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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".
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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.
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?
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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.
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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.
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!
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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the Galaxy Explorer was the first Lego set I ever had.
Not my first (that one goes to the Coast Guard Station one), but pretty darn close. Man that thing was cool!
The one thing that bothered me with the space minifigs is you could see their smiling faces with the helmets. But I knew (as only an elementary schooler can) that you couldn't see the astronauts faces through the visors. So I would turn their heads around so all you could see was the yellow through the helmet.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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> 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.
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