Company, NBCUniversal or any other company that we may cover.
