Lego Week Pt 5 - Primordial Legos

These are pictures I scanned from a booklet that came with a set of Legos my older brother must have gotten in 1967. The first Lego set came out in 1961, and as early as '67, Lego had focused on making Lego train sets. Man, when I was a kid, I wanted that thing so hard I could taste it.

But, it was not to be, mostly because my folks earned an honest living, instead of being tied in to the Danish mafia. You know... the Forbrydelsen Gruppe. I can't imagine how else a family could afford to support such a lavish Lego habit. Legos cost roughly $97 per pound. I don't know how to guess what the street value of this kid's train set is, but it's more than his dad's life is worth.

There were very few specialized parts back then, and the rectilinear limitations of Lego construction lent themselves very well to the type of architecture that predominated in the 1960s. It just so happens that this is the kind of architecture that I really like - all clean lines and orderly rows. Actually, maybe it's not such a coincidence, since I'd been staring at this booklet since I'd been able to see. Notice the little cars with metal wheels. I never had those, but I still want them today.

There are the blue plates that pass for water in Lego land. A boat with wheels? That's so lame, I think boats aren't even worth building. Check out the kid that looks like George Liquor's son...

This castle is bloody fantastic. I wanted this too (duh). You'd think there weren't any curves pieces that long ago, but actually there was a pack of curved bricks you could buy in 1961 that made a rocket. Mind = blown. Kabloosh!

I'm not sure why all the tires were gray. It does, however, occur to me that in really old cartoons, car's tires were gray also, and usually had a patch sewn onto them. I'll just go ahead and associate the two until somebody confronts me with evidence to the contrary. We did have some of those flat trees, although they're not in my remaining Lego stash.

I'm sure that anybody who grew up with a specialized Lego part for any occasion will make fun of these ancient Legos and the super abstract models that one wound up with, but I like the cubism. This is probably for the same reason that 8-bit video game graphics still charm.

Come to think of it, all my gray tires and flat trees are not to be found. Could I have sold those older parts at some garage sale twenty years ago? Whay did I do that? Kids are so frikkin stupid. Ebay here I come.

Lego Week Pt 4 - Lego Town

Pictures like this make me sick. I doubt there ere many parents who could afford to shower their children with Legos in this fashion, but there must be some. Maybe employees of Lego, Inc. get them free? Maybe Legos are amazingly cheap in Denmark, the way oil is cheap in Saudi Arabia?

Anyway, I'd have given a limb (possibly my own) to have a Lego spread that occupied the whole kitchen table, as this Lego town apparently does. You could play with it for days and when you got tired of it, have every building rammed flat by a giant parrot-piloted Lego truck.

Lego town-themed sets were rarely eye-openers on their own. I'd look at them in the store and say "Yep. That's a fire station." and move on to the spaceships. However, Lego town sets were a pretty decent way to score wheels in fair numbers. A Lego fire station may have a fire engine or three, and maybe a dalmation. All the other parts were likely to be boring architectural things like "bricks" and "doors". Whee.

Lego town would have only worked for me in large masses. You'd need enough buildings to make a town square to really have some fun, in my childhood opinion. Cars could race down the streets and inevitably, a pedestrian would lose a few heads to an inattentive driver, then hide in a garage while the Lego authorities hassle suspicious looking citizens trying to locate the perp. Then some kind of car chase would happen or whatever or maybe spaceships.

Point is, the Lego authorities would have to be nearly totally incompetent for any real fun to be had. The Lego coast guard? Oh yeah, they'd have to be unfailing idiots. How well-trained could they be, having boats that sink in water? And there's no Lego water anyway... just blue plates, not that I had any. The coast guard would need to show up at the end of every Lego town adventure, to drive their boats through the front of city hall, slaughtering countless municipal employees and wasting untold Lego taxpayer dollars. Ah, childhood.

Lego Week Pt 3 - Poolside Cabana

This set was released in 1992 as set 6416 Poolside Paradise. This set is clearly intended for girls, so how did a big giant man like me wind up with it, or at least the instruction booklet? I bought a mixed lot of legos a few years back and it was thrown in the mix., as well as the instruction booklet.

I'm not a girl, and I never have been, but now that I'm big and strong and emotionally secure, I can see that this set is pretty neat. It's the kind of house a drug dealer would have if he were made of legos. By the way, what's with drug dealer stuff popping up on my blog lately? Anyway, the poolside paradise has a cabana thing and a prissy little waiter and some flowers and pink crap. I don't know what parts were included in my mixed lot Ebay purchase, except for some flowers and the curved transparent door things.

Those curvy doors would have been torture for me if I'd gotten this set as a kid (apart from being mercilessly ridiculed for owning it). I'd have pounded my head against the wall trying to make them into a spaceship canopy, but they're almost useless. They only have lego patented attachment knobs (LPAKs) along the bottom and two at the top. They're a serious letdown. When I found them mixed in with my box of random online auction legos, I tried to make them into doors for a lego iPod dock... you know, like a suspended animation chamber or something? I couldn't get them to work.

Hey, check it out. A lego douchebag. Feathered hair. Sunglasses. Muscle tee. Hmm. He could be the drug dealer that owns the cabana. He didn't come with my Ebay purchase. It would have been fun to arrange a lego police officer standing on his neck while another lego officer violates him with a 1x8 lego runner, such as he deserves.

This set also had a scarlet macaw. He didn't come with my lot either. I'd remember him. He'd become my new favorite minifig. He would pilot all subsequent spaceships and race cars, terrorizing the legion of human minifigs and tearing out (in my mind) their little eyes, carrying back to his home planet (in my mind) to feed his young. See? When you're faced with wanting a girly lego set just to get your hands on some special parts, you need to find ways to make lemonade out of lemons.

Hey there he is again, in the construction diagram, driving his....

... Geo Metro convertible? Guess he over-spent on the cabana.

Lego Week Pt 2 - 404 Universal Building Set

The 404 set was just about the most exciting lego set I ever got. It was huge, it had lots of special parts, and it had a frikkin MOTOR! And since it was released in 1976, the 404 set made the black and yellow color scheme cool before Stryper made it gay.

The 404 set came with tank tracks, which almost made me weep with excitement.The first thing I did  was to build a tank using the motor and tracks. This was the set that introduced into my collection the "+" axle and wheels. You can see them on the bulldozer above. To my mind, this was the first hint of the now-super-complicated "technic" line of lego sets.

This set came with the first generation of minifigs, but hilariously, they were a torso, a legs piece, head and hat. No arms. No articulation.

Yerf and Horffdahl seem pretty happy with their hovercraft and crane. I don't think all the things in that picture could be built all at the same time. That hovercraft consumes a lot of pieces.

The instructions that came with this set definitely show their common origins with Ikea. No words and simple line drawings. I'm not sure what those colored dots represent, but it kind of looks like they would be numbers if not for the "Whatever you do, don't include words!" rule of Lego Inc.

A few months after I got the 404 set, I had a leap of understanding. I realized that if you put bigger wheels on the motor, it would go faster. So, when I picked up the 851 tractor tecnic kit, I took the giant wheels from the tractor (about 4" diameter), and put them on the motor, along with some absurdly tiny front wheels. It was a dragster that required a brisk walk to keep up with (The motor's remote was a wired unit.) When I shut it off to stop it, I sometimes put it into reverse by mistake, and the weight of the car combined with the diameter of the wheels would loudly grind the gears inside. This horrified me, so I chose to be more careful in the future with my precious motor.

I can't be sure, but I think the No.2 idea book came with the 404 kit. Maybe my folks gave it to me on the same christmas? I dunno, but those kids on the front are named Brint and Vivny. Brint grew up to be Adam Rich's stunt double on Eight is Enough. Vivny now curates the Stockholm Museum of Modern Art's new Linjer och Torg wing, where she performs her "Nude Danze in Cubizm" every Wednesday evening.

Lego Week Pt 1 - Space Legos!

We at P.A.G. Central Command have decided that this week is lego week. We'll be featuring high resolution scans of lego manuals and stuff like that. Why? Because legos are the greatest toy. They entertain, teach basic engineering and reward the urge to invent and build.

I remember that I was playing with the Alpha-1 Rocket Base the night that the hostages were freed from Iran, so that must have been 1980. At that time, space legos were new, I think, but I can't be bothered to check right now, as I'm on vacation. So there.

At that time in Lego History, specialized parts were still pretty novel. Cylinders! Wow! Holy jeez, radar dishes. I think that was a sweet spot in the ratio of special parts to regular old blocks, but maybe I'm biased. Now, it seems that you buy, say, a lego pirate ship, and you assemble front of boat to back of boat and you're done. Too many custom parts. Not enough room for imagination. Bah humbug.

What was really cool were the translucent parts. The Space Cruiser had a green sloped windshield and a pretty huge plate in clear yellow. These two parts pretty much insisted on being built into spaceships and fighter planes. That was reason enough to want the set.

That's the difference between a kid who has some legos and a kid who lives to build things. I got excited about a set because of the interesting parts it contained. The actual model you build was secondary.