Best Lego set

[mmcirvin]

So of all the Lego sets I had over the course of my childhood, which one do I remember most fondly? No contest. (This guy agrees.)

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Oh HELL yes.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I remember hearing about the Torro blocks but don't think I encountered them. Mega Bloks seems to still be their most successful competitor, as it was at the time. It looks as if Lego keeps trying to harass them with trademark suits but never wins one; the courts generally hold that the only possible infringement would be of a patent, and the relevant patents are all long-expired.

That sounds perfectly correct to me. Lego bricks themselves started out as a knockoff, of the British Kiddicraft building bricks (http://www.brickfetish.com/timeline/1947.html). Lego's great innovation was the tubes/studs on the bottom, which let the bricks grip together much more tightly, but their bricks were pretty exact replicas of the Kiddicraft ones for years before that.

[brooksmoses]

I remember that one pretty fondly, and I didn't even own it -- though one of my friends did.

[jecook]

I probably have most, if not all, the parts for that set. The instructions? They got destroyed a *long* time ago, sadly...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, you can print out some new ones (http://www.peeron.com/scans/497-1/)...

[schwa242.livejournal.com]

I knew which one it was before I even clicked.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

That was one of my favourites too... great fun. Had to give away the Lego when the parents moved, but at least it's still being played with by some lucky kid.

-- Steve nearly had a Lego flashback there.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Looking through that LUGNet database, it strikes me that they made a lot of more elaborate spaceship sets in subsequent decades, but none of them was quite as elegant-looking as the old Galaxy Explorer. No matter--you could probably make something cooler with the parts.

It's amusing if not surprising that the Star Wars sets are such a big hit today, when you consider how obviously influenced by Star Wars model design these early Lego Space sets were. But there was also some subtle influence from NASA hardware, and they took care to do a bit of their own thing too--that blue/gray/transparent-yellow color scheme is instantly recognizable, and I was strangely bothered by the look of the later sets that departed from it.

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Galaxy Explorer was awesome, but I think I would rank it #2. I got more good creative play time out of the yellow Castle (http://guide.lugnet.com/set/375_2).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I didn't get into the castle sets, but I admired them from a distance.

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Galaxy Explorer was awesome, but I think I would rank it #2. I got more good creative play time out of the yellow Castle (http://guide.lugnet.com/set/375_2).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The space sets instantly appealed to me in part because this was the main thrust of the playing I'd been doing with my old Lego collection anyway. I was always making spaceships and space stations--big blocky ships like flying houses on wheels with lots of living space inside, and spidery agglomerations of junk that were supposed to look like they were bristling with instruments and antennae, staffed with astronauts represented by bricks or by those early faceless minifigs with no arms. Now I could do the same thing but make them look twice as cool.

As a kid not really inclined toward war play, I liked that it wasn't all about conflict; there were pieces that made wicked ray guns, but there were no designated bad-guy characters, and there was this subtext that these little spacesuited people were primarily explorers. But you could always build your own monsters as needed, or have internecine conflict between the red-suits and white-suits if necessary. I also liked replacing the guys' heads with transparent cylindrical 1x1 pieces under the space helmets, to make robots.

Later on, they apparently started diversifying into this tripartite division of bad guys/enforcers/civilians, rang lots of changes on that, then the whole line of unlicensed Lego Space stuff kind of vanished for a while. Now all that's left aside from the licensed Star Wars stuff is some sort of "Mars Mission" line with a storyline about humans vs. Martians. Sounds kind of imperialistic if you ask me.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

I had that one as well, plus a lot of the other space explorers stuff. Come tot hink of it, most of it is probably still uin my parents' attic, in a big bathtub.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

That thing took ages to build!

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

Man, I've just mapped out my entire childhood year-by-year, just by going through the catalogs. I've managed to get back to about age 3 in my memories of Lego!

Plus I found some of the idea books I used to have, which gave a real kick of deeply-buried memory.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Some other pretty early sets I had:

Dump Truck (http://guide.lugnet.com/set/331) - This one actually goes back to 1967. I don't think the version I had had the gray tires. But I do know that when I got this, I was still so little that I couldn't really follow the directions to assemble it; my dad did it for me.

Lego had a whole line of these little vehicle models with a simple steering mechanism--there was a vertical shaft that poked through holes in the cab, and engaged an axle block underneath and a decorated 1x2 piece on top. I remember thinking much later that the play value was limited since you couldn't really put bricks inside the cab and pretend they were guys (this was before Lego figures of any kind). But the doors were good to have.

Brick Yard (http://guide.lugnet.com/set/580) - This set had a lot of nice specialized pieces, like the big conveyor and the spring-loaded crane claw. Also some nice yellow arches.

Universal Building Set 400 (http://guide.lugnet.com/set/400_1) - Faceless minifigs!

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

The earliest thing I can remember for sure that I had was the Lego wind-up motor. For some reason, after seeing that in the catalog when I was four, I absolutely had to have, as it was the coolest thing ever. However, as the catalog says, it was only going to be "available may/june". I mostly recall this wait being intolerably long, and checking store shelves for it every time we went to the store.

I guess we moved across the country later that summer, but I remember less of that than I remember wanting that wind-up motor.

I know I had a bunch of Lego already by then, but I can't recall what exactly. For some reason, though, I do recall seeing these indians, which I can't find any reference to after 1978 (I was born in january 1977), and being sort of confused by them, although I'm pretty sure I didn't have the actual kit.

I also remember really liking the lighting bricks, but I'm not sure when I got those. I also had the idea book on that page.

This is another idea book I had when I was pretty young, and that one left some deeply imprinted memories, for some reason.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

(The reason I liked those lighting bricks may be because they were used in that 6000 idea book to great effect.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I had the electric motor, which was bulkier. I didn't actually do a whole lot with it, since the vehicles you could make with it had to be big and ungainly.

I definitely remember that idea book. I hadn't remembered that in the second half, Mary and Bill were flying around in a stock Space Cruiser; that explains some of the comments on the LUGNet web site.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

I got the electric motor later. I was a bit too young for that at the time the wind-up motor came out. But I sure was excited about the wind-up motor.

When the Creator series came out with a small wind-up motor a few years back, I had to go buy it just because it was a LEGO WIND-UP MOTOR.

Also, I didn't get much use out of the battery motor either until I got a hold of a 12V replacement motor (for the trains), which had the exact same form factor as the 4.5V motor in the battery-powered motor block. I mounted the 12V, and then a friend of mine and me started doing Lego tractor pulling.

This ended in disappointment after the continuous one-upping led us to mount a Mabuchi 540 electric in a Lego chassis. We put in triple gears everywhere to make it able to withstand the power, but we ended up with one axle twisted ninety degrees along its length, and another one closer to the engine melted.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I do recall seeing these indians, which I can't find any reference to after 1978 (I was born in january 1977), and being sort of confused by them

Hmm... Lego always said that their lemon-yellow people were supposed to have a skin color of no particular race, but I guess orange Indians were an exception. (The yellow always reminded me of old racist caricatures of Asians, but that obviously wasn't the intention.)

Come to think of it, I wonder if the yellow people influenced "The Simpsons".

Lately they've gone to naturalistic skin tones in some of the licensed products where the minifigs represent real actors, probably because you have to make some of them dark to make them recognizable, whereupon you might as well go the whole hog.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

Another lineup oddity:

When Lego introduced the airplanes in 1985, I thought the wing pieces were a new addition to the set of blocks, but it turns out they were actually introduced in 1977 for the Boeing 727 kit, which was immediately dropped the next year when the modern posable minifigs were introduced and nearly the whole inventory was re-done.

Lego seem to be pretty good at re-using and re-introducing old blocks. I noticed when buying some of the new sets (like that wind-up motor one) that they've re-introduced some blocks that were falling out of favour back when I was a kid.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Lego really went the extra mile to redesign all the vehicles so that the minifigs could ride in them. That was one of my major frustrations prior to that time, especially when the first, large figures came out--they were completely out of scale with most of the town and vehicle sets. The faceless minifigs were closer, but as that 1977 catalog indicates, they hadn't quite gotten around to making most of the vehicles rideable. I was far more considerate in my spaceship designs of the era, of course.

On the other hand, they got some mileage out of the large figures later on in the dollhouse-interior sets; my sister had some of those. The early ones had this austere, sort of International Style design (as you'd expect from something made mostly from standard Lego parts) that my sister admired--I think their descendants have gotten much more Barbie frou-frou these days.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Hrmph, that "Scala" stuff in fact seems to be the girly version of Bionicle. They might be great toys, but are they Lego? Oh well, I guess Lego started out making a lot of stuff other than construction toys.