What if… LEGO Marvel 76178 Daily Bugle was built in tan?

LEGO Marvel 76178 Daily Bugle is a huge slab of grey bricks, but designer Mark Stafford almost considered building it in tan – here’s what that might have looked like.

The tallest and biggest LEGO Marvel set to date launched earlier this year, and designer Mark Stafford revealed in a reddit Q&A that the base colour hadn’t always been grey: instead, he almost followed recent video game incarnations of the iconic newspaper offices by building it in tan.

Ultimately, though, he decided that the set’s 25 minifigures – including Spider-Man, Daredevil, Punisher, Blade, et al – ‘stand out much better against a neutral grey’, and that’s how we ended up with 76178 Daily Bugle in its current form.

That said, the LEGO Group has recently taken a tentative step towards recoloured versions of existing sets with 77940 Mighty Dinosaurs, 77941 Mighty Dinosaurs and 77942 Fiat 500 – and in that spirit, we’ve used a little Photoshop magic to imagine what 76178 Daily Bugle might look like in tan.

On the left is the original set, which creates a vast concrete skyscraper using light grey elements. And on the right is that very same building in tan, a softer colour that gives the set a completely different feel. It’s true that the minifigures do stand out cleaner against the grey, spreading a splash of colour across a monochrome backdrop, but 76178 Daily Bugle still looks fantastic in tan.

Unfortunately, it’s not technically possible to build it in physical bricks at the moment: the 67 train track rails that line the edges of the skyscraper don’t exist in tan (greys and black are your only options), which means you’ll have to effectively redesign large chunks of the building if you’d like to recreate the tan version above.

It’s nice to dream about what could have been, though – and if the LEGO Group ever does get round to releasing that part in tan, we know exactly what we’ll be doing with it first.

If you’re happy with 76178 Daily Bugle in grey, you can grab the 3,772-piece set from LEGO.com right now for £274.99 / $299.99 / €299.99. For more hypothetical LEGO recolours, check out our Star Wars: Episode II spin on 75243 Slave I – 20th Anniversary Edition.

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