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I was just dorking around looking at Mars Mission and it has some of the most weirdly designed sets I've ever seen. Most of them look like something a kid made up. They aren't even that old either. Lots of cool parts though. I might buy some lots of random assorted parts from it.
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Mar 6, 2017 07:08
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 17:34 |
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I'm not made of money and certainly not a Lego speculator but I would greatly like that Maersk Truck if the price is right. ❤️
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Mar 6, 2017 07:22
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 It's Double VIP Points till March 16th!
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Mar 6, 2017 09:18
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Baronjutter posted:These are the "higher value" kits I'm thinking of getting rid of, if I can sort out all the loving parts. Oddly enough this stupid blue truck is the most valuable. I'd be interested in King's Mountain Fortress, for sure. What condition is it in?
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Mar 6, 2017 12:07
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Baronjutter posted:These are the "higher value" kits I'm thinking of getting rid of, if I can sort out all the loving parts. Oddly enough this stupid blue truck is the most valuable. The truck is valuable because of the ridiculously rare Maersk Blue bricks.
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Mar 6, 2017 12:19
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I'm planning on building these all, so I'll be able to post compleated pictures and any caveats like "couldn't find that weird red block that crimps down the wire inside the cab of the locomotive" or what ever. But since I was a kid I was always very protective of my lego so I don't imagine many or any missing pieces. Finding all those light blue pieces for the truck has been the worst.
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Mar 6, 2017 16:30
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Van Dis posted:I've got the Unicorn, Pan, and all the Simpsons ones you need. Email me at laws at wddp dot org. Got my legos from this guy in a great time at a great price. A++ would waste money on plastic trinkets from again
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Mar 7, 2017 04:00
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veni veni veni posted:I was just dorking around looking at Mars Mission and it has some of the most weirdly designed sets I've ever seen. Most of them look like something a kid made up. They aren't even that old either. Lots of cool parts though. I might buy some lots of random assorted parts from it.     The weirdest thing about it is the plot of the line seems to be that the humans are invading Mars both to steal minerals, and to kidnap Martians to use as power sources for their ships. It's weirdly dark.
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Mar 7, 2017 20:34
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Lego people are actually extremely hostile. That's why the police followed by the fire department seem to be the two largest employers in Lego City.
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Mar 7, 2017 21:31
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EvilJoven posted:Lego people are actually extremely hostile. That's why the police followed by the fire department seem to be the two largest employers in Lego City. Well, what do you expect with their extremely violent medieval and colonial-era history?
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Mar 8, 2017 02:39
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I just went 20 for 20 bag fondling the Lego Batman Movie CMFs. I'm weirdly self-satisfied. This is also the first set I got all of.
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Mar 8, 2017 03:35
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I just put together 76054 - Batman Harvester of Fear and thought the tractor's number plate - V1NT8 - looked a little too specific to be random. I googled it to see if it was a reference I didn't understand, and found this page from Marcos Bessa, a designer who has notes on all of the sets he's worked on. http://marcosbessa28.wixsite.com/marcosbessa/lego It's amazing how many little details he threw into the sets he worked on. And oh boy does this guy love the number 28.
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Mar 8, 2017 20:50
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We've talked about gender in legos before. One of the blogs I read had a post about minifig demographics I thought was interesting.
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Mar 8, 2017 21:35
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Gender diversity has definitely gotten better in recent years. I dunno how it stacks up against other toys, but I think they're doing pretty well now, especially outside of the licensed themes. Racial diversity, on the other hand
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Mar 8, 2017 22:04
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Strife posted:I just put together 76054 - Batman Harvester of Fear and thought the tractor's number plate - V1NT8 - looked a little too specific to be random. I googled it to see if it was a reference I didn't understand, and found this page from Marcos Bessa, a designer who has notes on all of the sets he's worked on. all the simpsons stuff, the ghostbusters car, the li'l red tractor in the scarecrow harvester
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Mar 8, 2017 22:43
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Koramei posted:Gender diversity has definitely gotten better in recent years. I dunno how it stacks up against other toys, but I think they're doing pretty well now, especially outside of the licensed themes. We're all bright yellow down here.
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Mar 8, 2017 22:51
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I have thought about this, and the thing that is funny about racial diversity in Lego is that making black/brown Lego people would essentially be admitting that all yellow Lego people are actually white and would look super bad for Lego. Keeping everyone yellow maintains plausible deniability that Minifigures are raceless, or a race of their own. I assume this is why they have a more realistic skin tone for white characters in licensed stuff. It infers that System minifigures are not actually white themselves. It's very odd, but I'd be willing to bet money that this is the reasoning behind it. Personally I think they should just phase out yellow and make ethnically diverse Lego people since it's more interesting and makes way more sense in 2017. Not that I don't love the bright yellow man.
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Mar 9, 2017 03:06
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veni veni veni posted:I have thought about this, and the thing that is funny about racial diversity in Lego is that making black/brown Lego people would essentially be admitting that all yellow Lego people are actually white and would look super bad for Lego. Keeping everyone yellow maintains plausible deniability that Minifigures are raceless, or a race of their own. I assume this is why they have a more realistic skin tone for white characters in licensed stuff. It infers that System minifigures are not actually white themselves. It's very odd, but I'd be willing to bet money that this is the reasoning behind it. I had a conversation about this last night and we decided that yellow minifigs were actually the Lego racial majority, and pink and brown skinned minifigs were both minorities in comparison.
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Mar 9, 2017 03:50
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Lego only makes minifigs that correlate to a real world ethnicity when the minifig represents a character that had the same ethnicity. So Indiana Jones is a white minifig because Indiana Jones is white in the Indiana Jones movies and Mace Windu minifig is black because Mace Windu is black in the Star Wars movies but the ADU Scientist in the Earth Defence HQ is neither black or white he's a Lego man. As for girl minifigs, I think Lego kinda finally took a cue from this: 
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Mar 9, 2017 04:15
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veni veni veni posted:I have thought about this, and the thing that is funny about racial diversity in Lego is that making black/brown Lego people would essentially be admitting that all yellow Lego people are actually white and would look super bad for Lego. Keeping everyone yellow maintains plausible deniability that Minifigures are raceless, or a race of their own. I assume this is why they have a more realistic skin tone for white characters in licensed stuff. It infers that System minifigures are not actually white themselves. It's very odd, but I'd be willing to bet money that this is the reasoning behind it. Yeah, the precisely do that with the licensed stuff. I think having the yellow figures as raceless works, though that gets harder when they provide hair pieces. It bugs me that the lego ideas mock-up for Women of NASA uses yellow minifigs to represent the white women.
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Mar 9, 2017 04:27
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EvilJoven posted:As for girl minifigs, I think Lego kinda finally took a cue from this: I mean, I'm mega psyched that Lego is gradually doing a better job with gender representation but Friends is doing exactly what it's intended to do and is making them buckets of money. For every girl geek who grew up loving SYSTEM Castle and Space and whatnot there were ten whose parents avoided buying them Legos because those were "for boys." If anything, I suspect that the increase in female minifig representation is a reaction to the success of Friends--Lego knows they have this whole new audience hooked now and is looking for crossover appeal.
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Mar 9, 2017 04:37
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"I don't like that stuff so clearly it must be the answer for everyone!" That comic is pretty tone deaf but nerds generally aren't very good at understanding that people like things other things they like, so it's not that surprising.
veni veni veni fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Mar 9, 2017 |
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Mar 9, 2017 06:50
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The problem too with yellow, it comes up with emojis too, is that despite the intention, it's primarily white people who read them as raceless. People of other colours don't. I read an article the other week, I will see if I can find it, it was about emojis but it is the same kind of thing, the yellow default people.
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Mar 9, 2017 10:00
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Maybe different shades of yellow would work? I read an article recently about how defined toys aren't great for childrens' development, by way of stifling their imagination or at least not engaging it quite as much as more abstract ones. Like when a kid has a toy car, that's always a toy car, but a kid can take a building block and imagine it's a car, or a house, or a train, you get the idea. One example was how the author's son's current favourite toy was a set of salt and pepper shakers and god only knew what he imagined them to be. It didn't advocate replacing all toys with geometric shapes and kitchen items, just made a general point, although now that I'm writing this down it is starting to sound a little like the scene in Black Books where Manny wistfully remembers playing with nothing but a breezeblock, then has visible trouble coming up with more than one example. Anyway, I immediately thought of the way Lego sets used to have generic minifigs that could be anyone and now there are clearly defined characters with established backstories and character traits, and while I see how only generic yellow figs can lead to representation problems, I immediately saw the article's point too. Surely there's a middle ground for this kind of thing. Like the old Ice Planet sets where you had generic faces, but with different hairstyles, and no names attached.
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Mar 9, 2017 10:40
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Lego's in that curious position where what it tries to be is different to what it's seen as. Lego didn't try to be a boys' toy - we've all seen the old ads. Most toy manufacturers make their lines as distinctly gendered as possible to make sure that, say, boys are choosing Hasbro's boy toys over Mattel's boy toys rather than over Hasbro's girl toys. Lego never had a reason to do this; they only produce one product, anyone choosing not to buy Lego is just not buying anything from the Lego company. Unfortunately they were the only major toy company not engaged in this, so the market shifted around them - all the other construction toys fell on the boys' side of the divide so Lego did by association, despite what they might have wanted. They've tried a bunch of ways to get products that say "Lego is for girls too" but up until Friends none of them were really successful. The same applies to ethnicity. The minifigs' yellow has always been used as ethnically-neutral - the same shade has been used for Roman centurions, pacific islanders, Egyptian pharohs and ninjas. It wasn't until licensed sets came on the scene and they were depicting characters with defined ethnicities. I read somewhere it started when they did a sports-themed line around 2000-ish, using figures real baskeball players, some of whom were insistent that they wanted to be depicted as definitely black. It might have just come from wanting to make it obvious who Lando Calrissian was at a glance, though. Either way, while Lego clearly intends and believes that yellow is ethnically-neutral, in broader culture, "white" is so frequently used as ethnically-neutral that anything trying to be ethnically-neutral just reads as white. There were similar arguments during the height of Homestuck's popularity, in which the human characters aren't coloured in and in theory they could be anything, but pretty much all the fanart for a long time was just of white people, and a lot of fans didn't think depicting them as anything else was faithful to the source, despite what the author said. Lego might have to eventually take the same approach to ethnicity that they did to gender - give up on trying to fit the world to their ideals and go along with what everyone sees them as so that they have a chance to make a definitive statement that they can be something different. It might not work so well, though, given that toys aren't divided along ethnic lines like they are gender, and that the yellow skin is so iconic to Lego that abandoning it would mean losing part of their brand.
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Mar 9, 2017 14:15
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EvilJoven posted:As for girl minifigs, I think Lego kinda finally took a cue from this: There is one female minifig that comes in one set of galaxy squad! Damnit, lego 
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Mar 9, 2017 14:28
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Question for you folk, I picked up a lot of mixed Legos off Craigslist last night and found about two dozen of these non-Lego figures. Anyone recognize what they are? Pretty excited about this bulk Lego haul, looking at least the 7781 Batmobile Two Face Escape, 6206 Tie, 7261 Clone Turbo Tank and 6209 Slave 1, with minifigs for $75. Going to take awhile to sort and rebuild but that's part of the fun for me.
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Mar 9, 2017 20:08
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Megablocks dragons.
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Mar 9, 2017 20:14
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I have 3 daughters, 2 of them old enough for legos (which they love) and despite being in to superheros and other things, they love the Lego friends line. They play with the barn and horses constantly. I get that it does sort of come off as patronizing, but at the same time different strokes.
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Mar 9, 2017 20:26
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RE: LEGO ethnicity - right around when I lost interest in LEGO, i.e. 7th-8th grade, was the time that the first licensed Star Wars sets were coming out. I did end up with one of them, I think as a stocking-stuffer, 7101 Lightsabre Duel with Qui-Gon and Darth Maul. Qui-Gon, played by noted white Irishman Liam Neeson, was yellow then and from looking back now over the SW and other sets it seems as though they kept the "yellow = Caucasian" rule in place for about five years and changed it around 2004/5. In the 10123 Cloud City set, for instance, Lando has dark brown hands and face, but Leia and Han are yellow. I suspect that the thinking (or lack thereof, really) was that since LEGO minifigs are race-neutral, and "white" is considered race-neutral in the West, they just made the overwhelmingly Caucasian cast of Star Wars yellow...until eventually they realized that was kind of hosed up and fixed it. I actually remember having a conversation with my mother when I was like 8 or 9 about how I liked that LEGO guys were bright yellow so they didn't have to be white or black or anything but were just LEGO, and she said that it was nice they didn't make them all pale pink like so many other toys.
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Mar 9, 2017 21:04
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I liked the paradisia or what ever line back in the day because I wanted to make realistic towns with cafe's and shops and pretty things. A town can't be entirely police and fire stations.
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Mar 9, 2017 21:29
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I always wanted Paradiso sets for all the cool pastel colored bricks but then the sets were really expensive and poo poo and also spaceships and submarines were way cooler anyway
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Mar 9, 2017 21:55
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Paradisa also had those cool glass dome pieces, right? Those were neat. Also, does anyone else remember Belleville or did I just hallucinate it?
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Mar 9, 2017 22:35
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I remember Belleville! Friends is so much better. That comic missed the point that there are kids who want to play with cars and shops and a fairy princess castle instead of submarines and spaceships and a castle with skeletons and traps. And if you really want to be equal, there's nothing actually wrong with that.
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Mar 9, 2017 23:07
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When I was a kid I appreciated Fabuland sets because of all the cool-looking old-timey automobiles whereas my sister liked the cute animals and flowers and poo poo and the theme colour was a neutral green instead of blue or pink so I guess adults felt fairly confident in buying Fabuland toys for kids of any gender welp that's my boys' Lego versus girls' Lego story everything was better in the eighties.
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Mar 9, 2017 23:16
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I do hate any sets that have non-minifig standard figs though.
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Mar 9, 2017 23:19
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Friends sets own. The colors are a lot less garish than they used to be.
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Mar 10, 2017 00:54
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Baronjutter posted:I do hate any sets that have non-minifig standard figs though. Yeah. I am well aware that none of us are the target audience but the figures really look like crap. I'm sure some market testing said girls prefer them, but I don't get why they couldn't just make the same figures to the normal standards. It's probably the main reason people get all worked up over friends too.
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Mar 10, 2017 02:17
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Apollodorus posted:Paradisa also had those cool glass dome pieces, right? Those were neat. Hell yes. Gotta get your spaceship canopies from somewhere.
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Mar 10, 2017 04:14
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 17:34 |
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Honestly, I like the minidolls a bit better than minifigs, it's just the lack of compatibility that gets me.
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Mar 10, 2017 06:32
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