How to Train Your Dragon 2 is the latest hotness around my house, so my kids (and I) were delighted when Spin Master sent over a big box of several toys from their dragon lineup. Here’s a peek at a few of them. (Note: There are a few spoilers from the movie in case you haven’t seen that yet.)
First up: the Ionix building sets.
Ionix is a building-block toy that I actually hadn’t heard of before, but it’s Spin Master’s own brand of LEGO-compatible bricks. There are a lot of familiar pieces, but Ionix’s innovation is their “shapeshifting bricks,” which are like little miniature transformers that you can build onto. You can see little animations of the various types of bricks on the website.
The minifigs start off as 2×4 bricks that unfold—you add the hair and a few accessory plates to complete the figure. The end result may seem a little odd to those accustomed to LEGO minifigs, but it is pretty fun to be able to turn Hiccup and Drago into bricks.
I got the Giant Toothless Battle Set, which features Drago Bludvist and one of his dragon traps, and Hiccup and Toothless. The set retails for $39.99 and has 242 pieces. Toothless is a pretty nice size, with about a 17″ wingspan.
The center brick in Toothless is the “Titan Beast” shapeshifting brick, which you can see below:
Along with these, there’s also a line of smaller dragons that are built on the “mini winged” and “mini-four-legged” bricks. These sets are much smaller, with around 15 to 20 pieces. Here’s the smaller version of Toothless and Cloudjumper, the four-winged dragon.
The small dragons are cute, and you can get all of the kid’s dragons in the film (plus Cloudjumper): Stormfly, Meatlug, Belch and Barf, and Hookfang. However, I found the core brick to be a little more prone to disconnecting, particularly the tail joint, so while they’re fun for building and posing, they might not hold up to more rigorous zooming and flying. These mini-sets retail for $7.99 apiece.
The one other playset available is the Toothless Viking Attack set, which features another mini Toothless (same as the one above) with Eret and his dragon net. It has 125 pieces, and retails for $19.99. I’ll admit: I got to assemble the Ionix myself—with an increasingly-mobile 1-year-old in the house, I decided to wait until after bedtime for these, and my older kids get to play with them out of the baby’s reach.
Continue reading for the dragon figurines!
