Subject:
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Re: banner year for castle
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.castle
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Date:
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Sat, 20 Dec 2003 02:17:29 GMT
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Viewed:
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2959 times
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In lugnet.castle, Tanvir Mahtab wrote:
SNIP
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It may have some play value for some kids...but many kids will see these sets
for just what they are...unattractive toys not worth nagging the parents
about. I think we - and more importantly TLC - make too many negative
assumptions about kids today. Clearly the company’s thinking is that the
video game generation of today can’t distinguish between a beautiful model
and a crappy one, and that they can’t possibly have the patience to build a
6080. In my opinion such thinking is total BS. If kids are fed this crap,
then of course they’ll eat it. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t
appreciate something better if given the option. The only reason I’m an AFOL
today is because of the beautiful sets I saw in the beautiful catalogs of the
late 80s. I can’t imagine any kid being similarly inspired by the current
garbage. If TLC keep up their current philosophy, there are bound to fewer
and fewer new AFOLs as the years go by. Another random thought. At the local
toys r us I saw a wonderful little display for mega bloks dragons right next
to the legos. Lego had nothing to compare. And thanks to the current sets,
they won’t any time soon. Whatever quality issues mega bloks might have, on
the surface at least, they’ve started to look better than lego. And that’s
something unlikely to be entirely lost on the same aforementioned kids.
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I’m not a castle-head so I have little personal attachments or expectations for
these castle sets. That said, I agree that the models in and of themselves are
not very attractive, especially when compared against the sets from the golden
ages. However, it seems that with most of TLC themes as of late the individual
themes and sets are not expected to stand on their own. Lego seems to be taking
a multimedia approach where their building products are integrated into a wider
range of products such as video games, commics, movies/dvds, etc. This approach
seems to have been very successful with the Bionicle line.
The new knights kingdom is interesting in that I beileve it is the first mixing
of minifig and technic-fig (or action fig??) scales in a single theme. It will
be interesting to see how that angle plays out. Perhaps these are all magical
knights that can “grow” to gigantic proportions (with regard to minifigs) to
duel it out with evil.
I don’t believe these sets are supposed to be models (historical or otherwise),
they are settings for which kids are supposed to tell/re-enact the stories they
read/watch in the media products that will also be associated with knights
kindom. The purpose of the wildly colored knights might just be so that it
would be easier to create character identities that kids could easily identify
in a movie or video game. Building is taking a back-seat to the
story-telling/re-enacting aspect of play. Is this selling kids short? Is this
assuming that kids are not intelligent enough or patient enough to construct a
complex (and good looking) model? Or is it just Lego realizing that they need
to adapt to the current market place and environment that kids are growing up in
today. Remember when most of us grew up, cable was in its infancy. The best
video games we had were atari 2600-7200, intellivision, coleco-vision. There
was no internet or WWW. And we had apple II or commodore64 computers. There
were a lot less distractions then. We all had to make up our own stories to
build to and act out. Todays kids just don’t have to do that.
I would expect no more or no less out of any of the themes that are targeted
toward the 5-10 yr old age ranges. Hopefully TLC and Lego Direct will be
profitable enough with these new themes to throw us AFOLs a bone or two every
now and then. Hopefully the .castle group will get their dream-set equivalent
of the 10030 someday. At best, I think AFOLs should think of all sets as parts
& accessories kits and concentrate on building their own MOCs using Bricklink or
TLC Bulk sales. I think the train sets have been better because TLC does
realize that a larger portion of adults are fans of trains. A similar arguement
can be made for the starwars offerings.
As far as what causes one to be an AFOL vs not; that is a good question. I
don’t know if it is a property inherent in the toy that causes people to become
AFOLS, or is it a quality inherent in the people that become AFOLs that cause
them to continue to love a toy that most people eventually outgrow. It would be
an interesting study.
Personally, I’m an electrical engineer, and, in general, I like making things.
I like to work on cars, bicycles, work with wood & metal. I like to work in the
yard and on projects around the house. I want to learn how to weld eventually.
I think that I liked (and still like) lego not because of the sets that I had
when I was a kid (heck they never stayed built very long) but because it was a
medium that I could easily exercise my natural instincts for creating things. I
also liked to draw and paint as a child as well. I can remember making crude
airplanes out of scraps of wood and nails that my father had laying around his
shop. I’m sure I would still be the way I am today even if I had never received
a single Lego set. Therefore, I think that in my case, it was a property
inherent to me that caused me to become an AFOL.
my 2 bricks worth,
drc
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: banner year for castle
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| (...) It may have some play value for some kids...but many kids will see these sets for just what they are...unattractive toys not worth nagging the parents about. I think we - and more importantly TLC - make too many negative assumptions about kids (...) (21 years ago, 18-Dec-03, to lugnet.castle, FTX)
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