That may be but I don’t remember them being commonly available. Perhaps they were only sold at FAO Schwarz or other specialty toy stores?
I suppose it depends on how you define “commonly available,” but they were in the Sears Catalog by 1969 at the latest.
https://forum.brickset.com/discussion/27689/1969-sears-christmas-catalog-lego-pages
Thanks for that. The comments on that page mention that the 536-piece set was “exclusive to both FAO Schwarz” and Sears. (And ten bucks for that set sounds like a fair price.)
Heh, I was already a senior in high school by 1969, so I wouldn’t have been looking for Legos.
What…the fuck…is that? Is this an attempt to appeal to the survivalist/far-right nationalist/Sovereign Citizen demographic? And are the tree fort people trying to lure people into a mantrap with $100 bills in a bucket? The woman is definitely on…something, or else a Romulan in disguise. I guess the officer is supposed to be fast-roping down while the pilot in the CH-47 chases down the woman in the buggy to net her, but this is definitely a Breaking Bad side-quest that Vince Gilligan definitely needs to do a Lego Breaking Bad video short for.
Stranger
And I was about three years old, so I wasn’t reading the Sears catalog.
Does anyone remember these “not LEGO” blocks? I had them, but all the internet searches (like that found this picture) just call them “building blocks”. Did they have another name?
I’m not seeing any custom pieces there. The gold color might be unusual, but everything on that is used for many other purposes.
But yeah, if your kid isn’t the sort to come up with clever new designs and see what they can make and so on, then maybe Lego isn’t the right toy for them. Doesn’t mean that there aren’t kids who still do that-- Just as many as there used to be when we were kids, so far as I can tell.
There were already competitors in the 80s when I was a kid: Mega Blocks and Tycho come to mind. Both were generally inferior (there’s a lot more engineering that goes into making Lego than most realize), but they were compatible.
Actually, the fact that you can take any two Lego pieces, even ones manufactured decades apart, and have them snap together, speaks to the exacting manufacturing standards that the company achieves. It’s really quite impressive.
It’s certainly true of my kids’ LEGO sets. Even though they came as kits for specific builds, they are now in mixed buckets and are frequently assembled into new creations.
Ummm. . . I know I didn’t play with them like that. I’ve never understood the appeal of the specific kits. I don’t think I ever had one. . . we just had a big bag of Legos and would create stuff with them. You know with the right Legos you can build a sword and bash your brother over the head with it. . . great fun!
LOL. It’s part of the Lego City Mountain Police theme, so I think they are…still trying to come up with something besides survivalist meth-heads living in a tree-shack.
This is another one we have, which I find amusing:
60161 Downed CIA Drug Plane Retrieval Team
Comes with a jaguar, pre-Colombian ruins, and what appears to be half a dozen private military contractors looking through the wreckage of an old cargo plane filled with…whatever.
The creative brick boxes are good for getting bulk pieces but they suck for imagination. You need at least a few kits to give you some specialty pieces. You just don’t need the huge expensive kits. Wings, windshields, cockpits, axels, wheels, doors, gates, control panels, people (faces, clothes, helmets, weapons…). They still seem to make the $20 birthday specials. Two vehicles and a few characters combined with the bulk boxes and you can really start doing things.
For those bemoaning the end of creative play with LEGO, I would like to gently point out the 3-in-1 Creator kits. They’re simpler non-branded designs with fewer “unique” elements, they’re inexpensive by LEGO standards, and they include instructions for three different builds using the included bricks. They’re explicitly designed to encourage the build-deconstruct-rebuild play that so many of us remember.
LEGO is a capitalist corporate entity and therefore isn’t going to leave money on the table by abandoning licensed kits and fancy stuff for the adult model-making market… But I do think the company’s institutional values still include the ideal of creative play and they make products that uphold it.
“The Toys that Made Us” series on Netflix has an interesting episode on Lego, Episode 7. (Season 2, episode 3.)
My son-in-law is a Lego fanatic. There are books with ideas of things you can build that don’t come from kits. I got him one, and the Lego James Bond Aston Martin which is rather awesome.
While you can buy raw blocks from bins at the Lego store, it’s not surprising they went with kits, since the Saturn V model mentioned above (mine is half done) has more pieces than most kids would ever buy. Reusable pieces doesn’t add to the bottom line.
Did anyone else see the short lived Lego building competition series, on ABC I think? Not very good, I gave up half way through since there were no pointers on building techniques, and I’d guess the producers discovered that watching people build a Lego set up is boring …
Teenagers, OTOH:
That looks almost exactly like what I got for Christmas one year. They came in a big plastic bucket but I don’t recall what name was on the bucket.
I guess I mostly used “illegal techniques”, trying to weaponize the (mostly) Technics Lego at age 12. I did break many pieces, so limits were met and then bashed through.
nevermind
My kid has a three-stage process, which seems typical of his peers. He likes to get the kits, as big and complicated as possible, and carefully assemble them according to the instructions. This typically happens only on birthdays and holidays. Then he plays with them until they break, which rarely takes long, and then the remains are added to the Big Box of Legos and used for free-form creative construction in perpetuity.