If you’ve been following me on Twitter, Pinterest, or around in the store lately you know I’m completely addicted to LEGO right now. 2012 is going to be a crazy huge year for the toy company, and a couple main reasons are the addition of the Lord of the Rings and Super Heroes lines. LEGO has been teasing us with posters of a few LOTR characters recently, but folks at the London ToyFair got some early shots of the new minifigures and they look amazing.

First off, I wish I could have LEGO Hobbit hair. It’s perfect. Second, Sam doesn’t quite look goofy enough, and Boromir looks a little odd. But you have to admit, seeing the Fellowship in minifigure form like that is pretty awesome.

Head over to FBTB for a smallish new glimpse at the Avengers. Who knew Captain America would translate to LEGO form so well?

Via From Bricks to Bothans

It’s just a teaser—in the grandest sense of the word—but the new trailer for next year’s The Avengers movie has dropped. Perhaps the biggest highlight is the glimpse of this Hulk iteration. It’s too quick to make judgment but it certainly looks promising.

The whole Joss Whedon-directed film has a ton of promise, actually. These are all heroes we’ve come to know on the big screen in recent years. Rather than spending one-third of the film with exposition and origin stories, we can expect fistful after fistful of action.

Who wants to get in line now for the May 4 opening?

(Unintended hilarity for your third or fourth viewing of the trailer: at the 0:50 mark, pretend that’s a Scarlett Johansson fart leading to the explosion.)

In this limited edition, extra-long episode of Bubble Pipe Theater secretly spliced together from two separate recording sessions, Tim, Rob, and Tommy talk about the Netflix streaming/DVD split, the PS3 game from Studio Ghibli, Adventure Time toys, Nintendo, Bad and Good Batman news, Scott Pilgrim, and Rob’s experiments playing Dungeons and Dragons on Google+.

The Top Hat Sasquatch team reads a lot of blog posts every day, and some slip through the crack or just don’t warrant their own post. That’s where Missing Links comes in. Every few days we collect the best links we’ve come across and pass them on to you.

• “Song of the South” can be yours – for $1,499. | Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation ConversationYou may not be able to buy it on DVD, but if you've got $1500 to spare you can have a nice 16mm print. I'll stick to my bootleg VHS, but if somebody bought this and paid to have a nice scan done, they would be doing animation fans a big favor.
• Halloween Kid Cuisine: Resurrected! – X-EntertainmentMatt over at XE found a new version of the Halloween Kid Cuisine, and posted an article exactly 8 years and one day after he first posted about the same topic. I can't think of a better explanation as to why XE is one of my favorite websites ever.
• THE AVENGERS Movie Toy PackagingThis isn't anything too Earth-shatteringly awesome or surprising, but Collider has a few images of Avengers merchandise up. Check out what the action figure packaging, a backpack, and a hoodie look like.
• Duff Beer Now Available in 24-can packs! – News – GeekTyrantIt's hard to tell if this is legit or not (read: licensed), but regardless I wouldn't mind having some Duff Beer in real life.
• Mindy Kaling: “Flick Chicks” : The New YorkerMindy Kaling from 'The Office' wrote this great piece for the New Yorker about the way women are usually portrayed in her favorite film genre, the Romantic Comedy.

In the inaugural episode of Bubble Pipe Theater, Tommy, John, Tim, and Rob discuss the ‘Baby Monkey (Going Backwards on a Pig)’ phenomenom, a horrible movie called Birdemic, an eerie correlation between Planet of the Apes and Pixar’s Cars franchise, and everyone’s current obsessions. We’re excited to kick off this geek culture podcast, and we hope you bear with us through the first few episodes as we get all the technical details ironed out.