Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys

> I think Lego is the perfect example of this. I never understood the point of it as a kid. Why would I want something that comes with an instruction booklet to recreate the exact thing shown on the box?

1) The same motivation as a model kit... except what you build is intended to be played with and won't be (permanently) destroyed by play.

2) Same motivation as a puzzle.

3) Modern Lego instructions do a lot more hand-holding than the ones I had in the 80s and 90s did, so I'm not sure how true this still is, but the ones back then were basically a series of sometimes-pretty-challenging spatial reasoning puzzles. So anyone who enjoys that kind of thing might enjoy assembling Lego sets.

4) Once assembled, you could customize, re-dress, and mash up the sets in ways you couldn't with other toys, and fall back on the directions to fix anything you screwed up too badly, if you wanted to get back to baseline. For example, one of the "good guys" bases from the Pirate series spent more time as a marine research base than it did hosting swashbuckling shenanigans, for me. My big castle sets would grow castle towns from a mix of smaller castle-series sets and custom builds on big flat plates. That kind of thing.

5) You could really destroy a Lego toy built from a set, then put it back together. You couldn't smash apart any bit you liked of an ordinary airplane or ship or castle toy and not ruin it permanently. With Lego sets, you can.

For my part, I've never understood people who don't understand the appeal of Lego sets, because I find the appeal so multi-dimensional and obvious.

[EDIT] FWIW I do find a lot of modern Lego sets worse for some of these purposes than the ones I had as a kid. They've leaned more into the "model" side of things and less into the "play". Exposed nubs get covered up (looks better on a shelf, or on the box photo, that way) so you have to tear pieces off to attach other things to it. Builds are incredibly fiddly and use tons of really tiny bricks even for basic things like a wall, so re-building from memory or a little simple reasoning after destroying a small part of a set is now far more difficult (I suspect CAD run amok is to blame for this one).

Oh cool, thanks for reminding me that this book even exists. What's really cool is you can just read it on the internet archive! [1] Almost makes me want to invest in some borosilicate glassware and lab safety equipment, and make a youtube series based on experiments in the book or something haha

[1] https://archive.org/details/1960-the-golden-book-of-chemistr...

I had the P-51 Mustang one in the late 80s. At the time I wanted to be a pilot and was busily building balsa models, windup flying models, plastic Testors models, and Estes rockets.

The thing with the Cox airplanes was they were cheap enough for your parents to actually buy one. RC stuff used to be really expensive and clunky. My first RC plane was in the late 2000s and it was about 5 foot wingspan and had an even bigger, even messier glow-plug engine like the Cox flyers. I had to join a club to go fly it cause the radio equipment was still kind of sketchy. Total cost once all the accessories to fly it were included was probably closer to $1000 and even though it was "Ready to Fly" it still probably took 10 hours of work to get it actually flying well. (By that point the models were starting to be partially assembled in China)

If it cost near $1000 in the late 2000s with it being partially assembled in China you weren't getting much in the 70s or 80s at an affordable price with it assembled in the US, so anything good meant many hours of you assembling it. Hence the Cox type stuff that was a couple pieces of cheap plastic.

I crashed mine for sure, but never that badly. It was pretty good fun and I used it for a good period, though never without supervision. I never managed to learn any tricks, but I remember seeing an adult at the school fields one day who had one and was very good and did all kinds of tricks.

I have a DJI drone.. it's amazing.. but is it actually as fun as that old stuff that took 10x-100x more work to get it to work? No, I don't think so, for me it's so easy it's kind of boring, though a good portion of that is that it's a quadcopter. Fixed wing is so much more fun to fly.

In Uruguay and other spanish-speaking countries those were called "mecanos" (which, judging by other local customs such as calling sneakers "championes" and bubblegum "chicles" was probably a trade name) and they were great. I'm from 1978 and got to play with some sets from my dad (who's from '49). Besides being entertaining, they were a great way to develop mechanical affinity (if that's the right expression in English? I mean things like knowing how far to turn a screw so that it's as tight as it can be but you don't break the piece)

Sadly, you can't get them anymore here, at least not ones good in quality. There are similar building games but they all feel rather cheap and I know from personal experience they only survive a few repurposing of the pieces.

I do love LEGOs though, even though I played with copies in my childhood as my parents couldn't afford the originals. My main gripe with them is the sets. As a child, I just had a bunch of blocks and would build whatever I wanted. Now you can still buy "just bricks" but most of what kids get at stores are sets that tell them what to build. They feel more like 3D puzzles than building games.

Erector-like sets and LEGO-like sets can go together well though: I enjoyed demolishing my brick buildings with my mecano machines :)

> I don't think so, for me it's so easy it's kind of boring, though a good portion of that is that it's a quadcopter. Fixed wing is so much more fun to fly.

Makes some sense you find it boring, it's essentially flying itself. Conventional remote-control helicopters have gyros for stabilisation but I don't think they're anywhere near as easy to control as quadcopter drones.