The latest in a long line of LEGO Harry Potter sets is a brick replica of the iconic Sorting Hat. Introduced in the first book of the series, the Hat sorts Hogwarts students into their respective houses: Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin. This set is small, but it is well-detailed and designed, and it contains a hidden secret that will delight devoted fans.
The Warner Bros. movie adaptations gave the Sorting Hat its iconic appearance: a beat-up, brown wizard hat with stitches and scuffs, and wrinkles that formed a crude impression of a curmudgeonly face. The new LEGO set captures these aesthetic qualities, and on top of that, it also talks, and its eyebrows and mouth move in unison. It comes with a single LEGO Minifigure, of a 1st year Harry Potter wearing the Sorting Hat.
The designers divided the build into seven separate bags. First, you build a black stand, where you can display the hat when it's not sorting students. The stand has four colored tiles on its four sides, which depict the sigils of the four Hogwarts Houses.
Then you build the Hat itself, starting with the brim and working your way up. It is a surprisingly colorful experience; the designers decided that if the outside was uniformly brown, then the inside—which most people would never see—would burst with reds, purples, pinks. Visually, the final build looks monotonous, but when building it, it doesn't feel monotonous, which makes all the difference to the person building it.
There's a fairly complex mechanism buried inside the hat—a tangle of Technic rods and pins, held together with rubber bands—that accomplishes multiple things at once. You pull down the tip of the hat (or place the hat on someone's head; there's a trigger mechanism underneath), and three things happen.
The eyebrows move. The mouth opens. And a rod pushes down on a button, which makes the Hat utter one of 31 randomized sounds—mostly, some variation of "You belong in… GRYFFINDOR / HUFFLEPUFF / RAVENCLAW / SLYTHERIN!" There is some variance; the Hat also makes thinking noises ("Hmmm") and recites a poem ("There's nothing hidden in your head / The Sorting Hat can't see / So try me on and I will tell you / Where you ought to be!"). The designers built a little trap door on the side of the model, so that if and when the batteries go dead, you can easily replace them without taking the entire model apart.
Then, you plate the set with brown bricks, which form a shell around the mechanism and form the Hat's facial expression. But right before you do that, the designers included a fun secret, just for the builder.
MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD
According to Potter lore, the Sorting Hat was originally Godric Gryffindor's, and he, along with the other three founders (Helga Hufflepuff, Rowena Ravenclaw, and Salazar Slytherin) enchanted the hat with their "brains." So it makes sense, on a figurative level, that inside the LEGO Sorting Hat, we see a visual representation of each Hogwarts founder, via their surviving relics: Gryffindor's sword, Hufflepuff's cup, Ravenclaw's diadem, and Slytherin's locket. It's a really cool, thoughtful detail—to give the Sorting Hat a sort of tangible "soul," similar to how Build-A Bear puts a cloth heart in each of their dolls.
The LEGO Sorting Hat is not the size of the actual hat—to build a 1:1 facsimile of the prop would make the set prohibitively expensive. But despite its size, the LEGO Sorting Hat is well-detailed, and the extra bells and whistles make it a must-purchase for Potter devotees. Whimsy and magic rarely come at a reasonable price.
The LEGO Talking Sorting Hat, Set #76429, retails for $99.99, and it is composed of 561 pieces. It is available now on Amazon and the LEGO Store.
For more, be sure to check out our picks for the best LEGO Marvel sets, as well as the best LEGO car sets and LEGO Star Wars sets. And for the latest, also take a look at the coolest new LEGO sets for March 2024.
Kevin Wong is a contributing freelancer for IGN, specializing in LEGO. He's also been published in Complex, Engadget, Gamespot, Kotaku, and more. Follow him on Twitter at @kevinjameswong.
