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How Hollywood Tie-Ins Saved Lego
MBCook writes "The New York Times published an article on Saturday profiling Lego, and how tie-ins with movies have helped save the company. 'Even as other toymakers struggle, this Danish maker of toy bricks is enjoying double-digit sales gains and swelling earnings. In recent years, Lego has increasingly focused on toys that many parents wouldn't recognize from their own childhood. Hollywood themes are commanding more shelf space, a far cry from the idealistic, purely imagination-oriented play that drove Lego for years and was as much a religion as a business strategy in Billund.' The article also mentions coming Lego Stores, a Lego board game, how Lego now allows sets with violence (like a gun for Indiana Jones), and how since 2004 Lego has cut part count nearly in half by encouraging re-use of parts and stopping one-off pieces."
Try this link.
That's the product line that has REALLY saved The Lego Group. The sales figures for that line alone are staggering. And as an AFOL, I can verify that the design quality and playability of their recent products have improved substantially. My kids continue to go back to their Lego collection to play with long after the novelty of the latest toy that they've received for their birthday\Xmas\whatever has worn off. As a friend of mine has always said, it's a thousand toys in one.
"Klaatu, verada, necktie!" -Ash
So, what you're telling me is Lego sold out. And for the Harrison Ford retirement fund--I mean, movie, no less.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
My son is 6 and right smack in the middle of the kids they are shooting for. He is obsessed with Star Wars, and loves playing Lego Star Wars. He's collected a few sets now for birthday, Christmas, etc. We have a lot of fun building the kits to the directions, but spend just as much time figuring out new things to build. There are a lot of different shapes that go well beyond the idea of a 'block' and I think it involves a lot more imagination to figure new ways to connect them.
It's something we can do together and have a lot of fun with it. When he's a little older we'll start working with the Mindstorm kit together.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I wish they were around when I was a kid. When my kids were kids, I used to play with their Legos all the time. I don't play with them anymore. Maybe when I have grandkids, I'll play with them again. Playing with legos when you don't have kids is probably weird.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
So they confirmed that in order to sell something you need to create a desire in the mind of the children. Welcome to the Marketing world.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
The tie-ins are tolerable even though they're still horribly dependent on using special pieces. What I want to know is why have they gutted the much more interesting Technic line? You rarely see the sets that are still produced on the big retailers shelves in the US anymore.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Wait... a gun for indiana jones is new? When I was a kid (20 years ago), we had pirate sets with guns in them... medieval sets with swords and cross bows... weapons everywhere.... how is violence in lego anything even remotely new?
While it is annoying to have 500 different versions of ____ summer movie theme represented in toy form, the best trick that lego has going for it is that you can usually rip it down and change it into something else when you are bored of it. LEGO recognizes that their product can still fit in with the imaginationland scheme while still appealing to a current market trend, so why not?
When I was a child in the 50's and 60's, legos were primarily just bricks. You got a big mass of them, and could make whatever you could imagine. Sure, there were instructions about making this or that, but nobody I knew ever paid them any mind. We just explored and tinkered.
The last time I saw a lego set a few years ago, I was horrified. It was all specialized parts and heavily tailored to make one very specific thing. I'm not say you *couldn't* make anything else, but it had clearly gone from being an open ended exploration tool to a "let someone else do the thinking for you!" toy.
Which seems to exactly reflect what has happened to our culture in the meantime.
ObGetOffMyLawn: get off my lawn.
Yea, and Al Gore invented the internet. Sure....
Could it perhaps be that marketing people took over and pushed up the price of what amounts to pieces of cheap mass-produced plastic that dragged down the company in the first place? To me there's something wrong in needing to jump through so many hoops to sell something so simple and appealing as building blocks.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
While it is true that movie themes have kept Lego afloat and even boosted its popularity significantly, once someone gets into Lego, it becomes something else entirely.
When I was a kid, Lego was mainly for building houses for the little people to live in. Our cultures have changed significantly since those days. Our homes are constantly filled with sound and music and noise of one kind or another. Everything needs to flash, bang or pop to get our attention. Star Wars and even Indiana Jones movie themes have lots of flash, bang and pop. "Playing house" or building a farming scene is just not something that most kids are interested in with all the color and excitement found on TV and in movies. "Simpler times" have gone out of fashion for now and I predict it will return again one day, but not until the 80's are finally dead and behind us.
But once a kid (or an adult, let's be fair -- a LOT of Lego fans are ADULTS!) builds his first model, he will want to build another. And while building those models, he will want to change it or improve it in some way. Eventually, that same child is building his own creations. So while the popular movie themes are a great hook, it almost never stops there!
And here's another thing -- it may be "movie themes" but it is also VIDEO GAME themes that will sell Lego sets. For some reason, Lego missed the boat with Halo and MegaBloks got the rights to that theme instead. (It's a damned shame because I see MegaBloks as cheaper and of lesser quality) But it is partly the Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones that brought interest in Lego for many. The games are outstanding and you don't "die" in the same ways and you build things as you progress through the games. They are genuinely enjoyable and the fun associated with those games ALSO bring interest to other Lego products as well.
But again I say, once the first set is build, the joys of building things then becomes more of the focus and the real magic of Lego is realized.
And one last thing I thought I would add. Lego teaches things to kids... to people really. It encourages a kind of engineering and architectural thinking. It also encourages ordered and organized thinking. There are elements of puzzle solving (especially when one is trying to make one's own creations) and most of all, it encourages patience, concentration and focus. And the reward of "look what I made" is ever present. These are things that are being lost and eroded with today's ADD/ADHD population. Most of us don't have anything medically wrong -- we just don't have patience and focus. Lego can strengthen the mind of the young and old with these kinds of lessons.
And it's fun!
(This is coming from someone who, as a kid, saved up for a year to buy the Black Seas Barracuda and subscribed to "Brick Kicks" magazine)
I used to question the movie tie-ins with LEGO. Then I helped my friend build the LEGO Millenium Falcon for his kid... and it was a blast. It made me realize that the fun of LEGOs was putting them together, destroying them, and building something new. The tie-ins don't really ruin that. If it keeps LEGO around, it's a good thing. You can still buy non-tie-in LEGOs (and it looks to me like the new City LEGOs sets are really cool).
Now, LEGO needs to make the next step and allow people to build their own kits online. I think that would be even bigger than LEGO Star Wars.
Guess we where privileged to have been kids while lego still made brick that wasnt gigantic and unique to a single model. Over the year it has sadden me to see how lego packages have been taking up less and less space of the toy stores, when I was a kid a whole section where filled with it, back then one could go there and find smaller cheap packages also, gone are those days. It prob never was cheap toy but the prices they are asking for very few bricks this day are just ridiculous, the only thing today that resembles the packages of the past are those special edition starwars boxes where you actuale gets bricks instead of prefabricated modules.
Hey-- why hasn't there been a Lego movie? Given the brand appeal and the richness of the settings possible, a Lego movie would kick brick-ass....
So they've managed to stay in business by the power of marketing and the irrationality that people display when buying for kids. Have you seen what a lego set costs these days? It's no wonder cheap rip offs that don't even work as well are getting a slice of the action.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/business/global/06lego.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=all
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The movie tie-ins are pure genius and uniquely Lego.. They have a good sense of humor and the new Lego sets are fun. As a 35 year Lego guy, it find the new stuff simply awesome.
The irony is that the Star Wars Lego sets are MORE Lego like than their 'original' sets they put out now. The piece on the Star Wars sets are more interchangeable while their "Mars" series has these HUGE molded pieces that can not really be used outside of the ship you are 'supposed' to build.
However, if you want to find something that sucks the soul out of Lego.. look no further than Bionicle.
Back in my days when there was knights lego, they already had swords...
Privacy is terrorism.
Pretty much everything I made out of Legos was war-related. Tanks and planes mostly, but I made some pretty cool howitzers back in the day. They'd fire the four-side black rods with a couple of rubber bands.
Just felt compelled to make another comment. From the article, there was one statement that really stuck in my craw. And it was the one that said with these Hollywood themed sets, kids will be playing out Hollywood's imagination instead of their own. It's true but it's not. With action figures and vehicle toys from the movies, that will definitely be true. But with Lego toys, it's not as true. Why? Because you can't make things with action figures and vehicles... not easily anyway.
And here's a factoid that people are overlooking -- children are QUICKLY losing their imaginations. We live in a different world now than we did 20-30 years ago. There are FAR fewer creative toys that are popular these days. Playdoh and crayons have really lost favor among kids. Why? I could guess a lot of reasons, but one of the more significant reasons is lack of interest from parents. In present times, parents are still playing their video games and aren't the slightest bit interested in what their kids create or draw. This is a huge shift. And without parents being interested in what their kids are doing, the kids are less inclined to doing anything creative at all. Whatever the cause, children and people in general are losing their creativity.
But while Lego, as a purely creative toy, has lost the interest of children, themed Lego has a chance of bridging the problem of lost creativity.
Few know that Google used Legos (and later cheaper Lego clones) to build their initial server cases since the legos let them quickly prototype boards and insulate them without building custom enclosures. And GOogLE even contains LEGO. Coincidence???? I think not.
When you can learn about physics by building things like this :
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2007/09/07/stephen-hawking-lego.html
Gizmodo has an excellent article with video from their tour of the Lego factory. It's a must-see for people who like seeing how things are made: http://gizmodo.com/5022769/exclusive-inside-the-lego-factory
So basically it is saying that Money has saved Lego?
... years before I otherwise would have.
Lego was a lot better before Hollywood owned it. The huge set lines like Aquazone, Exploriens, M-Tron, Ice Planet, etc. were really fun and fairly theme-agnostic. Those 'one off parts' were some of the more useful things you could find. (Can anyone really fault the transparent orange chainsaw? What about all the different colors of windows, or the giant dome windows that used to be available? Even the giant, axle-equipped base mentioned above was good for anything that happened to be large, heavy, and needed to roll around.) Also, instead of Bionicle, you had Technic. (Mindstorms doesn't count because it's ridiculously expensive and practically can't be found in stores here.) As early as 1999-2001 with the new Star Wars sets and Bionicle, all you could find in stores were overpriced Hollywood themed boxes and kits full of useless Bionicle bits, and the prices just kept going up. I'd already accumulated a decent bin of Lego, though, so I suppose it didn't matter much.
Still, the older sets, which weren't as sleek and didn't have big Hollywood names but did have great models, great parts, and great themes, beat just about any of the movie themed sets just for the sheer flexibility. (Not only that, quality control really slipped. The last sets I picked up, all three of them Star Wars, had pieces missing.) One of my nephews showed me a Spongebob Squarepants themed Lego kit that he built, and I thought to myself, "The only thing that's missing is a pile of sprues and some rubber cement." Perhaps I'll gift him an old Aquazone sub, if I can find any complete kits.
"The article also mentions coming Lego Stores, a Lego board game, how Lego now allows sets with violence (like a gun for Indiana Jones) ..."
Um, Legos has had guns for years. They commonly appeared in there pirate themed sets. Heck, I probably wouldn't have played legos half as much as I did if it wasn't for the firearms.
Lego != LEGO. Both the article summary AND the NYT article incorrectly use the company trademark.
..Lego has had weaponry since the 80's. The medieval sets had spears, bows and arrows. The space sets had laser cannons.
A lot of people complaining about some of these Lego sets seem to think that you can only really build the thing on the box when you get the set. There's a ton of parts for even the tiniest Lego model and you have a lot of options. If you have more than one set, you can genuinely make some really interesting displays. You need to think differently out of the box. My four year old autistic son taught me this. I buy them for them and he puts together all sorts of stuff. At first, I put the sets together and then let him have at them, but I had gotten lazy and just handed some stuff to play with, and felt pretty bad about it, so I bought a fairly complicated set to put together with him, and found that, by the time I'd got the basics of the first page done, he'd already built something very cool. For him, the picture on the box isn't the thing to build, but is representative of a sort of world he plays in with those pieces. I think right now Princess Lea and Han Solo Lego people are wearing pirate hats and are carrying knight swords on top of a steam engine (sad end for a Bachmann set).
Still, if you must have the ultimate in "suggestionless" Lego design, you need to go to a Lego store. Lego stores have all the theme sets, for sure, but they also have a huge wall in the back where you can just fill up a big cup for $15 and get anything you want. Wheels, different shape blocks, they are all there.
This is my sig.
Lego is clearly in charge of the business. Here's how it works. A kid sees a lego kit. The branding (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc) sells the kit. The child assembles the X wing fighter, or the Pirate ship. The toy then flies/sails to the corner of the room with all the other legos. The pirate ends up in the X wing. The cannons from the pirate ship end up on the x wing fighter but the nav console from the x wing becomes part of something else. The Ferrari mechanic is wearing a horned helmet and in the battlements of the castle. By the time the child is done, the "branded toy" has morphed and blended with all the other legos. Our lego chess set is guarding a castle. Bits of X wing and Imperial Walkers are outbuildings. From the children I've observed, the branded lego kit is a way to sell the blocks at the highest possible price. To the adult. The kids play with the blocks like kids. Lego is still one of the few toys with real play value, not just a prepackaged fantasy with no where to go. Also, for those of you worried about the "gun" issue, kids can make guns out of anything....and do.
Legos were among my most favorite toys as a child. I can't wait to have a child of my own so I have an excuse to once again play them.
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
How could one conclude that Lego was "saved" by these tie-ins and would have ceased to exist? Did they promote added sales, etc, yeah sure. But "saved" is simply a ridiculous statement.
Heh, my Lego city got assaulted by Green Army Men many a time.
Also, I find myself mixing "themed Legos" in with the other ones - even if I don't disassemble the model itself, the Star Wars spaceship interacts with a self-built ship rather than jsut with other Star Wars stuff, et cetera
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
My scientist's heart sinks when I remember the hopes I had and that the following would re-popularize the space program as well as science in general, then lost when nobody noticed...
So you've got these guys who built these robot car things and they're going to send them to Mars. One of the cool things they did was collect peoples' names and messages to the New Planet to send along. They burned the messages to CDs and then started looking for a way to attach the CDs to the 'dashboards' of their robots. How about... oh, I dunno... maybe some interlocking plastic blocks with the CD trapped between a pair of them, and a screw or two to hold each of the 3 pairs in place? I'll bet some of these guys even have some of these things laying around and would be glad to donate them to the cause.....
From the left science panaorama camera on each Mars Rover, taken on Sol 2 of each mission:
Spirit:
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/2/p/002/2P126556804EFF0200P2205L1M1.JPG
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/2/p/002/2P126556727EFF0200P2205L4M1.JPG
Opportunity:
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p/002/1P128365194EDN0100P2205L5M1.JPG
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/p/002/1P128365248EDN0100P2205L6M1.JPG
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If the journalists would actually have bothered looking at the last years numbers from Lego, they would have seen that the turnaround is due to a much much lower cost than ten - fifteen years ago. Their revenue numbers have been pretty stable for the last twenty years. But they spend *half* what they did in the mid ninetees.
This is the reason Lego has become profitable again. Not Hollywood.
Although I can see why stupid journalists would prefer the other story. *sigh*
Bo.
Otherwise I wouldn't have enough pieces that are in grey to make Star Trek Starships out of LEGO.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
"how Lego now allows sets with violence (like a gun for Indiana Jones)" Since when did they not allow "violence"? When I was a kid there were Pirate and Medieval sets that had cannons, swords, and muskets... That was LONG before Indiana Jones or Star Wars sets ever started coming out.
You have a specific citation for these lies that they've told?
Wrong. In a free market a business can choose to supply as much or as little as it wants.
Do you have a citation for that? You can certainly get third party lenses in most common camera mounts, and they're usually cheaper.
Wrong again.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."