The Fall of the LEGO Legacy

I don't normally peruse the toy aisle in a department store - especially during the "holiday season". But I had the occasion to go looking for a Nerf Gun recently (Yes, it was for me. God forbid you equip one of today's Munchkin terrorists with one of those things.) and was struck by what I saw in the LEGO aisle.

There were Star Destroyers and Castles and Cities and other themed (and to my budget expensive) sets. They had LEGO people, too, and all things LEGO with some correlation to a real-world item. All in neat sets so you could build what you saw on the box.

But that was the problem. You could only build what you saw on the box.

I couldn't help but look at them with a strong feeling of sadness and loss. It's not that I wouldn't have killed to have gotten something like that when I was a kid. It was the fact that these newfangled sets could NOT be used the way we used to play with LEGOs in my family when we were growing up.

WAY back then, shortly after the ice retreated for most of you reading this here, back in the 1960's, we used to play with LEGOs. Back then, they were just small, choking-hazard-sized, plastic blocks of different size, shape and thickness. The round ones were one pin thick. Others ranged from two, four or eight pins in a block, up to two pins wide. They had others which were exactly one third as thick as a regular block. They had two, four or eight pins and were two wide if they had more than two pins. There were others which were longer (always an even number of pins), and wider. They were "platforms" or "logs" - at least that's what we thought of them at the time.

You didn't buy kits. You just bought more LEGOs in bunches by the number of pieces, with a variety of pieces in each bunch you bought. And what you could make with them was anything your imagination said it was.

I used to make cruisers, myself. These weren't Star Cruisers. They were Navy Cruisers from World War Two (and a little later). The kind with large naval guns on the decks. Special "wheel" blocks had a pin in them which you would insert into special blocks for rolling LEGO toys. I used them to create gun turrets that would elevate and rotate and spent hours having navy battles with my siblings, along with authentic "battle damage" by tearing apart little bits that got "blown off" during the heat of combat.

All of this was made from generic blocks of LEGOs. No kits. No instructions. Nothing to tell me how to build it one way and not another. Hours and hours of fun and when you got bored with the Cruisers, you could make something NEW out of it.

Today, not so much.

These kits are apparently intended to be theme-based. Each kit makes something specific. Yes, it takes some time to put it together, but the imagination factor, and the "Hmmm..." factor in figuring how to do it on your own, is utterly lost.

To me, the introduction of LEGO people was the beginning of the end for LEGO. The first time I saw that on T.V. (back when I still watched T.V. when networks showed 12 to 15 minutes less in commercials than what they show today), I knew something vital had been taken away from kids.

We used to take the thinner ones - an eight, a four and three two pin ones - and make our "people". It took imagination to come up with this and time to find them in the LEGO bin. Necessity breeds invention and ever since the introduction of LEGO people, kids no longer had to think about how to make people out of little blocks of plastic. The whole LEGO experience went down hill from there - to the detriment of the imagination of children everywhere.

Back then there were no sets, no kits, no schemes. If you wanted to make something that looked like something "real", you had to use your imagination. We didn't worry about genders. We used them howsoever our little imaginations told us they needed to be used. If we wanted "girls", we could add a fourth two pin one across the arms in the middle - or get naughty and add two one pin round ones, creating a little LEGO Dolly Parton. It was rather disturbing to our mom to see that, but it was using our imaginations in using a generic set of building block options in order to create them. We did not have any gender identity issues. We made anything our minds and the blocks could be made into and if it wasn't exactly right, imagination filled in the gaps.

Today's LEGOs seem little more than three dimensional puzzles. Yes, you can put something together and play with it like a toy, but deconstructing it and rearranging it and getting an entirely DIFFERENT toy seems not to be part of the equation anymore. Perhaps they just became too "goal oriented", with the object of the little blocks to make one particular thing out of them, or adhere to a particular theme with particular LEGOs. But in my mind, the imagination factor has been taken out and that is what made them the most fun.

Be it marketing, legislation (I wasn't kidding about the choking-hazard-sized blocks), a generation or two of unimaginative kids (or parents) or simply catering to the average human being's ability to think creatively (which seems not to be all that high), LEGOs today are too easy and, sadly, BORING. Once the new LEGO kit smell wears off, that toy is tossed into the play-bin of obscurity from which no LEGO kit ever emerges wholly intact. And once a piece or three are lost, that kit becomes mostly worthless to a kid. When we lost pieces, we just got more pieces, not a whole new kit.

Today's LEGOs are unimaginative, expensive, easily made obsolete or less than what it should be and don't encourage the kind of play that made my childhood so much fun. It's time to bring back the basic LEGO and have kids develop their minds without adhering to an externally-imposed standard or expectation. Let them make their toys THEIR WAY and let them feel that sense of accomplishment in creating something special from the ordinary.