Just Imagine™
Comments: 3
There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark. Before Christmas I went shopping for a present for my nephew. I wanted to get him a big box of Lego bricks to add to his collection. I discovered that it’s awfully hard to buy a big box of bricks anymore.
I picked up the latest catalogue I could find (August - January 2001) to try to figure out what the hell happened to the big box of bricks (which used to come with a book of things you could make to get you started thinking about Lego dynamics and how to build foundation shapes that you could then incorporate into your own designs) and my mood grew blacker with every page.
What you can buy is any number of ‘co-branded’ or over-designed sets wherein the pieces are basically already made for you. Harry Potter turns out to be just the latest in a long and worrisome line of Lego kits which seem to include everything except imaginative spark. Disney has made it into the Duplo line, The Belville line looks like the very worst of Mattel, the Scala series is aimed at slightly older girls and features Emma, a hideous Barbie manqué character. Star Wars features prominently, of course, and then there’s the soccer series where the pitch is lined with Adidas advertisements. The Jurassic Park line features a director who looks just like Spielberg (who actually appears in the catalogue).
The closest thing I could find to what I was looking for and what my nephew wanted was the Creators series. It gets a single spread in the entire catalogue. At last, I thought, here it is. And then I noticed something really, really creepy.
The image above shows the two key scenes from the Creators catalogue spread. Notice anything? That’s right; the kids on the verso page are wearing exactly the same clothing as the Lego characters on the recto page. You can buy the clothing from Lego.
They couldn’t even leave our beloved Creators series alone. It’s become not much more than a shill for the clothing.
Just imagine™ (a Lego trademark) - an important part of millions of childhoods the world over has become just another corporation.
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Posted to General Rants • 2002.01.20 (Sun) • 21:45
Comments
Posted by Daniel 2002.01.21, 00:09
No imaginative spark in Lego?! E’gads!! What on earth are they doing to themselves over there? Shooting themselves in the foot obviously.
I’m sad to hear the state of Lego is like that. I grew up playing with the stuff… those were the days.
Posted by mss 2002.01.21, 01:56
This article might help explain the why of it.
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/50/lego.html
Apparently Lego’s founder’s son, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, died in 1995. The following year profits peaked and then began to decline.
“But anyone who hasn’t looked at Lego toys since his or her own childhood is in for a rude shock… Indeed, the blocks sometimes can be difficult to find — crowded out by a vast array of intricate Lego kits that look more like models than open-ended play toys.”
Posted by jh 2002.01.21, 16:59
OK, I may have been too hard on Lego… but the move away from those kits (and values?) older kids like me grew up with was quite a shock.
That Fast Company article is a great read; thanks for the link. I think that needs elevating to the main page, which I’ll do when I get home.
Hopefully, this is a just a dark period that the company has to go through before rediscovering what they’re really about. Doesn’t help when most of the other signals kids get in their lives steer them away from themselves and into a world where spending money is the only true creative act.
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