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Subject: 
Re: Nicely now. What do you think of the new colors?
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.lego, lugnet.general
Date: 
Fri, 16 Jan 2004 00:28:09 GMT
Viewed: 
13056 times
  
    So far I have bought sets with new dark and light gray and new brown, so
I've seen the 3 major color changes.  I don't like the new light gray or new
brown.  The new dark gray is OK, but only for certain pieces.
    As for the whole color replacement in general, I'm with the
If-it's-not-broke-don't-fix-it group.  As many people have stated before here,
the old grays and brown were fine.  The shade of old light gray worked very well
for stone, concrete and metal.  The new light gray just doesn't look quite
right.  The new dark gray is good for some things.  I think that some small
mechanical type pieces look good in new dark gray.  New brown was just silly.
Old brown was perfect for any brown thing you wanted to make.
    One of the problems with the new replacement colors is exactly that--they're
REPLACEMENTS instead of additions.  No one said anything bad about verdigris
("sand" green) pieces when they came out because we still had regular green.  If
a fairly new color or a seldom produced color had been replaced, I doubt people
would have cared much.  The 2 grays and brown are colors that lots of people
used in mass quantities, so the impact of their replacement was much greater.
    Another problem with the new colors is that they're so similar to the old
versions of the colors that they look like a mistake.  If a new color (dusty
["sand"] blue, light orange, teal, etc.) is clearly different from an existing
LEGO color, then we recognize it as something new.  The new colors aren't all
that different from the old ones, so it looks like LEGO made some kind of
plastic dye mistake.  This slight difference, as opposed to a clear/striking
difference, is what makes the new 2004 sets have a cheaper look to them.  (We
know, of course, that the quality of pieces in the new colors is the same.)  I
remember you saying something in a post about LEGO wanting the colors to be more
"in line."  That seemed odd to me, since colors in the real world aren't in
line; they're all over the sprctrum.
    I think that LEGO has made a big assumption in thinking that new or young
users won't notice the color change.  If this color change had happened when I
was a kid, I would've felt the same about it as I do now.  Another aspect is
that parents remember LEGO colors more than you'd think.  Take this recent story
for example:
    A few months ago I heard my sister talking to our mom on her cell phone.
From the conversation they were having, I knew that my mom must be in a Wal-Mart
store.  My local Wal-Mart was out of some LEGO sets that I wanted at the time,
so I asked if I could talk to my mom on the phone.  I asked her if she could
pick up a set or two for me, then I could pay her back later.  She said that she
was close to the toy section, so she would go look to see if they had the sets I
wanted while I was still on the phone with her.  Now we all know that every
Wal-Mart in the US has at least a few LEGO sets at any given time of the year.
My mom started searching the toy section, but could not find the LEGO aisle.
After a second pass, I heard her ask an employee where the LEGO aisle was.  She
had passed right by the LEGO aisle twice because she hadn't recognized it.  Her
next question made me realize why she had done that:

"What happened to all the yellow boxes?"



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Nicely now. What do you think of the new colors?
 
(...) Sometimes just one simple sentence like this very one is more clarifying than thousands of words. Thanks for sharing! Best, Paulo Renato (Sorry Jake but, i couldn't help reply to this one:-) (20 years ago, 16-Jan-04, to lugnet.lego, lugnet.general)

Message is in Reply To:
  Nicely now. What do you think of the new colors?
 
It's only a couple of weeks in the new year, and it looks like it's going to be an interesting 2004! I have a request, but before I go any further, let me say that personally, I understand the concerns surrounding the color changes. I know many of (...) (20 years ago, 15-Jan-04, to lugnet.lego, lugnet.general, FTX) !! 

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