Really? I loved LEGO as a kid, I’d build the castle or whatever once and them add the pieces to my collection to build massive custom projects.
My daughter has Harry Potter and Friends sets, which she leaves as-assembled and plays make-believe with. All the time.
She also has Creator and City and lots of my wife’s and my old pieces, which she uses free-form. So a mix.
She has reassembled some Harry Potter sets, but that was because they broke in a move, not because she disassembled them.
They’re perceived as “good” use of plastic because they don’t seem all that disposable - witness the roaring trade in second-had pieces, and the number of people like me passing stuff down to their kids (or even grandkids). Especially now that they’re eliminating more plastic in their packaging too.
I would say that in the UK pretty much everyone would treat Lego as uncountable, i.e. like water or milk, but I’ve noticed the opposite for the US, at least if Lego gets mentioned on TV or in films. So in the UK you would say ‘Lego’ to describe any amount, and ‘Lego brick’ or ‘piece of Lego’ rather than ‘Legos’ or ‘a Lego’ in the USA.
That makes three of us.
Oh btw Legos is an abomination.
Its Lego: or Lego bricks, pieces, etc
I must be a bit older or got them younger or something.
Erector Sets, Tinkertoys, and Lincoln Logs filled my childhood with lots of constructing goodness. Making an erector set crane with a golf ball for a skull-cracker and using that to demolish the Lincoln Log lodge house was a perennial favorite. Assemble, demolish, assemble, demolish, …
When we first got Legos (always plural; the manufacturer can keep their silly Danish non-native English to themselves) it was nothing but a big box of various small bricks. They were all the same height & same width: two bumps. They was a variety of lengths: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or IIRC 6 bumps. No other shapes. And there was a mix of red or white, but mostly red; no other colors. Even the flat base plates were still in the future, much less multiple colors, shapes, or (!!?!?!?!?!) kits. This would have been 1963-1964.
I found them boring as hell. You could make a cube or a wall or a misshapen blob. You could make a roofless floorless “house” or cabin with plain openings for doors and windows. And that was about it. Bo-o-o-o-o-riiiing!
By the time the sets got more elaborate I had both aged out and was actively disinterested from my earlier poor experience.
Some of the specialized looking pieces in licensed sets are just regular pieces used in a unique way. Licensed sets also use stickers as a finishing touch so some of the pieces that feel super specific are just regular pieces with a sticker on top. One of my least favorite things about Lego is the stickers since they require additional work when you’re building and taking apart models. I didn’t bother adding stickers to sets as a kid and now I just pile them up with my stack of instruction manuals.
I usually follow the instructions first and then build whatever I feel like building later on. After that I break down the models and add the bricks to one of my tubs.
Like the other 90s kids in this thread I grew up with themed sets like western, castle, underwater, space, city, trains, etc. Most of the bricks were completely generic and interchangeable but we also had specialized bricks like wall sections from some of the castle and western sets.
The original Star Wars Lego sets came out in '99 when I was starting high school so I didn’t have much experience with licensed sets growing up. I find it a little annoying that official Lego stores tend to only carry and display the newest and trendiest sets but it’s pretty easy to find sets that aren’t super rare online. Bricks and Minifigs is an unofficial Lego hobby store that has a much better setup. They still have a lot of the newer sets on display but they also have a sizable collection of generic sets and they sell also sell bricks by weight for folks who just want a pile to play around with.
I consider myself an AFOL (adult fan of Lego) but I only have one model that is on display (NYC Skyline - LEGO 21028 New York City | Brickset). The rest of my Lego shelf contains a few open bins and parts of semi-recognizable models that my nephew and goddaughters play with when they’re over. They’re in the 4-10 age range and they enjoy using partial models to build their own stuff.
Lego Masters:
Not bad for a reality competition show and it is easy to watch with a group. It’s fun seeing the different interpretations but the contrived drama can be ridiculous. I feel like the building techniques get lost in the shuffle during the early rounds but you get to see some impressive models in the later rounds. The show is most enjoyable when it gets out of the way and just lets the contestants build cool stuff.
I have watched multiple seasons of several different national editions of the Lego Masters (but not the U.S. one), and have witnessed basically none of contrived drama in these. I guess it’s an American flavor.
It’s all about the builds, and the pressure, and highly enjoyable to watch, even as a non-AFOL.
That’s not how I played with them as a kid. I’d get a kit, build whatever the kit was about once and only once, then take it apart and mix the new parts with my old Legos. Then I’d make new and different things from my imagination (mostly spaceships, IIRC) from the entire Lego collection. And I’d play with the new things I made until I got tired of them, disassembled them, and then make more different new things.
They were by far my favorite toys as a kid. I finally gave them away to friend’s kid when I was like 40 years old, and it still hurt a bit, despite not looking at them for decades. It was like a piece of my childhood going away forever.
The way my kids (and me I too I suppose) play with Lego is the same way the human characters in The Lego Movie play with them. A few years back I thought it would fun to buy some custom minifigs that looked like each of our family members from the Lego Stores in New York. So instead of “Emmit” and “Lord Business” standing in for the son and the father, it’s just actual Lego versions of everyone.
It’s hilarious watching how my kids play with them in this giant Lego City I helped them create with it’s weird mishmash of characters and themes. At the moment, my daughter has negotiated building a pet store in my son’s area (we have something like three dozen Lego dogs, cats, rabbits, and other animal pieces from various sets. But she’s still a bit sore because her brother won’t bring Lego Brother to visit her Lego avatar in her house in Lego Princess Village (a grotesque post-modern monstrosity not at all in keeping with the classic architecture of the neighboring Disney castles).
Last week they conducting the semi-orderly evacuation of almost 800 minifigs from pending disaster (an asteroid or nuclear strike I think). Although I did have to remind them if they actually blew up their city, the bricks are going back into the storage bin. I’ll allow a cluttered cityscape in our living room. I don’t want a pile of thousands of random bricks.
If you are referring to Lego Masters on FOX, I wouldn’t call it “short lived”. Lego Masters has been renewed for a fourth season.
I’m not surprised by this but I am disappointed. In their defense, the contrived (American) drama has decreased over time and the most recent season that I watched was pretty fun. The show would be better served if they made a Top Chef move and shifted to keep the focus on actual builds.
In a fun Lego playset development, one of the companies that does 3rd party repair on airliner engines has commissioned a Lego model of one of the new types they service. This is paywalled, but they may have a free article allowance: Leap-1B Engine Made Of Lego Makes Public Debut | Aviation Week Network
Here’s the money quote if you can’t see the article and pictures:
The engine, built at 60% of the powerplant’s actual size, is made of some 400,000 Lego pieces and weighs 450 kg (992 lb.).
The idea came from a Lufthansa Technik employee who likes to build things out of Lego and his son, “who built the first Lego engines at a smaller scale for giveaways,” says Derrick Siebert, Lufthansa Technik’s VP of commercial engine services. “These were very well received from customers, and that is where the idea generated,” he adds.
Lufthansa Technik hired an outside company to assist for the Lego Leap-1B. “As there is no publicly available 3D model yet, the Lego model was created based on illustrations with the support of our engineers,” says a Lufthansa Technik spokeswoman.
The outside company started building the Leap-1B in October and finished it nearly six months later.
I was hoping Lufthansa Technik had a non-paywalled press release on their media page, but they don’t or at least don’t yet. Homepage Lufthansa Technik (lufthansa-technik.com)
Almost a thousand pounds of Lego. Big job.
this was me…
My brother and I were kids in the 70s, and did the “bunch of loose LEGO pieces in a tub” thing. He was more into them than me — I tended to focus on my Barbie townhouse (with working elevator!) and Corvette — but honestly we were both more into Girder and Panel sets.
After childhood I didn’t pay much attention to LEGO until a few years ago, when my “nephew” (by best friends’ son, then in his late teens) started getting into them. In 2017 I went to Paris with a few friends, and as a joke I got us each simple Eiffel Tower kits…and immediately put mine on a closet shelf. But then late last year, I discovered that LEGO has a jazz quartet set: I’m a jazz singer, and was tickled by the idea. And I knew that my nephew and his parents were enjoying their LEGO adventures. So in January I bought it for myself, and assembled it over several weekends. I enjoyed it more than I expected to! A few weeks ago I dusted off the Eiffel Tower set, and put that together in less than 90 minutes.
I don’t think I’m going to become a LEGO enthusiast, but I’m definitely willing to get a set now and then if one appeals to me. For example, I see myself buying the jazz club someday (when I feel like spending that much money). I’m also considering the Van Gogh set.
I bought that for my nephew for Christmas in 2021…plus an aftermarket light kit, which I had him open first. 
The assembled car is definitely pretty awesome!
That’s certainly true for adults but my kids never did this; they would usually do the set as instructed, then pull 'em apart and build their own creations.
It’s a Pride Millennium Falcon! I love it.
I can’t resist posting this. Here is a YouTube video about a Lego version of the Anikythera Mechanism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPVCJjTNgk
(It wouldn’t let me embed the video.)
Mind posting a pic - I love those Saturn Vs!
Who remembers the smell of the original Tinkertoys? Mmmmm. And the little Tinkertoy man on the instructions with a wand and mortarboard? ha ha
ETA: Wow, $210!
Yep. My wife does this.
Kids, generally, do not-unless forced to by their parents.