Subject:
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Minifig Colour Precedents? (Was: Re: Panaka is yellow?)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.starwars
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Date:
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Wed, 22 Dec 1999 21:20:27 GMT
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Viewed:
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370 times
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Hi,
Lorbaat wrote:
> In lugnet.starwars, Dave Lovelace writes:
> > Anyway, yep, there's bigger issues on the grill here, even if they turn out to
> > be unassociated with the 7124. I was just looking at brown pieces, and
> > they're
> > a good medium-hued tone of brown which would allow perfectly legible
> > imprinting
> > of the "black dot eyes and mouth." I say "why not?" :-)
>
> Maybe they will. I agree, by even taking the Star Wars liscence TLC opened up
> a huge can of worms. Until now, they've been able to say "all minifigs are
> yellow, all one race" etc etc etc. But with Star Wars, they have three basic
> options:
>
> 1) Brown Lando
> 2) Yellow Lando
> 3) No Lando
>
> Option one makes them look bad for not having multi-racial minifigs before (or
> after, if they don't start introducing them into other lines). Option two
> gives them the moral high ground ("We *said* all minifigs are the same race,
> and we meant it!") but leaves everyone scratching their heads with a yellow
> Lando. Option three makes everyone ask, "Why no Lando? He was a major
> character!" and it becomes obvious that the reason was simply to sidestep the
> issue.
>
> If Panaka becomes an even more prominent character in the next two films, or
> Mace Windu does, then the proble will be even worse.
>
> As you said in your original post, it's a no-win situation.
This is an issue that came up with Fisher-Price over the "Little People" line back
in the 1970s. Everyone had hitherto been a generic Caucasian-hue, and then
Fisher-Price made a licensing deal with CTW to make Sesame Street sets. The
problem? You had to make Maria, Gordon, and other people who would not be
recognisable as themselves if you gave them a yellow or light beige hue--the
figures, like LEGO minifigs, were just too generic already. Fisher-Price simply
went ahead and moulded the characters in hues that would be most representative of
the actual people and Muppets (In an eerie parallel to the Jar Jar phenomenon, some
of the Muppets were fully-moulded above the waist--for example, Big Bird and
Grover. The main line of Little People remained generally unchanged until they
were done away with in favour of the "cuter, chubbier" Little People of 1993 on
(yuck).
I might be wrong on this, since I didn't look at Little People closely after about
1982. But at the time of the license, this is how it was handled. On the other
hand, it was the 1970s--such an approach might not fly in today's charged
environment.
Just food for thought.
best,
Lindsay
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Panaka is yellow?
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| (...) I think you're right- that is a reasonable assumption to make. I don't think that's what Lego intended, however. All the Naboo Guards wear the same uniform, and Panaka is the most clearly photographed of the guards in the movie. The stills of (...) (25 years ago, 22-Dec-99, to lugnet.starwars)
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