This is my favorite Lego build:
Amazing. The exterior is impressive, but they fully built out the interiors, too!
Years ago we took my son to the USS Intrepid. He was more interested in the Lego model of the Intrepid they had on display than the ship itself.
I haven’t read the entire thread, so forgive me if this has come up already.
It seems to me that the same thing happened to Legos that happened to Colorforms – they fell for the lure of corporate endorsement and representing one particular movie/TV show/set of characters, and that ruined the appeal of what started out as a simple construction toy that could be endlessly re-assembled and re-arranged into multiple shapes.
When I was a kid, they sold Colorforms kits that were blatant tie-ins to cartons and the like. The Colorforms kits were pieces of flat cut-out colored vinyl plastic that would stick onto a glossy background.
Here’s a Flintstones colorforms:
You can see that the pieces are cutouts of Fred, Barney, Wilma, Betty, etc. They’re printed so they’re not just outlines. The problem is, Fred always looks the same. You can put him in different places, but he’s always Fred, facing that way.
Similarly, here’s a 19560s Disney Colorforms kit.
After a very short time, this got boring.
What I didn’t realize was that the original 1950s Colorforms kit consisted of brightly colored shapes – you know, Color Forms – squares, circles, triangles. These had disappeared by the time I was around, and I only found out about them when they started re-issuing them as “retro” or “classic” Colorforms
Now THIS I can understand – it empowers little minds to create whatever they want from the basic forms. You can make people, houses, trees, animals – whatever you want.
The classic Lego set was like that. The one our daughter played with was a collection of simple snap-together blocks. There was no “planned model” for the set, but you let your imagination run wild. The new Harry Potter-themed sets and Star Wars ships and the like are intended to produce the one item, mainly.
The set of Lincoln Logs she had was almost the same thing, but the Lincoln Logs people never give you enough of the long logs. You get a lot of really short ones, and there are only so many things you can build with those.
You’re the first person to mention Colorforms. Though not the idea of scripted merchandising tie-ins versus raw imagination-powered free-form construction toys.
I’m older than you are. I only knew of Colorforms as the basic shapes in bright colors as shown in your Classic cite. By the time they had the e.g. 1972 Flintstones kit I was way past that stage in toy selection and never knew those existed until today.
I admit to being surprised about the earlier Disney set you cited. I’d have been too young for Ccolorforms yet when that set came out. And living near Disneyland, nearly anything Disney was embraced by us and / or parents. Yet I don’t remember those at all, nor any other branded character tie-ins. Although apparently my era as a Colorforms kid spanned across at least the early stages of the tie-in era.
Interesting.
Just like the cartoons!
But the difference is, you buy a Flintstones Colorforms, it can’t ever be anything other than a Flintstone Colorform. A Lego X-Wing is still a collection of Lego parts, and can be repurposed just as easily as a box of random Lego parts. Growing up with Legos in the ‘80s, I was a bit past the period where the default Lego was just a box of parts. All the Legos I had were kits, just not media tie-ins. Firehouses and helicopters and castles and what-not. They all ended up in the same big box of loose parts in the end, from which I built what ever I wanted. I don’t see any reason to assume the Star Wars and Harry Potter sets don’t function the same way for modern kids, and reading the whole thread, it seems parents’ experience bears out this assumption.
Yes, this. I’m younger and had Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, and more generic knight and castle sets, and that’s how I used them too.
Depends on the set you get. If it’s got a lot of generic parts, then you can restructure it into something else. But several Lego sets are very specialized, and it’s hard to build anything besides the intended complicated model.
That’s not really true, even though it seems that way at a glance. Parts specialised for a specific model are incredibly rare and provided you actually have a collection of LEGO to add your deconstructed sets to you will have no trouble at all turning them into something else. One model’s wheel arch is another model’s hallway entrance or fireplace or bridge support or whatever. It’s tempting to look at car models and see a lot of specialised car fairings but the vast majority of them started their LEGO careers as wing pieces or robot armour, they only look specialised to the casual glance. Most unique pieces in a model are actually generic pieces with printed details rather than stickers. The Saturn V model has some unique pieces for instance, all the UNITED STATES printed parts, but the pieces themselves aren’t specific to the set.
One of the things I enjoy about making official sets is seeing the creative ways the designers use older pieces.
You mean like the sets they still sell? And have never stopped selling since before the minifig existed? Sets like that?
I’m getting deja vu all over again…
Yep - the Horizon: Forbidden West Tallneck makes great use of Uruk-Hai swords and snowboards, for instance.
There’s a bonsai tree set that uses pink frog pieces for cherry blossoms. Other botanical sets repurpose anything from canoe oars to car hoods to minifigure shoulder epaulets as flower petals.
If you think Lego is painting themselves into a corner with licensed property sets, you lack imagination.
That’s not my experience at all. I’ve got several Lego sets as an adult, and the closest thing any of them have to a non-repurposable part is the cockpit to this Jedi Starfighter, which is a single piece of molded plastic. And that’s just one piece out of a set of over two hundred, the rest of which are generic Lego pieces.
I want the Lego set that featured snowboarding Uruk-Hai!
Variants of that with different printing (or clear) appear in several different sets, though. And cockpit parts like that are very useful in spaceship MOCs.
Yeah, I meant “non-repurposable” in the sense that it’s hard to find a use for it that’s not another spaceship cockpit, not that it could only ever be part of that specific spaceship.
And of course, “hard” isn’t “impossible.”
Aah, yes, it’s pretty much a cockpit. But since spaceships are such popular MOCs, it’s never going to lack for use.
In case anyone else was unsure, “MOC” is “My Own Creation”, i.e., something that a player builds on their own without directions.
And my Lego days were before the Star Wars kits, but most of what I got was Legoland Space kits, because even though I wasn’t building the specific models in the directions, those were the kits that had the wings and rocket engines and cockpit canopies and lasers and the like that I wanted for my designs.
I vaguely remember these sets from my early Lego days, I think. There were a few sets that I remember - they weren’t “branded” or licensed, but they were distinct and related to each other - polynesian/tropical/tribal/island/canoes (I distincly remember this being the first time I came across outrigger canoes), space, and of course knights and castles. I’d love to see these again, but I’m not sure what to search for? This was in the 90s and, if I remember right, just before licensed LEGO sets took off.
Isn’t that the point of a collectible? If they are buying the kit for the tie in to whatever fandom they like, it is a collectible.
Oh crap! I found it!
I’m not sure what you think you found, but it appears to be a bad url.
It might better be
