The history of the LEGO® Star Wars™ Millennium Falcon™: From a gray hunk of junk to the biggest LEGO set ever

Over the two decades of LEGO® Star Wars™ history, there have been plenty of versions of the iconic Millennium Falcon™.

How many exactly? It’s impossible to say. Unless you count them, in which case there are twelve.

So, what better way to celebrate them all, than by hosting a completely imaginary (and pointless) awards ceremony?

So welcome one and all, men and women, droids and bounty hunters, Jedi and Jar Jar, to the 1st Annual Arbitrary LEGO Millennium Falcon Awards (sponsored by Mos Eisley Cantina – where the elite meet to eat and the scum come for fun.)

Our first category takes us back to the original LEGO Millennium Falcon.

There sure is a lot to pick from, from the new, playability-improving panel design to that rather fetching cape worn by Lando Calrissian. But we’ve decided, quite rightly, on The Most Inventive Use of Ski Poles Award thanks to their starring role as the gun barrels on this ship.

Now we know why the Falcon felt so at home on Hoth…

Coming off that segue, which was so seamless it could conceivably have been deliberate, it’s the 2004 Hoth version of the Millennium Falcon! Amidst this most silly of ceremonies, let’s pause to genuinely award The Hyperspace Trophy for the Greatest Jump Forward. A huge upgrade from its 2000 predecessor, this set first introduced the panel design which has been a staple of future models ever since. 

OK, back to the silliness. 

The films have featured numerous attempts at concealment within this Corellian freighter. And to honor that, we award The Hide and Seek Trophy to the 2011 set – the first Millennium Falcon to come with a secret storage compartment! Unfortunately, we can’t find any of the minifigures to award the trophy to…

The award for Best Looking Hunk of Junk in the Galaxy goes to the beautiful blue-and-white Kessel Run Millennium Falcon (75212), which manages to make the deliberately… rustic… design of the ship into something rather streamlined and snazzy.

There hasn’t been a lot of competition for our awards… until now. Because this next award is the most hotly contested of all – namely The Smallest Hunk of Junk in the Galaxy. Battling it out are our three Microfighter sets – 2014’s Han Solo, 2003’s Mini Millennium Falcon, and most recently Chewbacca’s 2018 version. And we can confirm that by a hair (well, actually 2cm…) the award goes to… Chewbacca! Standing at 4cm high, 8cm long and wide, this is officially the teeniest hunk of junk we’ve ever made! Woo! Kiee!

The 2003 Mini Falcon had 19 building instructions, meaning it just missed out on The Award for Most Building Instructions, by a narrow margin of 1,358 instructions, to our latest, 7,541-piece Ultimate Collector’s Millennium Falcon, which comes with an award-worthy BB-8™ figure. Additionally, this set is also the (current...) holder of the Most Bricks of all LEGO Star Wars Sets Ever award.

And finally, we come to the one and only (literally, the only) Midi-scale Millennium Falcon (7778) from 2009.

Not quite mini, not quite play-scale and definitely not quite Ultimate Collector’s. There is no more appropriate award than the Most Difficult LEGO Millennium Falcon to Put into a Definitive Category Award!