I have to admit that I would consider buying this one for a friend.
I never liked lego kits in the first place because they curb creativity (make it look like what is shown on the box instead of just building something). But my main gripe is that we pigeonhole kids so early. Girly toys are pink and purple, boy toys are red and bright blue. Girls get stuff that tend to homemaking, teaching and pets. Boys get stuff that tend toward brain challenges, physical action and combat (whether war games or sports).
IMO, you pigeonhole kids role expectations by color-coding their toys. Those visual cues, backed up by the fact that just about every company uses the same cues, tells kids that pony toys and bikes with streamers on them are for girls (cue, pink and purple colors) and boys get the dirt bikes and skateboards (cue, red and blue).
A child who might have the potential to become an excellent skateboarder is going to say (mentally) “That’s a boy toy, I can tell by the colors.” If that child is a girl and the girl is put off by it, the world may be losing a champion skateboarder because she took the color as a visual cue that this is not a girls’ activity.
I just showed my 8yo the science lab as shown on Jezebel. It has beakers and vials and a robot and a girl in a purple shirt. Now she wants it for Christmas. Thanks a lot, guys. :dubious: (I already bought her two sets; the prezzies are all done.)
So one actual, real-life girl likes it as an *addition *to the Lego line, but she already wants every single item in the Lego catalog, so it’s not the case that she she’s thinking “Finally, a Lego set just for me!”
There have been Lego sets with larger dolls, marketed towards girls, at least since my older son entered the Lego age… and he’s almost 18.
I don’t have to like it, but I will give them some credit: not everything they market to girls is pink, and they’re still toys to be played with rather than objects to be collected.
My sister and I played Barbies a lot as kids. We had a ton of accessories, but I think we’d have liked pink Legos to build Barbie houses with. Not sure if there were any around 20 years ago, though.
When my daughter was of Lego age, we bought her a bucket of off-brand bricks, which she wanted because some of the bricks were lavender*. The other bricks were pink or white. These bricks worked with Legos. And we got about 3-5 times as many bricks in that bucket as we’d have received if we’d bought the name brand Legos.
I was very conflicted. As a feminist, I liked the fact that Legos was a gender neutral toy. But as a parent, well, those were the bricks that she liked.
I grew up playing with standard Legos myself. I never felt that I HAD to make the builds listed on the box, and usually I made stuff according to my own whims. I’d occasionally make the builds listed, but only to see if I could do it. I don’t particularly care for the trend of just having a few bricks in each box, and thus limiting the builds. I prefer to get a big box or bucket of bricks. A couple of years ago, my husband decided that he wanted some Legos for Xmas. So I went looking around in Target and wherever else toys were sold, and I had a hard time finding a largish collection, instead of a box with a few specialty pieces in it.
*When it was time to find her a second, bigger, bike, my husband searched forever to find a purple unicorn bike. We could find purple/lavender bikes, and we could find unicorn bikes. But finding the combination was a pain. And then she told us that a white unicorn bike would have been acceptable. Oh well.
In addition to Paradisa/Friends, there’s been a Belleville line since 1994. My daughter has the showjumpoing set. She also has a City plane and car, and plays with my Bionicle and Castle Lego (she is not allowed to play with my Millenium Falcon, though) - it’s just an additional range, I have no problem with it.
And as for the common plaint that there’s no “simple” or “original” lego, that’s bullshit. The City line is still doing well, and the Creator line is exactly what the originalists always say doesn’t exist anymore.
Hey, I had some Paradisa sets! That’s how I got my “beach” for my town, as well as a surf thingie, and a couple of other things that became parts of houses.
And yea, back when I was younger… eh… 2 decades ago, the “City” and such offered a lot of “house” type things. I remember a post office, a restaurant, a hospital, and firefighter and police stations. Now most of what is showcases are small sets of cars.
Yes, they offer the sets, but the marketing seems to have shifted towards the more specialty lines instead of the classic or original series.
I said that I couldn’t find anything except for the specialty boxes. I might have found the original Legos for sale online, but I couldn’t find them in the brick and mortar stores. Those are two different statements.
You might have missed the Creator line, because those do have themes and featured models on the front of the boxes (anything from houses to dinosaurs to robots), but the parts are generally versatile enough to built anything. Personally I think a set that has a bunch of curves/wedges/hinges/etc. offers more interesting building possibilities than a box of simple rectangular blocks.
I am always confused by people who say that the specialty kits mean that kids only use Lego to follow directions these days and that it stifles creativity. Have you ever actually, I don’t know, seen a small child?
Here is what happens in our household. Child opens Christmas present, finds Lego kit. Builds kit. Shows off completed project. Uses it to pretend zap aliens or whatever for maybe half an hour. Deconstructs kit. Puts bricks in giant Bin o’ Lego with all the other bricks. Uses mix of pieces from a skrillion different sets to build entirely new spaceship/alien/robot/whatever. The original kit thing is never built again and nobody much cares.
The kits are actually great because in the giant bin of Legos we had around when I was a kid, I don’t remember seeing a lot of specialty spaceship parts. You can build a killer spaceship with all the windshields and exhaust ports and stuff from all your kits these days!
Yes, that’s exactly what happens in our house too. My kid specializes in building large, elaborate ships, which she will then describe in painstaking detail to whoever will listen. “That’s the jail for the bad guys we capture. This is where we make lunch. This is the weapons arsenal, and here’s the captain’s chair…”
But my favorite was the day she took all her Star Wars guys and made them into a rock band, with weapons made into instruments and an audience of X-wing pilots.
I think the kits people are talking about are stuff like this. There’s really nothing but a ship you can make from those bits. There seems to be a lot more kits like that around than there used to be. You can get the more creative kits still, but ‘single purpose’ lego does appear to be on the increase.
There’s already a pink, girl-targeted Lego theme, and has been for years - the princess/fairy collection - it has pink, pastel and glittery bricks, unicorn figures, fairies, etc.
Concur. instead of bricks, many of these models have components that are entire walls or sections of vehicles, etc - they’re still Lego, but they’re large, specific-purpose components. They’re reusable to a certain extent, but nowhere near as flexibly as the smaller brick-scale items from which most of the older kits are primarily populated.
The same thing has happened to Meccano and even the little toys inside Kinder surprise chocolate eggs - the latter of which used to often contain elaborate models to be clipped together from a dozen or more clever little pieces. Now, a lot of the Kinder toys are just silly little figurines, or are composed of only two parts that slot together (and for no reason - some of them still fit inside the plastic capsule when fully assembled)
I always knew that I played Legos like a girl. Sure, I’ll get around to the build, but I was always much more interested in Legos as mini-action figures - which is just another reverse marketing term for dolls.
I grew up with castle Legos and then the pirate ones. I had a lot of fun battles with those little guys.
Yep. My husband (and I) like the multi-purpose bricks. The wedges and hinges and rounded bits are multi-purpose, but the specific-purpose units are far less easily integrated into other kits.
I think that the kits are marketed because once you sell the parents on the Big Bucket O’ Bricks, well, the parents figure that they’ve got most of the Lego needs covered. Possibly they’ll buy an additional BBOB, and maybe some special pieces, but essentially it’s a one time sale. However, you can keep coming out with more and more specific kits over time, and each one can be marketed to the kids as being absolutely necessary for a happy life, because you can’t build the pictured item with any of the OTHER Lego kits, you need the specialty items in THIS kit.
Exactly. But, hey, somebody here said following directions was their thing. So I can picture a section of consumers going for this. But how is any child ever going to want to be an architect if everything she builds already has a specified purpose and can be used for little else in her toys.
Regarding color - my objection is that we subconsiously teach girls= pink and lavender, boys= blue and red. We give baby girls so much pink stuff that they identify with it quickly. There is no way we can judge whether or not small girls really prefer pink because we bathe them in the color so they identify it as “girl stuff”. We then take the girly colors and apply them to all items we identify as girly and do the same with boy stuff. Then, we show acres of happy children in ads playing with “gender appropriate” toys. So, not only do they have color preferences based on their short history on earth but now we train them to identify with the activity based on the color and that other children are happy with such activities.
Okay, I know many people don’t care about such issues and others just find it easier to go with the flow
Why can’t boys wear pink camo and girls have red and blue bikes? To think that pink was once identified as a baby boy color.