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30 Years of the Lego Minifig
clikit writes "Today, the Lego Minifig turns 30 years old. Gizmodo is running a video contest with Lego, giving away Galaxy Explorer or the Yellow Castle sets and other unopened vintage sets. They also have an exclusive video from the factory, showing how the minifig is built. Check it out ... finding out how the little guys are made will make you smile." Scientists estimate that 98% of the minifigs created in the last three decades have lost a hand in a tragic vacuum accident, been melted by a magnifying glass, or been eaten by your dog.
They forgot "blown apart by blasters, whips, and batrangs".
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
For those who are curios about the arcane technical jargon in this post.
"I'm a Genius!"*
*Not an actual Genius
is 30 years of 2 am blood-curdling screams and blasphemous curses against our lord jesus when a parent happened to step on one of these things barefoot.
lego: just because you didnt get candy at the supermarket,
doesnt mean you cant punish mom for her insolence.
Good people go to bed earlier.
you insenstive clod!
I'm pretty sure if my dog had swallowed 98% of the minifigs produced in 30 years he'd be feeling pretty sick. Plus, I'd have noticed. So I doubt that claim.
Scientists estimate that 98% of the minifigs created in the last 3 decades have lost a hand in a tragic vacuum accident, been melted by a magnifying glass, or eaten by your dog.
Or how about a kid using a lighter to heat up a paperclip cherry-red so that he could reenact the ventilation shaft scene from Empire Strikes Back with his lego dudes?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Scientists estimate that 98% of the minifigs created in the last 3 decades have lost a hand in a tragic vacuum accident, been melted by a magnifying glass, or eaten by your dog.
Does this mean my dog is guilty of crimes against lego-humanity?
Am I the only one who saw those Lego heads on that big board and thought "It'd be cool to have a Lego bulletin board in my office"? Put some big Lego sheets on the wall and then have special Lego bricks with clips to hold papers that connect to the wall sheets. Perhaps some Lego bricks with magnets embedded in them so you could stick magnetic items to part of the wall.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I'd love to see someone top the infamous Lego Beer Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATBl4qH9I54
is 30 years of 2 am blood-curdling screams and blasphemous curses against our lord jesus when a parent happened to step on one of these things barefoot.
You just gave me a 'Nam style flashback to pretty much every night this past week, and it wasn't fun. Good God, kid toys are awful. Stepping on Legos is bad - movement-sensitive toys that start a 15-minute sequence of annoying jabber because I walk within 5 feet of it when I get up to piss at night is the worst.
I swear to God, the next one of my in-laws that buys our kid one of those demonic talking toys, I'm buying their kids a drum set or electric guitar. This shit is war.
I thought the description "Yellow Castle" sounded like a set I owned when I was a kid. Looking at the picture; the Galaxy Explorer was the first Lego set I ever had.
Not only does my collection include a good cross section of minifigs from that 30 years, but I even have some of the faceless no-arms-or-legs types (came with a police van set) and the larger, multi-jointed "maxifigs" from the 1970s (came with the moon lander set).
And somehow, I managed to never lose, damage, or otherwise destroy any of them. That's what green plastic army men were for - LEGOs were too expensive.
My generation didn't have any lego people, hell we only had rectangles. No curves. I remember "clear" legos being introduced and wanting them.
These days, the lego's are barely what I remember. Specially shaped parts, windshields, wheels!
We had to PRETEND our model cars with square wheels could role. Thee days, kids don't have to imagine anything!!!
I read the title as 30 Years of the Lego Milfing
Boy was I surprised!
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/
this web comic uses dozens of the little guys in alternating story lines. it's hilarious!
e
When my wife and I were first married (and childless) I used to give these kinds of gifts to my nieces and nephews.
My favorite was "DJ Johnny Bot" and extremely annoying remote controlled robot/music player that was about 18" tall. It had this feature where if you played with it and then let it sit for a few minutes, it would "say" something to get your attention again (The best of all was this annoying robotic voice saying "I put the FUN in Funky!")
Now that I have a two-year-old daughter, and another on the way, each birthday/Christmas I look at the wrapped gifts with trepidation, wondering which is loaded with some terrible revenge :-)
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Backinmyday, which was the Galaxy Explorer era, all the little figures had the same face. It was a 1970s-era smiley face. The only thing that changed was the headwear: space helmet, fireman hat, girl-hair.
Now, my son has space lego sets. The guys in the Mars Mission sets have decidedly bad-ass faces. Bad-ass facial hair with the bad-ass grimace of a real bad-ass.
Make no mistake about this: my 1970s astronauts did not lead pleasant lives. They fought brave battles, lost limbs, sometimes cracked (literally) under the pressure. Sometimes they even had that stupid smile wiped off their faces (again, literally).
Why do today's miniature astronauts wear their emotions on their sleeves? What happened to the steel resolve of yesteryear? Why not, when under alien attack, smile?
Kids these days.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
Did anyone else ever think that tinker toys were the stupid kid's legos. And I always hated it when I asked for the newest set of legos and got a stinking set of the same old tinker toys. How many freaking log cabins can i build?
"I don't have to think. I only have to do it. The results are always perfect, but that's old news." - Meat Puppets
FROM: The Darkmaster
TO: LEGO(r) Factory
Send more legos, please! I'm running out of blocks to build my 1:1 scale car
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
...And with that, our lovely off-topic thread arcs back toward the original subject... Legos...
Bow-ties are cool.
, relax, and twist up a fatty:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E66lier98PI
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Scientists estimate that 98% of the minifigs created in the last three decades have lost a hand in a tragic vacuum accident, been melted by a magnifying glass, or been eaten by your dog.
That dog must rattle as it walks.
http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/
this web comic uses dozens of the little guys in alternating story lines. it's hilarious!
e
Feh. Add that to the pile of game sprite comics and other webcomic formats for people who can't draw...
I'll see your "irregular webcomic" (and maybe recommend some fiber or something) and raise you a brickfilms.
Bow-ties are cool.
I like it!
"Cross my line of death and I'm buying a puppy!"
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I had the Galaxy Explorer. I had a few of the older Lego sets (like the moon lander with the big people, and a police motorcycle and a forklift with the little people that didn't have movable arms or legs), and I've picked up a few of the newer sets too, with all their pieces that can only ever have one use.
I consider the late 70s and early 80s to be the apex of Lego technology. Pretty much all the parts could be used anywhere, but there was just enough specialization to allow for some cool stuff.
I used to spend all day building a spaceship upwards of 3 feet long, 3 feet wide, and 2 feet tall, with separate compartments for crew and space infantry, small fighter craft, laser batteries covering every angle of approach, escape pods, missiles ready to launch . . . it was a combination battleship, spacecraft carrier, and troop carrier . . . and then I'd keep it around a week before I tore it apart and built an improved version. I think my final versions had about 6 fighters, and my chief complaint was that I never had enough Legos to make it REALLY good.
I also had it as an article of faith that Lego spaceships should be built tough enough to actually play with. True, I couldn't drop it without it falling apart (except for one small fighter I designed super-tough), but I could "fly" it with one hand for hours without incident. The new models they have out fall apart if you sneeze on them, with all sorts of parts held on by a single knob.
As for that one fighter - I used all white bricks, mounted it with skids, and on an icy day I would go out and practice skid landings on the ice - I would throw it in the direction it was to go, and watch it land. The "engine" would frequently fall off, but that was all. I think I still have that one intact somewhere. No way was I going to take apart a model that worked THAT well.
Finally, after building my awesome spaceship, I'd use whatever bricks I had left to build some crude adversary craft, which of course would get knocked into pieces in the ensuing, one-sided battles.
Didn't you have the first year EE seminar where they made you swear a solemn oath to only use your powers for good?
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
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Someone's bitter that they only got those crappy Tyco knock offs as a kid.
Nostalgia. Plus a lot of that other stuff has gone the way of the dodo bird while Legos still survive.
Didn't we just have this discussion a week ago? [/.]
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
In my day, Legos weren't made of cheap plastic. We had to chisel them out of limestone. Then we had to shove them around to make a huge 3D triangle for some rich dude's mummy.
Up hill both ways.
In the desert.
I'm a Scoutmaster. One morning, I woke up at Scout camp to the sound of a radio, which the Scouts are not allowed to bring to camp (something about experiencing nature, etc., etc.). From my tent, I called out to the Scout who had brought it, "Dan, could you bring me the axe and your radio, please?". The Scout quickly got the idea.
I misread this as "30 years of Lego Mining". Brings to mind visions of people hard at work, in secret underground Danish mines, toiling to harvest bricks for the children of the world.
I've looked a the lego sets these days and instead of selling them as tools to support imagination, they are trying to compete with the instant gratification/no thought required entertainment of movies video games.
Lego have this model building tool available, and I recently used it to make a "model" I built as a kid. Its the USS Enterprise (as created by a four year old). I kid you not, I had *fleets* of these badboys battling across my bedroom for weeks at a time :)
It's obvious that you haven't actually seen a child playing with modern Lego sets. My 11yo is in love with the Bionicle series. Since Bionicle was launched pretty much at the same time as he graduated from Duplo, Bionicle == Lego in his mind.
I'm 42, and I had the same worries you do. But you know what? My son's every bit as creative with his Bionicle as I was with the sets 30 years ago. He builds each new set according to the directions. Once. Then he rips it apart and combines it with pieces from all his other sets to make something new. Lather, rinse repeat. I still have all my old Lego bricks; they're in a big bin next to his Bionicle. He sometimes pulls pieces from there for his creations, but mostly sticks to Bionicle parts.
IMHO, when someone our age says that there's "zero creativity" in modern Lego, I think it's more a sign of how calcified we've become. The kids are doing just fine.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
For a new father approaching 40, the new range of Lego is abysmal.
As a new father approaching 38, I'm kinda tired of this rant, considering last year I found it trivial to find large boxes of the plain bricks with the same pictures of generic houses, boats, trucks (with genetic wheels) as when I was a kid, in better boxes no less (hard plastic with good lids for permanence) and enough minor specialty parts (e.g axles, rotating blocks) to make things interesting.
The secret (other than online ordering) is to actually go to and support a decent non-chain toystore with good toys, rather than depending on your the Wallmart aisle with a couple boxes from the latest movie.
Well what has degraded is the general purposiveness of the bricks.
Most of the "old-time" bricks where with a simple geometrical shape that could fit most of the function the kid playing with them could think of.
The problem with some of the recent series is that lots of them use very specific pieces (like a complete torso or whatever) which makes them very hard to use them for anything else. (But not impossible. Kids can be very creative anyway).
But in fact, it's more the older generation like us looking back with rose glass.
Back then we also had a lot of single purpose bricks hard to repurpose too :
- minifigs could hardly be used to make anything except, well, lego people.
- Several "house/castle" models had special giant elements that basically formed the whole wall and could hardly be used except maybe for a different architecture. (...well, I still find that they made good elements to build giant mecha-lego...)
- and don't get me started about the ships (cargoships/lego pirate), which basically had a giant chuck of plastic for the whole hull and couldn't be used for anything else.
So in a way, I think each generation of lego player is doomed to have its chunk of worthless bricks that are hard to use for anything else.
Your kids will just forget about them when they grow old, and only keep memory of all the crazy things they managed to do with the more generic ones.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
> For a new father approaching 40, the new range of
> Lego is abysmal. There's zero creativity in them.
Okay, I'm also a father approaching 40, too, and I've held a similar opinion of new-fangled specialized Lego sets for years. Sure, you could always buy the basic sets, but the space sets had these crazy single-tasking pieces.
My oldest son just turned six, and got a couple of the new Mars Missions space sets for his birthday. These sets are sweet. If you loved the Galaxy Explorer when you were ten, you'd have killed for the 7692 Recon Dropship set. If you just look at it, it LOOKS like it's chock full of pieces that you could never use for anything else. But it's not. The specialized pieces are not inherently less useful than the wing, tail, and window pieces of the Galaxy Explorer.
After years and years of junk, I think the Mars Mission sets are excellent.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
No good sir,
your canine is guilty of crimes against legonity. I suspect that they were in league with the arch nemesis of lego-kind, the vacuum cleaner.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Sweet contest. I still have all my legos and have spent mondo money on buying more.
I bought a lego set recently, just for the hell of it. There were quite a few sets with 'special' pieces, often a major part of the set. The one I got though, was a more generic one, that came with instructions on how to build it into an airplane, a helicopter, or a hovercraft. It seemed to me to be most in the spirit of Lego of all the sets.
And what did the guy at the cash register say when I bought it?
"That's the most popular set by far."
that may be true, but lego is just playing the marketing game here, kids want to be able to build stuff and if a specific piece is only present in one set then they'll sell more. That would not be the case if the specific parts would not be there in the first place. It would also allow the less affluent to be able to build everything they wanted with only a few sets.
You used to be able to buy a big book full of drawings of all the lego models in the different sets even if you had not bought the actual sets, because all the parts were the same. Not much chance of that today.
MP3 Search Engine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv5iEK-IEzw
Especially if you're a Muslim.
Their accurate historical figures, such as THIS ONE are
extremely popular in the Arab world, favoured by many young girls here!
Your daughter also would love one!
They are now available at WalMart in most US states.
(but apparently not with the usual Pinoqachole glue as in Europe)