LEGO Star Wars designer says dioramas are ‘very popular’, has ‘at least a dozen’ sketch models
The designer behind this year’s one and only LEGO Star Wars diorama says the format is ‘very popular’, and reveals he’s sketched up ‘at least a dozen’ potential sets from across the saga.
75380 Mos Espa Podrace Diorama is 2024’s sole contribution to the LEGO Star Wars Diorama Collection, and the first in the series to draw inspiration from the prequel trilogy (just in time for The Phantom Menace’s 25th anniversary). It’s the handiwork of LEGO Star Wars designer César Soares, who brought the finished model to shelves after initially working on the sketch model. But it wasn’t the only potential diorama he’d designed.
“Dioramas are very popular,” César tells Brick Fanatics. “I personally developed a lot of sketch models for a lot of dioramas. I must have made at least a dozen different ones from across several movies and several TV shows, and some of the things in The Phantom Menace were also there. We haven’t done a lot of podracers, so I thought it was a good opportunity to do something from that scene again, which is arguably one of the most iconic scenes in the prequels.
“Of course, it’s not in minifigure scale, it’s in microscale, so you don’t have any minifigures. But we thought that to have that scene represented, this was the best way to do it.”
Unsurprisingly, microscale was ‘always’ on the cards, César explains. Some LEGO Star Wars dioramas lend themselves to minifigures right from the off – he cites 75352 Emperor’s Throne Room Diorama and 75353 Endor Speeder Chase Diorama, both from 2023 – while others, like 75329 Death Star Trench Run Diorama, are a better fit for microscale. But while the scale didn’t change for the podracers, the size of the display did.
“The sketch I did was actually longer, but with those two podracers way less detailed, because when we do a sketch model, usually it’s faster, and we want to convey the idea of how it looks,” he says. “But the scale was more or less the same. I did the sketch models a long time ago, and when we decided to do this one, I dove into it again and I tried different combinations of terrain and mountains or rocks.
“One of the things that I had on the sketch model that I really wanted to keep was the arch, because it gives a bit more sense of 3D and it doesn’t look so flat. But then the back part I did a lot of iterations in taller, smaller, thicker and thinner shapes. In the end, I tried to achieve a balance, something that would not look like a wall, and did not look like a slice of something bigger. That was actually one of the hardest parts when developing the set.”
While the podracers themselves – which César says were also tricky to design, as you’d imagine at this scale – lock the backdrop at microscale, taking them out of the equation actually broadens the scope of 75380 Mos Espa Podrace Diorama, perhaps precisely because of that three-dimensional effect. Some resourceful LEGO Star Wars fans have already turned it into a minifigure-based Tatooine scene, for example.
That’s maybe also a consequence of the complete absence of minifigure-scale LEGO Star Wars dioramas in 2024. But given the design team is at least aware of the subtheme’s popularity – and that César has so many other potential sets sketched out – we hopefully haven’t seen the last of this particular collection. All eyes are now on 2025 and any Revenge of the Sith 20th-anniversary dioramas that may or may not come our way.
75380 Mos Espa Podrace Diorama is available now at LEGO.com, in LEGO Stores and through all good third-party retailers – including GAME, where it’s currently available for 20% off.
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