I remember having a LEGO set when I was 6 or 7 years old. It was a general purpose set; it only contained bricks, plates, tiles, etc. I made all kinds of things, using nothing but my imagination. I was a bit dismayed & disappointed when LEGO started selling kits where you could only build one thing, and now that seems to be the norm.
Careful about just donating or throwing away old Lego sets-- some of them really hold their value, even post-built. sonlost I the older had the foresight to keep the original boxes of all the Lego sets he got for birthdays / Christmas and built, and has resold some of them for some tidy cash. He still has the Simpsons house he built, which he claims is worth several hundred dollars.
Yeah I was gonna also mention that these new partnered sets aren’t very mix-and-matchable. There are SO many custom pieces, which I’m sure is due to the partnerships.
Although, kudos to the people who then take these whacky other pieces and turn them in to a custom new set that they try to get Lego to turn into an official piece.
I follow the Muppets fandom and people are always trying to propose Muppet Show and Labyrinth sets based on builds they have come up with. It’s amazing. I’m sure every fandom has examples like these.
Not only is the Millennium Falcon $850, but it’s almost 2’ x 3’ once built. Part of me wants to buy it & part of me has no idea where to put something so large once I’d build it.
My nephew has so much LEGO my brother just downloaded the instructions for that thing and the kid built it with bricks he already had. It’s not the right color course, but I think it looks awesome in a full rainbow of random colors. I don’t have a photo of it, but it was very cool looking.
But yeah, I was referring to just the Harry Potter sets. Other sets can go up to $2,000 or more.
This is not the one he built, but it looked similar:
Are you me? Same thing here - child of the 60’s, Lego was only available as a box of bricks and slabs, piles of which ended up in a shopping bag for next time in the den closet. Us kids would haul them out Saturday AM and make houses and castles and such. Kits didn’t exist, and agree I recoiled a bit when they came out in later years.
As far as new Lego sets are concerned, both the At-At and the Millennium Falcon go for $849.99. Here is the link to their most expensive sets for sale:
Gifts Over $100 | Toys $100+ | Official LEGO® Shop US
For a kit where the pieces would be pretty much useless if thrown into the random Lego bin, there is the Hulkbuster:
Hulkbuster 76210 | Marvel | Buy online at the Official LEGO® Shop US
I could’ve written this exact post, it applies that much to my childhood (also in the 90s).
Today in my late 30s I still have an interest in LEGO sets and it’s clear the company markets many sets toward adults, something they didn’t do in the 90s. This includes “retro” sets meant to evoke what they had on offer decades ago, as well as obvious “display” sets that aren’t appropriate for kids. These include wall hangings, delicate models of buildings, or very large sets like the Millennium Falcon mentioned by others, that would just be too plain cumbersome to play with.
I only have about half a dozen sets today. Most of them are from my childhood (Deep Freeze Defender, Formula 1 Racer, Custom Rally Van, Space Shuttle Launch), with the remaining ones being scale models of various vehicles. I have the Ecto-1 and the DeLorean time machine. All of them just sit on a shelf collecting dust.
Long discussion on Lego pieces, specialization, and such:
Brian
Kid Cheesesteak (14) has been through the gamut of LEGO phases:
Build it / break it/ mix it in a bin/ build random things from it
Build it / leave it as is untouched forever
Build it / break it / remake it as an alternate version
He’s now in the “this minifig is worth $100” phase, but is at least coupling that with “I can sell my old sets to buy these collectible items”. He was also nice enough to get me a vintage 1976 Cargo Ship for my office, nice conversation item, that.
I’ve wanted the Palace Cinema since it first came out and never have had the money for it. I want to rig it up with an LED light kit and have it on display. You can get a counterfeit version on AliExpress for $60, I may have to do that one of these days…
I had a pretty large collection of LEGOs that I played with several times weekly for years beyond my interest in any other toys, and that I built and rebuilt into various things. I also faithfully saved and protected instructions although I rarely rebuilt a kit more than a couple of times. (When my mother wanted to be especially cruel one day, she took the entire collection and pretended to throw it away, hiding it for months and putting me into a spiraling depression.) A couple of decades ago I gave the collection that I had been carting around into my early thirties to the children of a friend, and they reportedly played with them daily and added to the collection, so far from ending up in a landfill or just sitting in a closet they have long outlasted my use. Most of them, aside from the few flat plates that got broken and the translucent pieces that tended to become brittle after a few years, were almost just as good as they day they came out of the box, still snapping into place and holding securely.
I don’t know about all of the ‘themed’ kits that are so popular now; it is certainly possible that they are purchase for kids who are not actually into creative construction and so they don’t finish the kid or reuse them for other constructions. But compared to all of the completely disposable plastic items such as product packaging, food containers and single-use utensils, plastic wrap, et cetera, the ‘waste’ from LEGOs would be a tiny drop in the bucket even if kids were opening the boxes and dumping them straight into the trash. They just cost too much per mass to actually be that large of a volume of plastic waste.
Stranger
Just like to add, giving away Lego is about as hard as giving away dollar bills.
That is awesome! He must be a child of the 60s at heart!
jk
Ironically, the Lego movie was all about throwing away the instructions and building whatever you want/need.
Just to provide context, my kids are obsessed with Lego. More my son than my daughter, but she’s into it to. My my estimate (and by “estimate” my detailed spread sheet I use to track their sets), they have at least 50,000 individual bricks just in the sets we bought, and then double or even triple that to include collections of loose bricks we acquired at yard sales for pennies on the dollar or people just leaving them on the curb to get rid of.
So in terms of “waste” for the environment, I don’t think they are that wasteful (aside from the fact that they are made of plastic). I know Lego is looking for more sustainable materials, but as far as cheap plastic toys go, Lego probably have the least negative impact. The reason for that is they are almost infinitely reusable. And they are expensive! You can always find someone willing to take or buy your old Lego. And your old Lego will always be compatible with new Lego. There are entire online marketplaces like Bricklink.com where you can buy and sell old sets or bricks.
What’s “pretty bad” is that Lego are madness inducing. My children have started Legoforming our environment. It started out as a single play table, but the “Lego table” has spread to include our dining table and several other portable tables. Every so often, one of our children declares “I need to set up this, that, or the other thing” and they’ll take a chair or something and extend their play area. They are running out of space, so they started building upward. My daughter is slowly building Lego-friend’s themed high rise towers that destroy the classic aesthetic of her mostly Disney Princess themed area.
Oh, and they have their own individual areas they treat at best as rival municipalities and at worst like countries that are often on the brink of war!
And this is just in our apartment!
At our much larger second home, they are accumulating more sets there! We bought an Amtrak Acela-like Lego train for my son for Christmas and allowed him to “temporarily” set it up on the dining room table. Except my wife’s aunt had this 30 year old Lego train (which looks more like an NJ Transit commuter rail or Amtrak Regional) with a bunch of extra tracks and switches. And because they are compatible, the kids turned the dining room table into a rail yard with multiple commuter stations!
And my Dad shows up to visit and gives me such great advice like “oh you should have your kids put the Lego away when they are done playing with them.” First of all, they are never “done” playing with them! Second, we are clearly having two different conversations. My Dad is talking about “putting stuff away” while I’m trying to negotiate with my kids about not running more track through the house in exchange for building a hopper car for the train so they can deliver spaghetti and meatballs to my seating area!
We have basically become the family from The Lego Movies where I’m Will Farrell, except that the children have moved everything out of the basement and occupied every living area and there is a perpetual state of war between Lego City/ Ninjago City vs Planet Duplo / Disney Princess Village and my wife (played by Mya Rydolf in the films) instead of threatening to put the Lego in storage bins has becomes a sort of VP of Sourcing and Procurement!
Legos weren’t ubiquitous when I was a little kid. My 6 years younger brother has some . Just the basic sets of parts. My own kids has a ton of the pieces and a fun uncle who would buy and assemble a small fleet of Lego pirate ships for them. I never got into it much, I was an Erector Set kid, you could build real stuff with those things. But I liked playing with blocks (made out of real wood) ans Lincoln Logs too so I would have enjoyed Legos if they were around too. However, I believe the main reason Legos exist is to step on the little blocks when you are barefoot.
In the grim future of Hello Kitty LEGO, there is only war.
Stranger
When we were in Korea, my kids loved going to “Lego rooms”. These were little shops that had many, many Lego kits. You picked out a kit, which had all the pieces in a ziplock and the laminated instructions, and assembled it. For a reasonable fee, of course. There was a bin that had lost-and-found pieces in case your kit was missing one. And then you disassembled it back when you were done.
Not sure how well those places did once covid came. Poorly, I expect.
Bonus rant: I don’t care what they say, the plural of Lego is Legos.
What else would it be? I think I’m missing something.