How Hollywood Tie-Ins Saved Lego 193
MBCook writes "The New York Times published an article on Saturday profiling Lego, and how tie-ins with movies have helped save the company. 'Even as other toymakers struggle, this Danish maker of toy bricks is enjoying double-digit sales gains and swelling earnings. In recent years, Lego has increasingly focused on toys that many parents wouldn't recognize from their own childhood. Hollywood themes are commanding more shelf space, a far cry from the idealistic, purely imagination-oriented play that drove Lego for years and was as much a religion as a business strategy in Billund.' The article also mentions coming Lego Stores, a Lego board game, how Lego now allows sets with violence (like a gun for Indiana Jones), and how since 2004 Lego has cut part count nearly in half by encouraging re-use of parts and stopping one-off pieces."
4 Pages? (Score:2, Informative)
Try this link [nytimes.com].
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I, for one, welcome our Lego overlords [thekeltners.net]
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But, I foresaw this in 1961, when my Grandma bought my first (or second?) box of Legos. This is why I have storage trailers with 20,000 tons of legos, collected over the years. This is why my sons built a full scale, functional space shuttle. Unfortunately, NASA wouldn't lend them the Canaveral launch pad....
Alright, alright, so I lie......
To be honest, I haven't messed with legos in a long time. Maybe you have a point.
Re:4 Pages? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lego Star Wars (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the product line that has REALLY saved The Lego Group. The sales figures for that line alone are staggering. And as an AFOL, I can verify that the design quality and playability of their recent products have improved substantially. My kids continue to go back to their Lego collection to play with long after the novelty of the latest toy that they've received for their birthday\Xmas\whatever has worn off. As a friend of mine has always said, it's a thousand toys in one.
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And as an AFOL, I can verify that the design quality and playability of their recent products have improved substantially.
That's because of the reduction in one-off pieces as described by the article. I've noticed it independently myself, that there are a lot fewer specialized pieces in the products. There are still a few piece I'd like to see go the way of the dodo, but its' much better, all in all. And piece quality has gone up since '04 as well, closer to where they used to be.
The thing that killed Lego in the early '00 was the lack of creativity. The themes were stale and the individual sets bland. The large amount of spec
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Loose Legos from garage sales or craigslist are great, too. Lego still makes "generic unstructured pieces;" a large part of current sets are made from them.
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I'm a YAFOL (Young Adult Fan of LEGO) and I concure here.
I've been a fan of the Star Wars movies (well, OK, except for Episode II), but I never ended up with much of the merchandise.
The Star Wars LEGO sets are pretty much the only SW merch I've got - great idea, a product at a confluence of two things (LEGO and SW) that are each strong & popular for their own reasons.
I have a feeling that the BIG Lego Star Wars sets (which I didn't have) would have been even cooler to monkey around with, but then again,
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So, in short... (Score:2, Insightful)
So, what you're telling me is Lego sold out. And for the Harrison Ford retirement fund--I mean, movie, no less.
Re:So, in short... (Score:5, Insightful)
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why stay the course and become the next GM
To get a ginormous handout from the tax payers and continue running your business into the ground, of course!
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There's usually more options, though. In a lot of cases, selling out isn't done to avoid going bankrupt, but just to make more profit than before--- the alternative would've been to be still-profitable, but smaller.
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Re:So, in short... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, no; a) they still make in Denmark with one of the highest safety standards in the business b) reduced "one off" special parts actually is a return to the spirit of building it yourself c) all the build it yourself stuff is still available d) you can still buy basic kits and they are as good as ever.
There is one thing; the violence and Star Wars shit but you don't have to buy that for your kids. I don't. This is a major change (the didn't make green bricks for a long time so that nobody could make tanks and so on) but it's not the main or nearly most crucial element of Lego.
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I grew up with Lego, and I can't express the joy it gives me to walk down a toy isle and see a healthy thriving Lego line. As you said, you don't have to buy the themed Lego sets (Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Space Police, etc). They are awesome, and if you're going to spend money on toys for a kid, Lego toys allow a child to explore his imagination better than static action figures. My preference is still for the Lego CITY set which are more inline with the Legos I had as a kid. These sets are very elaborate.
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They have more sets in the Lego "Creator" line than ever - i.e. basic building sets (many with *three* suggested models and instructions for each) and brick boxes/buckets. 42 sets in that section of their website, and my local store has an entire shelf section devoted to them - as much as Star Wars Lego has, possibly more (some large Creator sets on other shelves too).
City Lego, while it is a theme, is obviously one of the major mainstays of Lego as ever though - again it's the largest product range (far mo
Re:So, in short... (Score:5, Informative)
How can they say that Lego sets have violence *now*, when I have a 1989 catalog with plenty of pirates models, with guns and canons?
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A journalist needed to write a story. The worst part is these types of errors are common in things that matter, not just articles about toys.
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'violence and Star Wars shit' ...
God you are a fucking pussy. I'm flamebait, sure, but your kids are going to get their asses kicked so many times they turn into wife beating child abusers with that stupid mentality.
You don't need green bricks to make a tank, kids have no problem with red tanks, blue tanks, white tanks and black ones. Its only retarded adults that think something like that is going to stop children from being children or somehow block millions of years of evolution which have made us into
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Not allow violence (i.e. real weapons)? Fort Legorado [brickset.com], 1996. Six shooters, rifles, swords, and cannons.
Re:So, in short... (Score:5, Insightful)
"POOP"s(Piece Out of Other Pieces [blogsome.com] are, along with wholly inflexible merely decorative elements, pretty much the biggest enemy of Lego as a reconfigurable imaginative toy. Instead of getting a bag of bits that can be the model on the box, or any number of other things, you just get a snap together model. Might as well come with hobby glue. If that is the case, the quality of the model on the box really matters; because that is more or less what you get.
With the sharp reduction in one-off overdetermined crap, the goodness or badness of the model on the box matters a whole lot less, you can always just treat it as a kit of parts and rebuild it. The only thing that ends up really mattering is whether the color scheme of that particular tie-in is close enough to what you want.
If movie tie-ins are what it takes for Lego to stay solvent(and volume sales almost certainly are, I don't even want to know how expensive Lego sets would be if they went from doing high-precision ABS injection molding to short-run high-precision ABS injection molding), that may well say something unfortunate about the buying public; but(as long as the sets aren't made of worthless pieces) that doesn't really harm old-school enthusiasts. If anything, the more sets sold, the more bricks will show up in big Ebay lots, or on Bricklink [bricklink.com].
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A screw.
That day, a part of me died.
Re:So, in short... (Score:5, Informative)
A screw, like the one in my circa 1982 LEGO motor battery block?
How hard that must have been for you. Do you need a hug?
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Exactly.
I had a Lego police van (Technic line, I think) from the 80s that had a screw as one of its components.
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Re:So, in short... (Score:5, Interesting)
So, what you're telling me is Lego sold out.
I wouldn't say that. Lego is renowned as one of the best companies in the world to work for: They treat their employees well, pay them well, give them good bennies, and don't nickel and dime 'em. They don't shift jobs to countries where they can exploit workers. If selling out their brand name lets 'em avoid selling out their employees, then I'm all for it.
Imagination still useful (Score:5, Insightful)
My son is 6 and right smack in the middle of the kids they are shooting for. He is obsessed with Star Wars, and loves playing Lego Star Wars. He's collected a few sets now for birthday, Christmas, etc. We have a lot of fun building the kits to the directions, but spend just as much time figuring out new things to build. There are a lot of different shapes that go well beyond the idea of a 'block' and I think it involves a lot more imagination to figure new ways to connect them.
It's something we can do together and have a lot of fun with it. When he's a little older we'll start working with the Mindstorm kit together.
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When you mean "we"... do you mean "you" and your kid sitting on the side, watching? ^^
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No - I mean he and I with big piles of legos around us and we are each putting stuff together. When he builds by the directions I help him find pieces if he gets stuck looking for them. We have all his kits in plastic bags, sorted by color which can make it tough to find certain pieces. He does a great job building.
Over the summer his cousin brought some Bionical sets to a family get together so now he really wants some of those. He has one Indiana Jones set - but he's never seen the films and isn't rea
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I probably enjoy it as much as he does - but not more.
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You might try sooner with something that strucks me a bit as "Mindstorm Duplo" ;) (yes, I know those aren't Duplo bricks...)
http://www.ni.com/academic/wedo/ [ni.com]
http://www.lego.com/education/news/default.asp?pagename=press_kit&l2id=17_1 [lego.com]
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I've never seen those before - they look awesome. Thanks!
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When the first Star Wars movie came out I was 8 years old. I was completely taken by it. I had figures, comic books, trading cards, etc. It might not be reality based but it is the pirate/cowboy fantasy of a few generations. My son has a ton of fun running around the house with a light saber, or tie fighter - pretending to be someone from the movie. What's been really weird to watch is how the current show and more recent movies make the storm troopers the good guys. My son spends a lot of time preten
I really like Legos (Score:2)
Re:I really like Legos (Score:5, Interesting)
Not when you are playing with LEGO Mindstorms NXT [amazon.com]. I got my set ( the older version ) when Ed Nisley, writing for Dr Dobbs at the time, recommended them as a way to learn about embedded programming. Here is a great example [cnet.com] of how awesome the robots can be.
Re:I really like Legos (Score:5, Insightful)
Who gives a crap!!? Go out and buy yourself a set! Be a kid for a little while. Don't hold yourself back because of what others might think about you. And if you want to justify it to yourself in some way, then consider there are far worse things you can spend your time and money on... cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, porn, guns and on and on. Most "adult" things are also considered vices. I see nothing wrong with doing something fun that is harmless and nice.
And if it helps you to feel less weird, "give it away" to some 'needy kids' or to a school, a day care, a church or some such place.
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Playing with Legos as an adult is not weird. It is AWESOME!
For one thing you can build really awesome giant detailed models because when you need a certain brick that you don't have, you can JUST BUY IT! You can either buy a new set or go someplace like http://www.bricklink.com/ [bricklink.com] to buy specific pieces (there are people who run businesses where they buy sets and break them apart just to sell on bricklink).
There is a huge underground industry supporting adults who play with Legos and clubs made up of adults (
Marketing (Score:2)
Where's Technic? (Score:5, Interesting)
The tie-ins are tolerable even though they're still horribly dependent on using special pieces. What I want to know is why have they gutted the much more interesting Technic line? You rarely see the sets that are still produced on the big retailers shelves in the US anymore.
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Mind you, the Architecture line is what has me the most excited lately, even if they are very much a linear Lego experience.
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I'm 33 years old. My mom hid my christmas present from me in the house, which was the 8880 super car. I was 18 at the time, working on my first real car. I do miss hard core Technic. Gears, axels, levers and such are quite educational to a future mechanical engineer.
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That's a problem with retail, US retailers don't seem to try to get many of them. They only get so many kits, and Lego offers a lot more than what any retailer tries to offer.
But they are available, I counted something like 24 kits currently available:
http://technic.lego.com/en-us/Products/New/8258New.aspx [lego.com]
Guns in lego are new? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Guns in lego are new? (Score:5, Funny)
Space sets had those nifty bazookas too. But even so, with the large Technic guys I can make ninja swords out of an axel and a grey spacer.
I've said too much.
Re:Guns in lego are new? (Score:4, Interesting)
Space sets had those nifty bazookas too. But even so, with the large Technic guys I can make ninja swords out of an axel and a grey spacer.
Bah, that's nothing. When I was a kid (in the late 60s) one of my friends had an old bazooka - a REAL one. Okay, no projectiles, just the launcher. We used to fight over who got to use it when we played Army.
We also had old canvas army jackets (REALLY cool if it had your actual surname on it, versus the usual random surname), locking ammo boxes, stuff like that. Most of our dads were, or had been, in the military - and a lot of that stuff seemed to wander home. My dad didn't bring home infantry stuff, so while I had a camo jacket I was in awe of the kid with the bazooka.
I also remember eating a lot of just-expired C-rations. Those, I think, were legit. We used to fight over who got the one with a particular dessert we liked (most of the actual meals were crap, excepting maybe the beans and franks). Didn't get to keep the cigarettes though.
What's any of this got to do with legos? Nothing, but hey - you brought up bazookas. And I believe I still owned some Legos back then. Okay, well it's time for my medication.
Re:Guns in lego are new? (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, this is a conversation about Lego. You can't just go on and on about using actual army gear when playing as a kid and not expect an off-topic mod...
Okay then, never mind.
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Space sets had those nifty bazookas too
No, they were a "camera with side sight" (http://www.peeron.com/inv/parts/4380). See, those spacemen were just shooting film, not baddies.
And this one (http://www.peeron.com/inv/parts/4349) is a "loudhailer" - you know, for making announcements on the lunar surface...
Re:Guns in lego are new? (Score:5, Informative)
LEGO's policy for a long time was to feature no "modern" weapons, which allowed things like swords, crossbows, blunderbusses, and laser bazookas. I believe the policy went out the door some time ago with the Wild West themed sets and their revolvers and rifles.
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So pirates (with swords, pistols, and cannons), knights (with swords, catapults, and axes) and space marines (with bazookas, space-fighters, and massive laser cannons) are all OK, but an archaeologist with a revolver and a whip is not?
I struggle to see the problem. If they were making Lego Abrams main armour, with infantry support armed with M16s, I might see your point.
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Mixing toys (Score:2)
Heh, my Lego city got assaulted by Green Army Men many a time.
Also, I find myself mixing "themed Legos" in with the other ones - even if I don't disassemble the model itself, the Star Wars spaceship interacts with a self-built ship rather than jsut with other Star Wars stuff, et cetera
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Sounds like the person who wrote the article didn't understand what they were talking about.
Yes, little plastic weapons for the lego men to hold are nothing new. But the closest to actual violence in Lego sets was the pirates sets - there's never been a set, for instance, where you build a replica assault rifle that fires real projectiles.
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there's never been a set, for instance, where you build a replica assault rifle that fires real projectiles.
Of course there was! But you had to be really inventive to put it together right, and the muzzle velocity wasn't exactly that high even then. Not even enough to break a glass door. (Thankfully... :-)) The best approach was probably to do something a bit like a tennis machine, except with smaller projectiles. Lego men heads worked a treat!
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The first batch of the original 1989 pirate sets did have the firing cannons even in the US. My 6285 Black Seas Barracuda (awesome set) and 6270 Forbidden Island (not nearly as nice) both had them.
Later batches of those same sets had the disabled cannon, and later pirate sets (and the western sets) had the no-moving-parts cannon in their North American versions.
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There were also the medieval sets which included swords among other things. But as with the pirate sets, the box art still looked like the Lego men were having fun. The Space Police sets today look more serious.
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Try a dremel.
(way back in college I took a course where we built robots out of lego - not mindstorms. We'd embed sensors in blocks modified with dremels)
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You can swap arms if you're very careful, but if you don't do it just right they can break. The LEGO company doesn't consider them removable.
That's just the trick isn't it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Tie-Ins Saved Lego? (Score:2)
Yea, and Al Gore invented the internet. Sure....
Could it perhaps be that marketing people took over and pushed up the price of what amounts to pieces of cheap mass-produced plastic that dragged down the company in the first place? To me there's something wrong in needing to jump through so many hoops to sell something so simple and appealing as building blocks.
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I'd love to buy some of the bigger pirate ship and castle sets from when I was a kid, but even if they re-released them at the prices they charged a decade and a half ago I wouldn't want to shell out that much for them. I know they have to pay real wages because they don't manufacture in China, but damn. I'd think they could e
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They can't really lower their prices when 25 to 50% of the profits probably go to Hollywood for the tie-ins.
Re:Tie-Ins Saved Lego? (Score:5, Insightful)
. I'd think they could easily cut their prices by 25-50% and still be making a tidy profit.
Probably not whilst delivering the quality and safety that they do. If you look at some of the Meg@#$%# lego clones, have a feel at how they fit together; See how the bricks start breaking up and how Lego seems to last and last, you know what I mean. In the end the Lego is cheaper because it lasts and it still gets used. When I get told that my kid "needs" a rescue helicopter or something instead of buying it, we just build it together.
When I buy random cheap Chinese toys I really feel I could be poisoning my child. I don't think the manufacturer wants to poison my kids any more than I want to do that to his, but I'm sure he has little way to control the quality of the quality of the plastic coming in and no come back if he does find someone has done something bad. Look at the chinese milk scandal [wikipedia.org]. The key thing there is not that the milk companies were cheating and failing to test. Someone was deliberately working around their testing. With that kind of garbage; better buy Lego.
In this case; you get what you pay for.
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Re:Tie-Ins Saved Lego? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd think they could easily cut their prices by 25-50% and still be making a tidy profit.
I'd rather have them keep the uncompromising, legendary quality instead. I encountered exactly 1 bad brick in 10000$ MSRP worth of Lego. I think the fact that the set will not break or wear out in 5, 10, 15 years is a big consideration for families which have more than one child. I have a lot of Lego bricks that survived my entire childhood and are still in very good shape, even though I used to play with them very frequently. The Technic line is essentially precision machinery made of plastic.
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Could it perhaps be that marketing people took over and pushed up the price of what amounts to pieces of cheap mass-produced plastic that dragged down the company in the first place?
Making pieces of mass-produced plastic is easy. Making the pieces to extremely strict tolerances and ensuring that no set is incomplete or has broken pieces is hard. Making those pieces survive 5 years of heavy use with litle wear is really, really hard. That's why Lego is more expensive than the crap excreted by Chinese factories.
Lego still retains its magic! (Score:2)
While it is true that movie themes have kept Lego afloat and even boosted its popularity significantly, once someone gets into Lego, it becomes something else entirely.
When I was a kid, Lego was mainly for building houses for the little people to live in. Our cultures have changed significantly since those days. Our homes are constantly filled with sound and music and noise of one kind or another. Everything needs to flash, bang or pop to get our attention. Star Wars and even Indiana Jones movie themes
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I'm more of a ADD/SUB guy.
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Lego Movie? (Score:2)
Hey-- why hasn't there been a Lego movie? Given the brand appeal and the richness of the settings possible, a Lego movie would kick brick-ass....
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There have been several Bionicle movies now, I have the first one on DVD.
I call BS on the whole thing... (Score:2)
The movie tie-ins are pure genius and uniquely Lego.. They have a good sense of humor and the new Lego sets are fun. As a 35 year Lego guy, it find the new stuff simply awesome.
The irony is that the Star Wars Lego sets are MORE Lego like than their 'original' sets they put out now. The piece on the Star Wars sets are more interchangeable while their "Mars" series has these HUGE molded pieces that can not really be used outside of the ship you are 'supposed' to build.
However, if you want to find something t
Violence in lego is not new. (Score:2)
Back in my days when there was knights lego, they already had swords...
Non-Violence was Missed on me (Score:5, Interesting)
Playing out Hollywood's imagination instead (Score:2)
Just felt compelled to make another comment. From the article, there was one statement that really stuck in my craw. And it was the one that said with these Hollywood themed sets, kids will be playing out Hollywood's imagination instead of their own. It's true but it's not. With action figures and vehicle toys from the movies, that will definitely be true. But with Lego toys, it's not as true. Why? Because you can't make things with action figures and vehicles... not easily anyway.
And here's a factoi
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You couldn't be more wrong if you TRIED. There's nothing wrong with kids' imagination, the problem is that everyone from their parents out to are forcing them to spend every waking moment in some "structured recreation" style BS and nobody tolerates kids actually making noise and messes anymore. Creative toys are basically the exact opposite of this and encourage kids to ask "why" and not settle for "because I said so", that's where the real problem is.
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I don't agree with you: most kids I know play videogames most of their free time and still have vivid imagination. Actually, I think many videogames are an excellent source of inspiration.
But if videogames are the problem, just have them play LittleBigPlanet [youtube.com].
Has anyone actually -bought- Legos? (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of people complaining about some of these Lego sets seem to think that you can only really build the thing on the box when you get the set. There's a ton of parts for even the tiniest Lego model and you have a lot of options. If you have more than one set, you can genuinely make some really interesting displays. You need to think differently out of the box. My four year old autistic son taught me this. I buy them for them and he puts together all sorts of stuff. At first, I put the sets together and then let him have at them, but I had gotten lazy and just handed some stuff to play with, and felt pretty bad about it, so I bought a fairly complicated set to put together with him, and found that, by the time I'd got the basics of the first page done, he'd already built something very cool. For him, the picture on the box isn't the thing to build, but is representative of a sort of world he plays in with those pieces. I think right now Princess Lea and Han Solo Lego people are wearing pirate hats and are carrying knight swords on top of a steam engine (sad end for a Bachmann set).
Still, if you must have the ultimate in "suggestionless" Lego design, you need to go to a Lego store. Lego stores have all the theme sets, for sure, but they also have a huge wall in the back where you can just fill up a big cup for $15 and get anything you want. Wheels, different shape blocks, they are all there.
Clearly, no one has actually watched how kids play (Score:5, Insightful)
Legos On Mars (Score:5, Interesting)
My scientist's heart sinks when I remember the hopes I had and that the following would re-popularize the space program as well as science in general, then lost when nobody noticed...
So you've got these guys who built these robot car things and they're going to send them to Mars. One of the cool things they did was collect peoples' names and messages to the New Planet to send along. They burned the messages to CDs and then started looking for a way to attach the CDs to the 'dashboards' of their robots. How about... oh, I dunno... maybe some interlocking plastic blocks with the CD trapped between a pair of them, and a screw or two to hold each of the 3 pairs in place? I'll bet some of these guys even have some of these things laying around and would be glad to donate them to the cause.....
From the left science panaorama camera on each Mars Rover, taken on Sol 2 of each mission:
Spirit:
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/2/p/002/2P126556804EFF0200P2205L1M1.JPG [nasa.gov]
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/2/p/002/2P126556727EFF0200P2205L4M1.JPG [nasa.gov]
Opportunity:
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p/002/1P128365194EDN0100P2205L5M1.JPG [nasa.gov]
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p/002/1P128365248EDN0100P2205L6M1.JPG [nasa.gov]
Glad they did Star Wars... (Score:3, Interesting)
Otherwise I wouldn't have enough pieces that are in grey to make Star Trek Starships out of LEGO.
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Re:lego mirrors real life (Score:4, Informative)
Some sets are that way - but most are still incredibly flexible. There are a lot of cool things that can be done with the new sets that couldn't be done with the old. There are a lot more mechanical parts in the basic sets now. My sons Imperial Shuttle kit had some very cool gears and other parts to allow the wings to move up and down. The hinged doors are pretty slick, etc. We've been able to incorporate that into a lot of fun designs of our own.
It really still is an open ended toy for exploration, especially once you have 4 or 5 kits worth of pieces on hand.
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Fun thing is that my kids turned to bigger scale reuse, where functional blocks of 10 or 20 bricks are reused from kits to kits. That gives most of their work a weird Tetsuo [animenation.net] feel...
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You might THINK that there are a bunch of specialized pieces that are tailored to make one specific thing, but that's not necessarily true. Yes, there are more different kinds of pieces and some are rather unique. But it is actually hard to find a particular piece that isn't also used in other sets. It may be painted differently or be made of a different color, but that's the way it goes. These more unique pieces enables even more creativity, not less. Go browse "www.mocpages.com" and just look at what
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The term "specialized parts" makes no sense.
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So they've managed to stay in business by the power of marketing and the irrationality that people display when buying for kids.
They actually created a product that people want to buy. Is that a bad thing? Coupled with the fact that you can still buy the 'unbranded' sets and that they are reducing one-off non-reusable pieces, it's a good thing.
Have you seen what a lego set costs these days?
There is a reason. The quality of Lego is legendary, so much that they don't even advertise it any more. The parts are manufactured to tolerances comparable with precision machinery. For example, when you place 10 bricks with holes side by side, you can run 12-unit axles through each of the ho
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Every toy that says "Made in the EU" is expensive, but they're generally good quality.
When I was a child (90s), every toy that said "Made in Taiwan/China" was cheap shit and wouldn't last.
What toys have I kept? My Lego (Denmark), model railway (Britain, Germany), Mecanno (France), Warhammer (Britain), and K'NEX (USA).
I think the Lego and Warhammer is still made in Denmark/UK, and they're both expensive, but the others are now made in China, and the quality seems to be as it used to be.
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Imagine designing a kit in a Lego CAD program and then automatically exporting the BOM to an order form that takes a screenshot of the finished item, a manual and contents list and produced a boxed, bagged set that is immediately shipped to you.
Seriously Lego, where are you?
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Here: http://ldd.lego.com/ [lego.com]
Re:Black Seas Barracuda (Score:5, Informative)
Now, LEGO needs to make the next step and allow people to build their own kits online. I think that would be even bigger than LEGO Star Wars.
Seriously Lego, where are you?
It's called Lego Degital Designer [lego.com]. If you've got a complaint, at least take a couple of minutes to figure out if it's valid.
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No, what saved Lego was lucrative merchandising tie-ins with Hollywood, expansion into video games, and brutal reform of a very slack internal corporate culture.