Many pieces are designed for only one function, but that doesn’t mean they only have one function. I made a great dragon once… The head was made primarily out of the front end for a boat, a fender-piece, a storage locker, and a couple of landing lights… And when put together in just the right way, they look exactly like a dragon’s head. I haven’t seen any of the more recent castle or Viking sets, but I’ll bet you I could find some other way to use them.
And WhyNot might be glad to hear that when I was a kid, whenever I got a new Lego set for Christmas, I immediately sat down, went through the instructions, and built the thing pictured on the front of the box… And then promptly took it back apart, added the pieces to my hoard, and figured out what new things I could make. This was in the age when the only sets made were the specific models: They worked well as guidelines and themes: I mostly got the spaceship sets, since I wanted to build spaceships, and those came with things like wings and rocket engines. But they were not restrictive of creativity.
Though I chopped some of the Lego-specific theme comments, I agree with your frustration over color thing. My parents are getting my 2-year-old the new Fisher Price digital camera for Christmas. The camera comes in two styles: blue (“Fisher Price Kid Tough Digital Camera for Boys”) or pink with flowers (“Fisher Price Kid Tough Digital Camera for Girls”). It’s a camera! All my daughter wants is one that looks like Mom’s and Dad’s…
FTR, I gather my parents have bought her a gender-neutral red one that is a Target-only model.
Good for them. This is exactly what bugs me…why should a camera be gender-specific? Things are SO color-coded that it has become “wrong” for a girl to have a toy that is blue. The last thing I want is for a cool toy like a camera to be undesirable because it is blue and therefore a “boy’s toy.” Not to mention the practical standpoint…if every toy my daughter owns is pink, what am I going to do if the baby currently in gestation is a boy? Buy all NEW toys of the same type, but in blue?
Bingo! This is exactly why they do it. So you spend money for another.
I’m a freecycler, and I boggle weekly at the people who offer one BLUE stroller up for grabs at the same time as they’re posting a request for a PINK stroller. B’wah? I took an offer of a BLUE stroller and had to practically wrestle the owner for it when she saw that I had a girl. “But it’s a BLUE stroller!” she wailed “It was my son’s. I’m giving it away because I had to buy a PINK stroller for my baby girl!” I finally lied and told her it was for my nephew. I guess she thought she had to save me from myself. Me, I just wanted a stroller and didn’t have money to buy one. What the fuck do I care if it’s BLUE? It has cute little teddy bears on it - I think they are feminizing enough to ward off the lesbian tendencies my daughter undoubtedly picks up riding in it to get to the park.
Maybe it was a regional distribution thing. Vynce was still playing with Lego sets nine and ten years ago, and I bought him more than one big bucket of basic legos since it was something a college kid could afford as a birthday present. I’m pretty sure he still has them somewhere, too. I can’t remember not seeing the buckets in Wal-mart since then, either.
There was a thread awhile back that said in some areas, a century or two ago, pink used to be a boy’s color and blue was considered a girl’s color. I wonder if little boys used to beg for pink toys back in the day.
When did they start phasing out the generic “make anything” sets? I thought it was something recent for some reason, but this quote makes me wonder.
That is so funny, because I deliberately bought all that kind of equipment in navy blue…I figured it could be used for a boy or a girl, and would be dark enough to hide stains, etc. Never would have occurred to me to buy a pink stroller.
Ohhhh my. I want lego! This particular girl had the old black-white-red-yellow-blue bricks, with green base plates. I used them to build doll houses. I just looooved it–I could make furniture and everything.
Now, I see that Lego sells a “house building bucket” with lots of doors, windows, trees, etc. They apparently know what they’re doing…
I was really into expert sets (now called technic) in Jr High. I would build the model (tractor, bulldozer), and then make my own stuff. And I did like the idea book that showed some combined things (what you could build with sets A and B) - no directions though. I don’t remember if I ever duplicated them, but I did borrow some of the ideas.
Wow! I thought colour-coding was bad around here but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pink stroller, except for those little toy ones for toddlers (which are, of course ALL pink)
I have to agree that there’s a genetic component to the “girly girl” and “macho boy” stereotypes, but it’s not guaranteed. My friends with two girls have one of each type - a skirt-wearing pink-loving ballerina, and a tomboy of the “clothes are what you have to put on before your parents let you go play” variety. In our own household, Her Smallness has yet to notice (at three) that 90% of her clothes are blue and red handmedowns from her boy cousins, and the Doll Gene seems to have completely passed us by (phew!)
I will admit to having bought her a Girl Colour bike for her last birthday, because I couldn’t quite bring myself to go for the ones with BOY RACER emblazoned all over them in large letters. The closest thing to neutral in the shop was a purple one with flowers all over it. If we ever have a boy in the family … well, if he objects, then spraypaint’s cheap enough!
Nitpicking the nitpiclk; ‘Lego’ is the company name; it would only require pluralisation if there were two or more such named companies and we wanted to refer to them as a collection. The plural of Lego is ‘bricks’.
Okay, I’m kidding about that, but the first thing my kids (both girls) did with Lego was to dump the pieces out all over the floor, toss whatever papers came with it to one side, and start building. I have a vague recollection that there were “people” in with the blocks, but I remember them as being rather sexless. I don’t recall whether there were any people in the sets my brother and I had when we were kids (I don’t remember any instructions, either, but then again I was the second child and I don’t think I ever saw a new set of Lego).
Now, the Mindstorms set - those instructions were definitely consulted. And in our household, that was also a unisex toy (because Mr. Legend insisted it was meant for him as well).
Now, creating things on your own is certainly one of the great things about lego(s), but I’d say there also is great value in being able to learn to read the instructions, and build from those.
I remember building some pretty complicated castle and space kits back in the day, and it was a small challenge and a skill to replicate the steps illustrated in the instructions in three-dimensional space.
The girl Lego sets are so tempting! I have three nieces of approximately the Lego Age.
Two of them demand all things to be pink (or purple, or besequinned, or possibly covered in glitter). This includes toy cars and trucks. You can get trucks in pink by the way. That discovery made me a hero for birthdays this year. The third niece doesn’t care what color her toys are as long as they can be used to create things she can subsequently destroy.
To be fair, the pink-demanders nieces are children of my sister and sister-in-law, both of whom were big proponents of gender-neutral toys and color schemes. They just had girly-girls. The oldest one has some GI Joe-style action figures (no idea what the current flavor of the month on those is, but the current analog), which she cheerfully dresses up in Polly Pockets clothing and then uses to hunt down and kill the T-Rex dinosaur toy she has also dressed up in Polly Pockets clothing. You haven’t seen funny until you’ve seen a GI Joe in drag killing off a T-Rex with heels and a flowered hat.
Exactly what I did, too. I’d build the crap on the box, then I’d build a squid (or to me, what a squid SHOULD look like, dammit!) with rocket fins on it and a seat for a lego dude or three to sit on it.
It was an underwater bus, of course. What ELSE could it be?
I also grew up with Technic (or “Expert Builder”, as they were called back then) legos. I spent a lot of time building the “official” items in the instructions. But also a lot of time building my own things. And what I learned from the official items (like, how to make cars steer) was used when I built my own things.
There are certainly some things you just can’t build with plain bricks, period, which having specialized pieces helps with.
hmm. MilliCal has a great big box of just ordinary Legos. She also has a set of Lincoln Logs. She’s got sex-specific dolls and the like, but her construction toys are pretty unisex.
Not necessarily- for example, the usuage here in Australia and NZ is for “Lego” to be both singular and plural- for example “I might go and buy a new Lego kit”/“Did you leave your Lego all over the floor?” , “Lego have some interesting new lines coming out”/“Where did all my Lego go?”
Lego themselves are apparently very insistent that “Legos” is not the plural of “Lego”.
