30 Years of the Lego Minifig 167
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.
Re:Gaaah! (Score:5, Insightful)
Just do what I do:
1) Grandparents give child noisy annoying toy.
2) Allow child to play with said toy until grandparents go home.
3) Take toy away from child and REMOVE BATTERIES.
4) Give toy back to child and watch him/her lose interest in toy very rapidly.
5) Put batteries back in toy and donate to Salvation Army (Alternately, if you have a gift receipt, just return it to the store.)
6) While out donating (or returning) annoying toy, buy child quiet, quality toy such as LEGOS, a ball, an "action figure", a dolly, a stuffed animal, ect.
7) Tell grandparents (later) the toy broke on the first day, and that next time they should get child something more durable and less gimmicky.
I did this for the first 5 years of each child. Eventually, the GP's got the message. Now my kids get fun and educational toys, or sports/activity related toys. For my son's 6th birthday just last month my parents gave him a 16 foot Trampoline with safety net. Both kids (6 and 7) love it and play on it every day. No annoying noisy crap toys sit around the house, and people know not to bother wasting money buying those toys for our kids.
Of course, they all think my kids are incredibly rough with their toys, but if it keeps the crap out of my home, it's worth a little bending of the truth. (actually, the gimmicky toys wouldn't last much more than a month anyway. I just shortcut the breakage process by ensuring they "break" on the first day.)
The faces... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lego People? (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, most of the grognards who cry about how lego "used to be" haven't played with some of the more recent kits. There's some seriously clever design in some of them, and I find it inspiring to see how other people do things to incorporate them into my own design.
I think that cleverness acts as a force multiplier for the big tub o' bricks.
Re:Lego People? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or, maybe, your son is different from you.
Seems to me that the instructions in the mindstorms kits are just like the instructions in the regular kits: Good places to start.
Good ideas create other good ideas. Creativity doesn't happen in a vacuum, and other peoples' cleverness can be a good catalyst for one's own.
Re:Character driven crap (Score:2, Insightful)
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 [lego.com] battling across my bedroom for weeks at a time :)
Re:Character driven crap (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Character driven crap (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
General purposeness of the elements (Score:3, Insightful)
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.