Blacktron, Space Police II, Spyrius and my beloved Ice Planet 2002 was the greatest series of all time.
While all of them were set in space theme, there was literally no chance you could mistake one with another!
Lego has changed since we were kids (2014)
291–300 of 301 posts
Re: Lego has changed since we were kids (2014)
#292The main difference is that the sets and instructions got way more complicated and elaborate. So much so that they stifle and discourage the creativity instead of feeding it. The first set I had was a minuscule "mineral detector" from the space set - https://media.brickinstructions.com/06000/6841/001.jpg There were 6-step instructions [2,3] AND there was a separate page with what else was buildable from the set [4].…
first-party extra models: https://www.lego.com/en-my/service/help/bricks-and-sets/buil... third-party extra models: https://rebrickable.com/sets/alternates/
> https://rebrickable.com/sets/alternates/
This is excellent, thanks.
Re: Lego has changed since we were kids (2014)
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a lot fewer bespoke parts than you might think. Creating new molds is expensive and if you look closer you'll see that odd shapes are reused for different purposes in different sets.
For some firsthand examples, I have a few of the "botanical" sets, and they have things like Technic wing/fin pieces for leaves, flowers made out of car hoods and trunks, and pink frogs used en masse for cherry blossoms.
They're very creative at reusing pieces. One of the Lego Mario sets has a bomb on a parachute, but the parachute is made out of a white version of the old 3-flower-stem piece.
Re: Lego has changed since we were kids (2014)
#294> Now you don’t have regular Lego cops and robbers—you have Batman and the Gotham criminals. You also still have regular Lego cops and robbers. Cops and robbers is still by far the largest sub-theme of the City theme. Almost every set, even some sets that aren't about cops and robbers at all, will have a cop and a robber in there.
That was a particularly weird gripe, considering some of the themes that have in fact been replaced by licensed stuff (looking at you LEGO Space/Star Wars) but the cops and robbers is definitely not one of them. The LEGO City theme has always been packed with cops and robbers and still is to this day.
While Lego Space may have been replaced by Lego Star Wars, Space has also come back as a sub-theme of City, but now much more realistic, with bulky space suits and realistic space shuttles. I love it.
Re: Lego has changed since we were kids (2014)
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a kid I had a ton of legos and my main obsession were technic sets (Still have them). But, before technic sets I had a bunch of the early town themed sets. So for example if you bought the gas station, it comes with a little mechanic figure and tow truck. Most of the blocks were standard and a few specialty blocks rounded out the set like windows, doors, auto chassis parts, wheels, even trees and plants. Of course…
Assuming you're talking this one - https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/haunted-house-10273 - I'm failing to see the specialty parts, outside of a couple of things like the spiderweb. Even the organ is brick-built from parts that could be repurposed in a number of ways (for example, exhaust pipes on a car or truck).
That is not even close to what I am describing. A licensed set is a set that contains licensed material like star wars and marvel. e.g. https://www.lego.com/en-us/themes/marvel
There are sets that are just busts of characters heads like darth vader or an infinity hand, whatever that is, which are more of a one time build puzzle rather than a palette you can turn into something else.
Re: Lego has changed since we were kids (2014)
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, the biggest difference between Legos when you and I were kids and now is that the sheer number of different pieces makes it too often nearly impossible to find the piece you need when building something from "the pile". My kids also have a lot of Legos (by volume, more than I ever had). When engaging in free play (i.e. not building a new set from the instructions), I find that the things they make tend to be…
> I find that the things they make tend to be much smaller than many of the things I built when I was a kid. Could this be that the constructions are the same scale but you have gotten bigger?
Lol, that's a good thought but no. I still have some pretty specific memories of some things I made (lots of spaceships).
Re: Lego has changed since we were kids (2014)
#297If you don't like the licensed sets, or even sets with instruction books, then you're still covered. Lego, Mega Bloks, and others have buckets or bags of just parts. To stick to Lego without a themed set, look for The Lego Classic line. If you want them as a themed set but maybe without a media license, there's the Lego Creator line (which does include some licensed material like the Bond 007 Aston Martin DB5). Kit 1…
It is a real pleasure to see old-school lego sets at costco - 1500 piece set with no theme.
Ooh. Thanks for that tip.
Re: Lego has changed since we were kids (2014)
#298I was a kid in the 90s and most of the things written in that article were already true. I still broke down all the elaborate sets, put them all together in a big box, and built my own things later.
> I still broke down all the elaborate sets, put them all together in a big box [..] In a box ?!! Our kids store piles of bricks on more or less every horizontal surface in their rooms. > the elaborate sets Our kids will always build each elaborate set once, according to the instructions, wait a day or three, then it's fair game to be cannibalized for their latest homespun supermegagiga-jet, -spaceship, -car or -hous…
haha, yes.
My mother wasn't too happy to step on the bricks, so I had to put them in a box.
Re: Lego has changed since we were kids (2014)
#299Lego really dialed the monopoly rent to 11. I wonder what the material cost for a 2,000 pieces set really is? After all it's a bunch of formed plastic pellets. My journey and a product idea: https://medium.com/hyperlinked/whats-missing-creator-platfor...
Seems like you're missing the part where they have to pay someone (or more accurately, entire teams of people) a lot of money to actually come up with the set idea and instructions. Boiling LEGO down to just "a bunch of formed plastic" is criminal.
Please read the article before you write a comment.
I explicitly said in it that LEGO is successful because of the combination of instructions and plastic.
I further argue that you could unlock value by unbundle the two. If you have salary data on LEGO designers please share. In the meantime I assume a good model designer would make more in the described platform model. (Comparable to a newspaper journalist going solo with Substack.)
Re: Lego has changed since we were kids (2014)
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming you're talking this one - https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/haunted-house-10273 - I'm failing to see the specialty parts, outside of a couple of things like the spiderweb. Even the organ is brick-built from parts that could be repurposed in a number of ways (for example, exhaust pipes on a car or truck).
That is not even close to what I am describing. A licensed set is a set that contains licensed material like star wars and marvel. e.g. https://www.lego.com/en-us/themes/marvel There are sets that are just busts of characters heads like darth vader or an infinity hand, whatever that is, which are more of a one time build puzzle rather than a palette you can turn into something else.
I'm still not seeing what you're talking about. The Darth Vader head and the Infinity Gauntlet, for example, are both built out of standard pieces. Sure, it's a limited color palette, but it still wouldn't be hard to repurpose either to use for parts of a spaceship or themed building or whatever. Even on the page you linked, the only really specialized parts on display are the spiderwebs, the Gargantos tentacles, and the Venom teeth; everything else is ordinary brick-built stuff, including the large robots/mechs, which are built on a Technic frame rather than any specialized parts.