Subject:
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Ahh, the old times...
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.dear-lego
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Date:
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Sun, 3 Jul 2005 00:29:25 GMT
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Viewed:
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4944 times
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Dear LEGO,
When I was a kid, I remembered how LEGO toys were apart of a modular toy
system. Town, for example, had a complementary set of vehicles and sets,
focusing on emergency services (such as police, firemen,
ambulance/hospital, etc) and on generic 'common' stuff like cars and trucks
and other stuff you'd see driving down the street; this easily blended into
Train, which focused on cargo shipment, with trains, cargo trucks, cargo
units to put on the train, and cargo ships.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but it doesn't seem like that anymore. Its just a small
number of sets that don't really have the imagination that sets when I was
a kid had.
I know LEGO has been pouring a lot of time, money, and other
non-temporal/monetary resources (such as blood, sweat, and tears) into the
Star Wars and Bionicle lines (not that I'm complaining too loudly here, the
SW line has great gimmicks such as the light up lightsabers, and Bionicle
is a great exercise in trying to make action-figures out of bricks, which,
when I was a kid, I always wanted), but it seems to be wrong to neglect the
classic LEGO toy lines, such as[1] Town, Train, Pirates, Castle, and the
Underwater. All of them suffer from neglect.
The Technic line also suffers from this. I remember the 8839 Supply Ship
( http://guide.lugnet.com/set/8839 ). A unique, nice little kit (only $60
when released), and its decently sized had has a bunch of neat gimmicks.
Newer stuff just isn't as complex (and when it is, it costs twice as much).
Like, the Mobile Crane
( http://shop.lego.com/product.asp?p=8421&cn=48&d=11&t=5 ) is awesome, but
its also $150, and way out of the price range of most people (kids or adult
fans).
Of course, the Technic line is doubly screwed. Walmart[2] doesn't seem to be
carrying Technic, and if they are, its not many. The local Walmart has even
gone as far as carrying a few popular SW line kits (with the SW stuff, not
the LEGO stuff), a few Bionicle products; very little shelf space dedicated
to the Designer line, and very little also allocated to whats left (like
Town and Alpha Team). No Technic is on the shelves. (In addition to this,
no one is buying the Knights series at all, the same bottles have been
sitting on the shelf for the past few months)
Thats another problem I see: kids wont buy toys they don't think are
important and important toys have a lot of shelf space. At the local
Walmart, half of one side of an isle is dedicated brick products. By brick
products, I mean LEGO, Megablock (blargh! We need an
alt.toys.megablock.die.die.die), K'nex, and some magnetic toy I don't know
the name of. Of this half of one side an isle, half is LEGO, the other half
is shared by everyone else.
In contrast, when I was a kid, we had two major stores[3], and /both/ had a
full side of an isle dedicated to the wonder that is LEGO; and during the
holidays, Walmart had both sides of a full isle filled with boxes with the
square red LEGO logo on them, it was really awe inspiring. I'm much older
now, and I still miss that.
LEGO was an important part of my childhood, and I want other kids to have
the same thing in their lives. LEGO has shaped the way I think about the
world around me. I became a computer programmer, and playing with bricks
when I was a kid was an important step in forming my analytical and spacial
skills, which come in handy when working in object oriented languages such
as Objective-C.
LEGO, thank you.
[1]: Obvious omition of Space, due to the fact it can't co-exist with the SW
line, but the same still applies. The last space sets produced before SW
just wern't as awe inspiring as the older stuff, back when Blacktron and
M-tron were popular, and Ice Planet was just introduced.
[2]: Its a small town, and we have no other major stores, and no one else is
selling LEGO products; otherwise, yes, I'd hit up a good toy store for
stuff.
[3]: Walmart and Ames, and Ames shut down all their stores 2 or 3 years ago.
I miss Ames because they used to sell LEGO kits a little cheaper than
Walmart or LEGO S@H.
--
Patrick "Diablo-D3" McFarland || pmcfarland@downeast.net
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids,
we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and
listening to repetitive electronic music." -- Kristian Wilson, Nintendo,
Inc, 1989
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Ahh, the old times...
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| (...) While I hope they do continue older product lines, I am a big fan of the mindstorms, the Spybotics, the Bionacle manas. I have found uses for some of the most obscure peices, and if you take a look at the lugnet mecha forum, you will some othe (...) (19 years ago, 3-Jul-05, to lugnet.dear-lego)
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