I used to have the Hospital kit and my brother had the Gas Station, in the early 90’s. Now I’d like to get something similar for my niece but everything is Star Wars this or Harry Potter that (at least in Toys r us, that’s all they have).
Look for the Lego City sets. You may have to go to a different toy store or look online but they’re pretty common sets. I see them all over the place.
I remember as a kid I had lots of standard pieces and pieces from a kit (a castle, if I remember correctly). I did what some other posters have indicated their kids do: I built the kit a few times but ended up reusing the kit pieces for my own creations. This would have been in the 80s and 90s, so the kits have been around for a while.
As an aside, my wife bought me the Falling Water kit from the Architecture series as an anniversary gift after hearing me say it was neat in the Guggenheim gift shop, and I’m currently 31 years old. 
One thing I noticed about this kit is that while its 800+ pieces are specifically put together to build Falling Water, they are almost all pretty standard pieces (2x1, 3x1, 4x1, etc, albeit in a non-standard beige color scheme) that you could use for anything you imagined. I see lots of crazy beige inventions in our soon to be child’s future!
It certainly hasn’t stifled my son.
Oh he LOVES getting new sets, and we build them together (well, me mostly with him helping) then he plays with them for a couple days and they get pulled apart and tossed into the Bucket O’ LEGO which has remnants from my brother and I, friends who gave them their old legos, and new kits. He build space ships and houses and cars and all sorts of things with them with pieces from ships and planes and Star Wars and City kits…
I’d give almost anything to have my old Robin Hood kit back though. I was the one who liked to keep my sets together and my brother and his friends smashed it and I have no idea where the pieces are. Out of what we have I could find Robin, maybe Maid Marian, the gold chest, the bridge, the base and some of the tree leaves and that’s about it.
This is an extremely good point that I’d never thought of in that way before. By that logic, all we need to do is give kids a rock and a stick and they’re good for the rest of their lives, because they’ll be creative.
It is a little silly, now that I think of it from that perspective.
Ooh, that Robin Hood set is cool. I want it.
Last night my husband and I went birthday shopping for our younger daughter, who is the family Lego addict. (You can see her rock band here and here, though how she knew Chewbacca would be the best bouncer I do not know.) We wound up splurging on the Hogwart’s Castle, because we are finally pretty solvent after a long period of penury and we are giggling over what her reaction is going to be, because she thinks asking for Hagrid’s Hut is the same as asking for the moon.
The outside is little lego, but on the inside it will still be Duplo 
This is true.
I wonder if there are any Who Lego sets, and if any of them are appropriate for a three-year-old?
Oh, man. If Whatsit Jr. got Hogwarts Castle, he would just die. That’s great, dangermom!
I grew up in the 80s and while I did have a big pile 'o Lego, we had 3 or 4 kits that I loved putting together more than anything. I looooved following directions.
Turns out that following step-by-step directions has served me much better than being super creative. I’ve made more recipes and put together more wooden furniture in my life than needed the skills to think outside the box.
Yes and No, but only to a point. Some of the kits are filled with pieces that are so specific to that model (I’m thinking of the pirate series) that there isn’t much else you could do with it. But other specialized pieces (I’m thinking of spaceships) have pieces that can be recombined in hundreds of ways to produce creative models - even if most of them are space related.
90s for me, this was well into the era of custom molded pieces, and I would say they required a lot more creativity then just a bucket full of red 2x4 blocks. I remember viewing some of those pieces as challenges more than anything; “You are not a metal detector you are now a tailpipe for my carboatplane!” Every model I got was assembled according to spec, but it was always disassembled within a week and the pieces put into the big box.
I remember building a lot of houses, and a lot of cars, boats and planes (and carboatplanes), but birds, teakettles and Stonehenges never crossed my mind. For one, they’d be too static and no fun, and if I had a pressing need to sculpt any of those things, I’d choose a medium that would actually be suited to it. Kids don’t care about making lego sculptures to show off how gifted and creative they are (to their credit, IMHO), they like making things for their lego figurines that allow their stories to be told. There’s no way to build a teakettle out of legos that actually fits in a figurine’s hand, so nonstandard pieces are absolutely there for a reason.
Like JJ said, there’s also a lot of fun to be had in the course of seeing how a bunch of unrelated pieces come together into a whole, and learning to predict how the construction would come about from the first few steps. We don’t knock kids for reading because they’re wasting time that would be better spent writing, and I don’t think this is any different.
Also, if your kids never build anything without direction for fear of being wrong, maybe it’s distantly related to the fact that you’re the kind of person who judges their kids for not playing correctly?
I remember one time in my youth that we had a large piece of plywood, leaning up against the house. The challenge was laid out by my Dad to build a car that could roll to the bottom of the board and transition to the flat concrete without breaking. We spent hours building testing and making changes to the vehicles. From three different kids we got three completely different solutions.
Try ripping the label off a can of corn, call it nuclear waste and ask the little one build you a vehicle that can transport it across the couch, or a bridge to transport it to the coffee table.
Yep. I remember it like you do; I had a kick ass airport/jet kit in the mid-80s and there were tons of other kits like that then. And when I wanted to buy generic buckets of legos for my brother during the early 90s, I had to look pretty darn hard for them since they were already almost exclusively themed kits.
The pieces are less specialized than you think. There are a few singular pieces there, but mostly,the generic types have gotten much, much more complex. I was mostly playing with Lego in the 90’s and early 00’s (though I still get Lego for my birthday… in college!) and whenever I see a contemporary Lego set, I get a little jealous of how they make pieces now that I always needed but didn’t exist. Sigh…
YES. Birthday present last year… so cool… pretentious Lego… don’t you love the booklet with the “Lego artist’s” statement of artistic intent? I got the Guggenheim Museum for my birthday this year (smaller and not as awesome, but still pretty neat.) Now I’m running out of shelf space.
Someone else has said it, but it’s all about the Lego City. Anyway, at least for the past two decades, most of what’s on the shelf has been sets. (I mean, how many different types of boxes of Lego do you need to sell?) I actually find generic boxes are more prominent now than in the mid-90’s, though I’m not exactly doing a monthly survey. (ETA: Lego City is really, really common. Lego got on the branding bandwagon in the last… decade, maybe?.. with Lego Star Wars, and I’m not an enormous fan of branded stuff, but they still have generic Castle, Space (though it changes all the time), and City.)
I’m pretty sure that’s just a set that someone has cobbled together. Your best bet is assembling the pieces one by one — just find stuff that works. Has there ever been a Lego fez?
[oops; nevermind]
That’s been my observation, too- the Lego I grew up with, whilst in Kit form (City Lego, Pirate Lego, Castle Lego, Space Lego, etc) still had more than enough “generic” or “repurposeable” pieces that you could still make all sorts of other cool stuff anyway.
Having said all that, whilst the newer kits do seem to have more “unique” and “single-purpose” parts, I don’t think it makes Lego any less cool or “worthy” as a creative toy.
I’m going to go ahead and say “no”. When I was a kid playing with legos, sometimes I wanted to build things that didn’t really lend itself stack blocks in various ways. Organic shapes like boat hulls came to mind (unless you were going to built a very large ship).
Plus parts from the fancy purpose-built kits can still be used as details on a different model. For example, you can use the pirate ship parts to make your own pirate ship.
