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Why Can't LEGO Click?
A reader writes "This article from FastCompany.com contains a fascinating history of Lego, from wooden toys and the basic eight-stud brick to Star Wars kits and Mindstorms. According to the article, changes in the way children play has made the Danish toymaker struggle to adapt, while holding on to the values that helped build it's reputation. 'Once, for a brief moment, Lego changed the way kids played as well as the way kids learned to think. Lego hasn't been that kind of leader in a long time.'" The article itself paints a sad picture - LEGOs were such an integral part of my growing up, I can't imagine growing up without them. My favorite thing was to construct vast cities, and then launch billiards balls at them, pretending it was meteors coming down. Hurm. I think that may disqualify me from ever being put in charge of heavy weapons ordnance.
Just today the German news magazin Der Spiegel has a story about Lego cult and especially movies made with Lego characters. If yo don't speak German, just visit the box on the right of the page for the links.
At the beginning was at.
All of the intelligent, thoughtful, and creative people that i've met in my age group grew up with these toys, and they made all the difference in the world.
I've found that buying a set of just simple blocks is difficult if not impossible! When I say simple bricks, I mean the 2x4, 2x10, etc. not the 1x4, 1x8, etc that now come in the "buckets" that are available at .
I had the luck of growing up near a Lego plant (then manufactured by Samsonite here in the US) and employees could by large bags of the bricks that were swept up from the floor of the plant for a dollar a bag. The bricks were dirty, many were misshaped. We had a Christmas tradition of dumping the newly delivered bags in the sink and washing each brick and sorting out the melted ones. I didn't knwo 'sets' were available until I'd moved on to the next stage: girls.
Can't get a bag of bricks like that -- just those useless 1x pieces.
Yes, lego was absolutely the best toy I had, even GI Joe and the vast armies of He-Man didn't give as much joy. :) (But it was close)
:)
Here's why.
It was durable. ONLY lego could take the stress of being hit with billard balls, trampled on by feet, and being swallowed by the rubber godzillas repeatedly.
It was reusable. I STILL have my lego today, my uncle's and aunt's have their buckets. and still my little nephews build cities, starships, and moon bases, tear them all down, and do it all over again.
It was limitless. Didn't like the guys face? Change it, even the damn tiny HOOKS for the arms were tough to break. You could snap weapons in and out all day long, and it wouldn't let you down. Try that with a batman figure from today, see how long it lasts....
I know that while lego may not be able to compete on a technical level with some of the newer toys, I still smile when I see my little relatives running around the basment with my LEGO, when just around the corner is the Playstation. I guess some things just don't die.
Lego, you GO!
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I was never a fan of LEGOs (for whatever reason) but I really did like to build things w/Construx. god only knows how many times I built myself into a box and had to have my mom come and try to get me out w/o breaking the new creation I made.
:).
:). Just take steps to ensure safety if the bottom floor is above ground level.
I used to amuse myself by building towers that reached the ceiling (at least three times my height in those days)
Through much deviousness, I also managed to build a working Construx pendulum clock at one point... even if the hand went a quarter-turn around with each tick. (Show your kids the guts of an old-fashioned pendulum clock some day; I was endlessly fascinated by those as a kid.)
The most challenging task, though, was to build construx mazes for my hamster in such a way that he couldn't push any of the panels out. The trick was to make sure that all of the panels attached from the inside of the tunnels, which imposed interesting design constraints.
I had the good fortune to be exposed to many building toys as a kid. Construx is still one of my favourites.
As a side note, two-by-fours and nails work too. Let your kids help build the tree-fort you're making for them
Well, gee whiz, how did kids ever play togther before there was TV? Your argument is ludicrous... if anything I think the problem with Lego is that it's not Lego anymore, unless you stick with the very basic stuff. Lego was originally large quantities of very generic pieces that would as easilt build a house, spaceship, car or dinosaur. Nowaways, most Lego sets are essentially models. You build the model, there might be some variations possible, but with all the specific pieces they have now it doesn't require any imagination. Also, one of the strengths of Lego was its limitations. There weren't pieces to cover every possible thing you might want to build so you had to learn both creativity and compromise. In more recent days, they make models that look like the things they look like (to paraphrase Homer Simpson) in part by making one-off pieces specifically for the target model. Sure, the resulting model looks better, but to me it violates the basic principle of what makes Lego the best toy ever. My kids have a lot of Lego, some of it is 30+ years old from my early childhood. They received several of the Star Wars sets, which are very cool, and in each case, the sets were built once, and then cannibalized for the latest original creation. Now the Star Wars sets do seem to have fewer non-generic pieces than other sets I have seen, but in my family's case, being able to create your own toys out of Lego is the highest requirement.
I'm sorry if you feel the way you do, but in my book, if a child can't be creative without a TV show or something to draw from, he or she is going to grow up to be another boring person. My kids do watch their share of TV.. I'm not a purist in that regard, but their imaginative games, drawings, Lego models, etc, veer wildly into realms they create themselves. I think all children should have to drive and capacity to be like this. I have always steered them towards toys that lend themselves to creative play, which is what I myself was brought up on, and at the end of the day, with a toy box stuffed full of cool things, often times their favorite indoor toy is blank paper and something to color with.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Given the LEGO kids have to work with today, they probably envision futuristic spacecraft as being a single irregularly shaped plastic piece that's no fun at all.
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
When I was a kid, I adored Transformers robots. I mean, I was infatuated with those things. My brother and I would sometimes pretend we were transformable robots ourselves, contorting ourselves into mock-cars and mock-trucks and driving around the basement smashing into each other.
I got as many of the "cool" Transformers toys as I could, but there was a limit to how many of them I could afford. But my mom bought me LEGO space sets as well, which I assembled dutifully according to the instructions whenever I got a large one for my birthday or Christmas and then disassembled to make other stuff. Eventually, I figured out that if I couldn't collect all the Transformers I wanted, I could make them myself.
And I was good. Two "Autobot Clones" which looked the same as robots but turned into different vehicles were my favorite early effort. My last was a larger-than-the-toy Fortress Maximus, built out of every last black and grey LEGO brick I could find. It couldn't stand under its own weight, so I propped it against a wall to admire it. I never made a serious effort with the LEGO Transformers again, but they'd served their purpose.
If only those LEGO sets didn't cost as much, I would have bought them instead of the TF toys. Why buy one action figure when you can get a hundred?
We've all done it before -- stepping on Legos scattered all over the floor in the dark hurts like a bitch, stumbling from one painful pile to another, wrecking a whole day's worth of building while leaving your feet full of small indentations, all perfectly arranged and usually in an 2x4 pattern.
Yes, stepping on Legos certainly sucked. (For some of us, I'm sure it still sucks.)
J