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Patreon Podcast: Learning to Love LEGO Again (Patreon)

Published:
2023-08-24 14:32:59
Imported:
2024-01

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I spent countless hours as a kid playing with LEGO on my bedroom floor, as did many others of my generation. But I had a falling out with the company, and only recently has it drawn me back. Let's explore how LEGO's changes lost, then found me again.

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Comments

Dan Vincent

I listened while driving today, and please don't take this as harsh, but Lego has changed considerably since you fell off of it. This isn't the Zombie Lego of the early aughts anymore, and the conventional wisdom of back then isn't really applicable today. Some more context might help for their current market position and its resurgence in popularity. 1. They were teetering on bankruptcy in the mid-aughts, and the thing that saved them was Bionicle. Lego Star Wars was part of the turnaround, but Star Wars often used a lot of custom pieces until the parts relaignment. Bionicle eschewed many custom parts and utilized existing Technic methods in a new and novel way, which reduced its R&D costs significantly. Adult lego fans slagged Bionicle at the time but kids loved it. That gave them the runway to really get their house in order and not sell. 2. Custom parts. They were at their worst at this during the early aughts, but during the turnaround of the company the usage of custom parts was slashed dramatically. What you might think are "custom parts" today are actually new elements that get reused through many sets via different colors and usage techniques. Truly single-use parts have been rare for over a decade, and any new part will almost always get reused in some other set. If you watch some of the current designer videos, they often talk about the justification they have to do for new parts and molds. There's so much creative parts usage today—even the humble frog can be used in ways you might not expect. 3. Lego hired a lot of designers from the adult fan community in the aughts and their building techniques are now largely standard parts of lego builds. SNOT (studs not on top) and greebling are much more prominent in today's sets. This means you can pull off more complex shapes without requiring custom parts. 4. Lego does sell a lot of licensed sets, but their non-licensed City, Creator, and so on still do brisk business. Lego Friends was a huge success as was Ninjago. There's new original themes introduced every year, like this year's Dreamzz, which looks kind of neat. Creator 3-in-1 offer multiple builds out of the same set. 5. "Lego as a model" takes up a lot of the news about Lego, because adults are buying them more than ever. But kids are still taking their lego sets apart and mixing them up. Adults are too, which is how we get lots of customs. The Technic Liebherr Excavator can be reconstructed into a fully working Johnny 5 from Short Circuit with no additional parts! My six year old nephew's rebuilt all his Minecraft sets into something completely different. Kids love the Pick-a-brick wall. 6. The custom / MOC community is more vibrant than ever, and that's not counting Lego Ideas. Between Bricklink and the Pick-a-Brick wall you can get a ready source of parts to build whatever you want. Stud.io and other lego CAD software make it much easier to test designs and more importantly share them with other people. 7. There's so much lego out there now that the "go out and buy a bucket of mixed lego" has been replaced by craigslist/thrift shop/hand-me-down mixed buckets. I gave my nephew my old lego from when I was a child (because my mom still had it at her house) and he's gone nuts with building from it. My lego buying has slowed down considerably. Space is an issue, as well as the fact that Lego is producing too many cool and neat sets that I can't possibly keep up with them. But I still enjoy building from boxed sets because it is very much a Zen experience. Creating customs is its own thing and Stud.io helps so much there that its reinvigorated my passion for making new things out of Lego. Plus it helps that it spits out instructions to share with friends and parts lists to order from Bricklink.

Alan Grassia

I thought that this was a good discussion of Lego. I remember playing with a lot of Lego sets in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. My favorite sets were City and Space. By the time the licensed sets came around, I had lost interest. Around 2015 I got back into Lego and started buying the City models for things like the garbage truck and a big fire engine set. I also picked up sets that looked cool like a space shuttle kit and a couple of country home sets. I would leave them out on my desk for a while, then take them apart are build them as one of the alternate models. Eventually, I would disassemble it, store it in the closet in a bag with the directions, and build another model. The really fun moment for me is when I got the idea to take the various sets and build a model campsite on four of those medium plates with my teenage daughter. The model was our Lego representation of the campsite we would go to for our year end trip of the daughter/father club that we belonged to here in town. While it didn't look anything like the real YMCA camp we would go to, it was "our" version of that place we built together. Some of the cabins were built with the directions, but other parts of it were made from our own creativity. It was a sad day when the time came to disassemble it. But it meant a lot to us. So I took a lot of pictures of it and I kept all of the parts together so that it could be reassembled again one day. And those sets that I would play with as a kid? Well, they ended up getting rediscovered by my nephews when they would spend days off at my parent's house. They would combine my old Space sets with the Star Wars sets to build new space ships. So, while I agree, that Lego the company seems to have lost focus on creative open play, I'm glad that at various times, our family has come together around building with Lego that we still talk about today.