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In lugnet.trains, Harvey Henkelman writes:
> In lugnet.trains, Reinhard "Ben" Beneke writes:
<Snipped stuff about "Evil-Engines">
> > If nobody took notice of it so far: Lego was a very creative building and
> > construction toy in the past, but there have been NO WEAPONS till the end of
> > the 70ies and I once read the rumour that there were no green Lego® bricks,
> > because nobody should be able to build military vehicles.
> >
> > In the 2001 catalogue there are only mechas, monsters, killing machines and
> > deadly + brutal racers. If I want to see such stuff I watch TV news or trash
> > action series. I fear Lego® looses it's good reputation and even more market
> > volume if they deny to offer at least both: classic bricks and new stuff.
> > (only exception in my eyes are sculptures)
> >
> > (But I think this leads to far out of train discussion and has been mentioned
> > more than once before.)
> >
> > Ben
> Ben, you've struck a chord with me. When I was a child, playing with LEGO
> (the late 1970's) I never did connect violence with LEGO. Now when I hear
> young kids playing with the stuff, interest is quickly lost if they can't
> add guns or missiles to their creations. This also may be outside the scope
> of trains, but the world is getting more violent all the time. Wouldn't it
> make sense for LEGO to 'keep up with the Jones'. -Harvey
Well, I completely agree with all of this.
When I was a child, playing with Lego (late 60's early 70's) I never
connected violence with Lego either. But, what did I play? One of my
brother's and my favorite things to do with our Lego was to build 'rubber
band guns'. These weren't Lego guns that shot rubberbands. They were
rubber band powered Lego cannons (no, we didn't use Lego rubber bands
either. At that time I had never seen a Lego set that came with a rubber
band!). They were made from Lego and they shot little Lego missles (like a
stack of 2x2 bricks with a 2x2 45 slope peak at the top). We would make
rows of boats out of Lego and shoot at them using our Lego cannons. We
spent hours and possibly years designing new guns that shot bigger Lego
missles, and shoot them farther, and stayed together better (rubber bands
can put a lot of force on those little lego conenctions!).
Another thing we loved to do was to play Star Trek. We'd build all the
bridge controls out of Lego turning our bedroom into the bridge of the
Starhip Enterprise. Then we'd fly our bedroom thorugh space shooting all
the Klingongs with our Phonton Torpedoes (launched via our 'lego controls'
of course).
This was good for hours of fun.
Of course, we also did non-violent play - we built Lego cameras and houses,
and robots and cars and submarines (you know, the Sea View from "Voyage to
the Bottom of the Sea"? and that little yellow flying sub that they had? I
loved that one!)... Hmm... Maybe the submarine wasn't a good example of a
non-violent game after all. We had to destroy the big deep sea monsters of
course... Hmm... And even the houses were burnt to the ground so that the
fire men could come and rescue the people. And our cars... They were Speed
Racer's Mach 5. Guess that could get a bit voilent in some ways too...
Even when we built camera's there was always some bad guy chasing us in our
play game. Someone always had to be bad (though in our games the bad person
was always imaginary. Nobody wanted to play the evil people :). And
besides, if there isn't any drama, what's the fun of playing the game?
Now, Lego never sold a gun then (that I know of), but we're we being any
less violent than many of today's kids? I don't know. Maybe we were. I'm
not saying it is the same. And I'm not saying that it isn't worse now. I
certainly believe there is more direct, person to person violence on TV now
than there was when I was growing up. But I'm just not sure its as black
and white as we always want to make it out.
Just some thoughts from someone who doesn't post too often...
Kim
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