A Tale of Two Fortresses

I recently had the pleasure of acquiring two different yet similar Lego sets: 2006’s 7709 Sentai Defense Headquarters from the Exo-Force theme and 2012’s 5887 Dino Defense HQ from the new Dino theme.

7709 Sentai Defense Headquarters

5887 Dino Defense HQ

Both sets are, in their own right, full of similarities.  Each consists of 4 walls enclosing an open courtyard.  The two side walls on each fortress are mirror images of each other with the front consisting of a large gate.  Each one also includes a variety of supporting cast members of both vehicles and figures.  Although inflation impacts it slightly they also cost the same each clocking in at the $100 mark.  But when you look at them side by side the differences could not be greater.

The most obvious difference is the piece count, the Sentai fortress comes in at nearly double the amount of pieces: over 1400 to the Dino fortress’ 800+.  The second is the size.  I am not exaggerating to when I say that the Dino Defense HQ can fit inside the Sentai’s courtyard.  The walls of the Sentai fortress are tall enough to legitimately impede the non-flying mecha included with the set while the walls of the Dino Defense HQ look like the T-Rex could have stepped over them to get inside as he is pictured on the front of the box.  How in the world could these sets have cost the same amount?  The answer can be found in Lego’s history, specifically the 2004 fiasco.

Most people do not know that Lego nearly collapsed in 2004.  Years of mediocre product did a serious number on the company’s pocketbook and in fiscal year 2004 they posted their biggest loss in history.  The sharks were circling the family owned company, most notably toy giant Mattel (the thought of Mattel owning Lego sends a shudder through every true fan!).  So Lego went back to the basics focusing all their efforts on their core products.  They also had something to prove so sets got big, very big (I have never seen a set which required more floor area outside of the train and monorail genre than the Sentai Headquarters) and the piece counts got large, very large.  Lego had to recapture the market and they opted for the go big or go home approach.  The focus shifted in the last couple of years to realism.  Those dinos (of which the HQ set includes three) are highly detailed, multi-colored pieces that required new molds and colors.  Realistic, but not cheap to produce.  Size was traded for detail.  Each has value in its own right and I am a big fan of both of these sets.  The playability alone for each of them is incredible.  I highly recommend either of these sets.         

Taking The Plunge

My wonderful mother-in-law was kind enough this past Christmas to endow me with the perfect present: a gift card to the Lego Store.  On a recent business trip that took me to a hotel a mere few blocks from the Glendale AZ Lego Store I had the opportunity to put it to good use.  As I checked out I was informed that contrary to my memory the card had more money on it than I thought by $3.00.  This I concluded was the perfect time to see what the big deal was with these collectable minifigures.  I walked over to the display and selected one at random to add to my purchase. 

As I walked out of the store my thoughts were optimistic.  Maybe I have been wrong, maybe there is something to these collectible minifigures.  Did a delightful surprise wait for me beneath that packaging which would prove my doubts wrong and usher me into the minifigure fan club?  Overflowing with glass half full thoughts I tore into the packaging there in the parking lot not wanting to delay my advent into this new world of loving minifigures a second longer. 

Off came the packing and into my lap fell… 7 pieces.  A torso, legs, head, hat, stand and two objects, one for each hand.  That was it.  Three dollars for 7 pieces.  These were my first thoughts.  "Ok" I said "maybe the magic starts when you put it together."  Perhaps that is the case for others but for me the disappointment just continued.  Now I will grant that I did not get one of the more exciting figures, I ended up with 8827 Surgeon, and that it falls far short of say the Genie or Classic Alien figures on the coolness factor. 

However, my confusion over the appeal continued as I surveyed the small poster included with my figure that displayed the other offerings from Series 6.  While I will grant that the specific details of say the face or the clothing is unique, with the exception of the Minotaur and Lady Liberty I have something similar to every one of these figures in my collection.  Bandit?  Got tons of those in my Wild West collection. 

Bandit from Series 6

Flatfoot Thompson from the Wild West Series, I think I have 6 of him. 
What is the big difference?

Robot? Syprius and the Exploriens had those years ago.  Alien?  We have had two rounds of Mars Mission that had aliens not to mention the old UFO series.  Skater Girl, Mechanic, Butcher?  Check, check and check.  At least with my Surgeon I can add her to my Hospital set from the 80s, though that set came with a doctor that could, with a minuscule bit of imagination, have been a surgeon. 

My question then remains the same: what is the appeal of these figures?  They are, in parts per dollar, the most expensive sets of all time checking it at almost 50 cents per piece.  While labeled exclusive in almost every case Lego has released something similar in regular sets through the years (cowboys, indians, extreme sports, soldiers, spacemen, and I could go on) and all the special elements are inevitably incorporated into other sets (the "exclusive" injector that my minifigure is holding is the tranquilizer dart in all the new Dion sets).  And beyond the sets themselves the minifigure craze they have started has bled over into every other Lego theme where now the figures are more important than the sets.  I have seen numerous statements about the upcoming Marvel line that people care little to nothing about the sets but will get every last one of them so as to acquire the figures.  The message to Lego?  The market will continue to buy mediocre sets so long as they contain special figures.  That is inevitably going to come back to bite us!           

My Collossal, Unnamed Spaceship

The pictures of some of my creations included in my last entry sparked some interest.  So, the following are some more pictures of the large space ship I created back in high school (10 years agon now, wow!).  What is funny is that I could never come up for a name for this thing, to this day I think of it as "the big ship"; no name I could come up with ever seemed right.  Any suggestions?

Statistics:

Length: 5.1 feet long

Width: 3.1 feet at widest point

Average Width: 1.5 feet

Height: 2.25 feet at talles point

Some "Big Picture" shots:

I had always wanted to build something big enough that it
could include a monorail.  This was it.

This picture was actually taken from on my roof looking through
the window.  Model was too big to move.

This front part housed the hanger, labs, bridge and officer's cabins.

This middle section was crew quarters (the yellow section) and
connecting walkway.


The following pictures show how the model opened so that you could access the inside.  My goal was to make it 100% playable (a requirement for all my MOCs) which meant 100% access.  I succeeded. 

This shows everything opened and all the removable floors removed.

The crew quarters.

The hallway, the crew quarters were accessed via hatches in the floor
(you can see the red in the floor, those are them)

You can see the monorail dock and the rear access door here

And now a few detailed pictures of the interior.

The hanger, it was so big I could (and did) stick my head in it.

The engine room with the reactor front and center.

The mechanical room.

The greenhouse.

The first floor of the medical wing.  The hatch to the right accessed the
mechanical room and crew quarters.

Top floor of medical wing.  This was before sites like bricklink so I had to use
printed tiles for lack of plain ones.

Inside view of the hall looking from the front to the rear of the ship.

Crew quarters, 3 stories tall, sleeping was on the left and workout room
was on the right.

Officers quarters off the bridge.

The bridge and stairwell to the officer's cabins.

The model was very intricate.  Working pathways for minifigures existed throughout.  Their was a large working elevator in the hanger as well as the working monorail.  To date it is the biggest model I have ever done. 

A couple of final shots.

 

4 Collections

I realized the other day that I have 4 separate Lego collections that I do not mix.  They vary in size, but they are all there and each is actively growing. 

The Sets

This first collection is the longest running.  My sets span 3 decades now and constitute not only the oldest but the largest collection comprised of 283 complete sets.  Currently about 50% of them are sorted into bags waiting for assembly when my kids come of an appropriate age.  Alas the other 50% remain, despite my best efforts, parted into a variety of bins arranged in my own sorting method.  I have been trying over the past 3 years to get them all sorted into their respective inventories but 283 is a lot of sets and I have not been able to get them all done. 

The MOCing Pieces

This collection is the runner up in terms of size.  It consists of my extra pieces which are not associated with any of my recognized sets.  This collection came into being first through extra parts left over from Bricklink purchases and then was added to intentionally by purchasing Lego lots on eBay by the pound (for the record there is no more satisfying way to buy Lego than by weight!). 

A past by the pound Lego purchase!

These are the parts I use for MOCing.  When I MOC I like to keep my creations permanently so I don’t want to use parts from sets.  Ergo I have another whole set of bins, sorted in my same system, which I never mix with anything else so I know all those parts are extra.  Yes, I have a lot of plastic bins.  And yes my wife is a saint!

The Spare Parts

This is the smallest collection and also the most exclusive.  Through the years I have learned which parts are prone to breaking, wearing out (hinges!) or which ones would be disastrous to lose (whether due to exclusativity or importance).  So I have set about storing extras of these parts away in a special box that is off limits for MOCing.  A perfect example of the type of piece you can find in this collection is the door for 6195 Neptune Discovery Lab.

Photo credit: bricklink.com

Those beautiful blue doors are exclusive to this set alone and have been discontinued now for almost 15 years.  Should one of the clips which holds the door to the station break I would be up a creek without a paddle should I have to rely on The Lego Company to replace it as that part stopped being produced before many of today’s young Lego fans were born.  I have a wanted list on Bricklink that is populated entirely of pieces that I want to have extras of.  Every purchase I do I check for these parts before completing and add them to the order whenever possible.  Hopefully I will never need them, but in the event that I do I have a decent little bank of extra parts that I can call on. 

The Office

No I am not referring to the TV show.  My final collection is the small ensemble of sets that I keep at the office.  Technically this rotating display is counted as part of The Sets collection but since I don’t keep any other sets together outside of the three to four models I put on display on top of my bookshelf at work I think of them as their own category.  As I work at an engineering office much envy is expressed when my coworkers see certain sets.  More than once I get the response of: “You have that set!  Not fair I sooooo wanted that as a kid!”

My current office display, several M:Tron sets

Is My Kid Too Old For Legos?

I was chuckling to myself the other day as I pushed back from the computer and surveyed my work.  I had just completed a list of the Lego sets I have acquired since graduating from college (6 years ago now).  I knew the list was going to be long but I was still shocked at its length as I passed my eyes over the finished product; it contained 50 sets.  And most of these were not small, 18 sets were over the $85 mark and another 8 (so over 50% total) were over $50.  What made me laugh though was not the fact that I have spent more on toys for myself in the last 6 years than many of my coworkers have on their multiple kids combined (is that funny or sad?) it was remembering back to 1997 and the turmoil that had engulfed my home. 

In 1997 I was 13 years old and my parents were worried.  For the previous 10 years, since my dad brought back my first set in 1987 from a business trip, I had had a single passion: Legos.  The problem was that my parents were getting worried, wasn’t I getting to be a bit old for these children’s toys?  Wasn’t it time for me to start pursuing more “big boy interests”.  As the oldest (and therefore the guinea pig as all first borns are) my parents were not sure if I would ever snap out of it and was therefore setting myself up for ridicule as I moved into middle school and high school.  To their credit they came up with a clever way to handle it.  They imposed a limit, $100 a year, which I could spend on Legos.  Their thought was that as my money from mowing lawns was freed up I would eventually explore other interests.  I was horrified when the new rule was announced.  $100 a year was one big set or at most two medium size ones.  What other interests would I want to pursue anyway?  My dad suggested I get a guitar and work on learning music (that also makes me laugh now, I am many things but a musician or even one who can pick out good music from bad is not one of them).  There was palpable tension.      

In hindsight  none of us could see what was already in the works.  As I had grown my skill with building had steadily increased.  Even as the rule was being imposed I was in the process of disassembling my collection, gathering their varied parts for some serious large scale building.  What none of us perceived at that time but saw clearly within just a couple short years was that the Lego habit, although not going away, was morphing.  What my parents were ultimately afraid of was that I would keep playing with Legos, zooming M:Tron and Blacktron ships around my room, and that my growth into a mature adult would be stunted.  For most kids they stop having an interest in playing with Legos about the age I was, so what was wrong with me?  The answer was nothing; I was losing interest in playing with Legos right on schedule but this was hidden by the fact that unlike my peers for whom no longer playing with them meant no longer being interested in them at all the nature of my addiction to those small plastic bricks that inhabited every corner of my room was changing.  I was shifting from playing to modeling.  I disassembled my sets in 1997 and only recently embarked on reassembling them in preparation for my own kids to be old enough to play with them.  But for over a decade they were parsed out into a variety of containers.  Why?  Because I needed the parts.

Over the next five years until I left home for college at 18 I embarked on a series of increasingly more complex projects.  I constructed robots and programmed them.  I built a Rube Goldberg machine for Science Olympiad.  And I modeled, first a pirate ship then an even larger and more detailed modern tanker, followed by my Mona Lisa: a colossal space ship. 

The Olec my tanker, she was finished throughout with a full working interior

At the time this was the most detailed model I had done

Every florr was finished out, this was the bridge

My pride and joy: over 4 feet long and 2.5 feet wide

This thing was so big the back of it is out of focus

She was fully finished out, this was the hanger, yes it had a monorail in it

What had been the staple of my play as a child became my respite, my detox as a maturing adult.  While my peers relaxed by playing video games or watching sports I exchanged my childhood Lego table for a work bench and shelves full of my sorted bricks.  To this day almost nothing relieves my stress better than modeling with Legos.

So I laughed because I remembered my mom and dad’s concern that I would regret all the money I had spent on Legos when I lost interest in them.  I can honestly say after 25 years of collecting Legos (and still going strong) I have never regretted a single purchase.  As I have matured the Legos roles has continually morphed but in each new stage they have found a way to remain part of my life and activity.

Sourcing Craziness!

Well, the success of my Skull's Eye Project had an unexpected consequence.  You see almost all of the Lego sets that I never got as a kid were very popular.  As I wrote about the Skull's Eye, I am not the only kid who longed for that ship and then grew into a gainfully employed adult.  The problem is that many of the sets I missed and have been on the lookout for ever since were very popular and therefore fetch a large price on any of the after market sites.  As much as I love Legos, even I have my limits as to how much I am willing to pay for them, and many of those sets are just too expensive.  But in sourcing the Skull's Eye and making my own sails I was able to dramatically reduce the cost (when adjusting for inflation, I got mine for less than the original MSRP) of that set.  And now I must confess I have gone a little bit "sourcing" crazy. 

Since completing that last project I have gone on to source and make the sails for the remaining 5 ships at I was missing.  Pictured from left to right below are 6289 Redbeard Runner from 1996, 6274 Carribean Clipper from 1989, 6271 Imperial Flagship from 1992, 6268 Rennegade Runner from 1993 and finally the (very ugly) 6250 Crossbone Clipper from 1996.

All of those sails are hand made, you would not have been
able to tell if I had not told you!

I have also gone back and done 6090 Royal Knight's Castle from 1995.  Picture below are me and my budding Lego maniac on Christmas morning putting the finishing touches on it (I made the castle my Christmas present, how thrifty of me no?)  It has been glorious! 

All of these sets were completed for at or less their original MSRP not adjusting for inflation, not bad, not bad at all!

The Golden Age of Lego

If you hang around AFOLs for any length of time inevitably the “golden age of Lego” will become the topic of discussion (or more likely debate).  Google this phrase and you will find that pretty much every 3-5 year stretch from Lego’s inception until today is described as the golden age of Lego by somebody.  I will save you the trouble of sifting through all the opinions and tell you that it was from 1993-1996 but my reasoning for that will have to wait for a later post. 

A set from what I consider the Golden Age of Lego: 1995's Royal Knight's Castle.
Just got this one for Christmas this year!  I sourced the parts on Bricklink.com

What struck me as I read the different opinions on when Lego’s best work was done was that though the timeframe differed the words used to describe them did not.  Over and over I read how such and such a set was the one that they never got, or how much fun the author and his friends had with a particular set or theme.  Stories of ecstasy on Christmas morning when the coveted set was finally theirs or the bemoaning of that one treasure that got away.  I suppose any hobby or passion is like this, you hear the same themes from avid fishermen, role-players, etc.  The thing that stood out to me more than any other, however, was the consistency of the author’s age as it related to their golden age definition.  Universally it was somewhere in the range of when they were 7-12 years of age.  And I must confess I am guilty as charged because I was 9-12 during what I consider the golden age. 

What makes a series of years the golden age?  It appears that it has less to do with Lego’s product line and more to do with a magic set of years in which the joys of childhood combine with the wonder of these plastic bricks to create hours of play that are the source of numerous happy memories.  My mom and I still reminisce about her quest to get me Fort Legoredo in 1996.

One of the greatest sets from The Golden Age of Lego

My brother sister and I spent hours together, despite our age difference, combing the sea floor with the Aquanauts.  The sets of that time are intertwined with our stories as people. 

As I have gotten older my Lego collection has expanded and Lego’s product line has risen and fallen in terms of excellene.  Yet no matter how fantastic the sets are, the ones that I add to complete the collection or because I think they are well done cannot compete with the ones which have logged hours of play.  And even more so I think it is true of the ones that we longed for and imagined being able to play with during those years but never got the chance to.  The big example for me is 1993’s Central Precinct HQ (no. 6398) and 2008’s Police Headquarters (no. 7744). 

The Central Precinct HQ was the one I longed for and never go during my childhood.  I purchased the Police Headquarters as an adult and must confess that though it is arguably a better set in many ways I would trade it in a heartbeat for that earlier set which stands larger-than-life-better in my eyes.  Why?  Not due to a scientific reason but because I spent hours imagining having The Central Precinct HQ in the middle of my town.  Longing truly does make the heart grow fonder. 

So, was there a Lego Golden Age?  Yes (it was 1993-1996), but you will likely hear, should you ask an AFOL, a variety of different answers as to when it was.