<story><title>What happened with LEGO</title><url>http://therealityprose.wordpress.com/2013/01/17/what_happened_with_lego/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acabal</author><text>My beef is that Lego have become so highly branded.  I would rather my kid play with generic space and castle and pirate blocks, than with Star Wars and Harry Potter and Pirates of the Carribbean blocks.  As a product of the 80&apos;s I can say I spent a lot of time playing with highly branded and marketed toys, so it&apos;s not necessarily a bad thing; but there&apos;s something special about Lego that makes me feel like they should be above film tie-ins and in a special airy realm of pure imagination.</text></item><item><author>Tloewald</author><text>I don&apos;t have a problem with the price of lego, having — as a child in the 70s — saved my own pocket money to buy lego. The real criticism of lego is that it&apos;s gone from being a collection of parts that can make the thing on the cover of the box but also many interesting variations, to something that isn&apos;t very malleable.&lt;p&gt;First, lego no longer has a consistent color scheme, so only pieces from one genre go with other pieces of that genre.&lt;p&gt;Next, there&apos;s the proliferation of zany specialized parts. I remember getting a lego cargo ship as a kid (the hull was four specialized pieces — bow, stern, and two mid sections and thinking this was awful. Lego doesn&apos;t do ship sections any more but many similar things.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s not a get off my lawn thing. I still love lego. But it does seem to have exchanged its DIY charm in the pursuit of merchandising.&lt;p&gt;That said, you can build much better looking models now — just not out of any reasonable selection of pieces.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pyre</author><text>1. They still have the generic sets.&lt;p&gt;2. You can go to places like bricklink.com to buy almost any block or set that you want.&lt;p&gt;3. Branded sets usually mean more specialized pieces which only &lt;i&gt;increase&lt;/i&gt; the source material you have to draw from when building things.&lt;p&gt;4. Lego also puts out stuff like this: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=67132&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=67132&lt;/a&gt;. Highly specialized pieces that aren&apos;t tied to a brand.&lt;p&gt;When I was a kid I would have been in heaven if they had all of the sets out there today. Buying a Harry Potter set wouldn&apos;t have meant that I can &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; play Harry Potter[1]. It would have meant that I had more legos to combine in other ways with the rest of my parts (all sets ended up broken down and stored in a huge bin of Legos). I realize that ultra-specialized pieces like 3-CPO or R2D2 minifigs can&apos;t really be reused elsewhere, but most specialized pieces tend to be pretty generic (e.g. Harry Potter wands don&apos;t have to only be used with Harry Potter).&lt;p&gt;[1]: Example, I recently saw a Harry Potter set that used a combination of a translucent 1x1 brick and brown stud to create &apos;potion bottles.&apos; It&apos;s a pretty generic idea that translates elsewhere.</text></comment>
<story><title>What happened with LEGO</title><url>http://therealityprose.wordpress.com/2013/01/17/what_happened_with_lego/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acabal</author><text>My beef is that Lego have become so highly branded.  I would rather my kid play with generic space and castle and pirate blocks, than with Star Wars and Harry Potter and Pirates of the Carribbean blocks.  As a product of the 80&apos;s I can say I spent a lot of time playing with highly branded and marketed toys, so it&apos;s not necessarily a bad thing; but there&apos;s something special about Lego that makes me feel like they should be above film tie-ins and in a special airy realm of pure imagination.</text></item><item><author>Tloewald</author><text>I don&apos;t have a problem with the price of lego, having — as a child in the 70s — saved my own pocket money to buy lego. The real criticism of lego is that it&apos;s gone from being a collection of parts that can make the thing on the cover of the box but also many interesting variations, to something that isn&apos;t very malleable.&lt;p&gt;First, lego no longer has a consistent color scheme, so only pieces from one genre go with other pieces of that genre.&lt;p&gt;Next, there&apos;s the proliferation of zany specialized parts. I remember getting a lego cargo ship as a kid (the hull was four specialized pieces — bow, stern, and two mid sections and thinking this was awful. Lego doesn&apos;t do ship sections any more but many similar things.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s not a get off my lawn thing. I still love lego. But it does seem to have exchanged its DIY charm in the pursuit of merchandising.&lt;p&gt;That said, you can build much better looking models now — just not out of any reasonable selection of pieces.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smackfu</author><text>Honestly, I doubt a kid will play much differently with a PotC themed Lego ship vs a non-branded one.&lt;p&gt;They basically look the same; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.brickset.com/brickLists/?5954&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.brickset.com/brickLists/?5954&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Also, pirates was a dead theme until PotC came around.</text></comment>