I wasn’t planning to write this weekend…but here you go!
Quick heads up that today’s NY Times has a great article about the direction that the LEGO company has taken – with media-linked toys, weapons, video games, etc. The article, Turning to Tie-ins, Lego Thinks Beyond the Bricks, talks about some of the issues I’ve raised in previous posts: All Legos are not created equal and Lock and load with LEGO? It’s good coverage with comments from the LEGO company and parents.
One LEGO executive is quoted as saying, “We’ve never sacrificed our values.” With the weapons in the media-linked kits, such as Indiana Jones and Star Wars, it’s hard to believe he said this with a straight face. The article focused on media-linked violence and didn’t even touch on “bad guy” characters that LEGO has developed themselves, such as Kranxx. When my sons told me their new LEGO guy already had a name and a whole story (they’d read about Kranxx a LEGO magazine), I was nostalgic for the names they’ve made up themselves (my favorite being “Mustache Man”).
Well, as I’ve said in the past, LEGOs are still good – you just have dig real deep to get to the good ones (original and open-ended basic building blocks).
It was an interesting article and I thought of you as I read it! When my brother and I were little we made houses and horse pastures and sky scrapers with our legos (we preferred he bigger bricks!) but these days kids are creating the latest movie and losing a lot of the creativity that used to come with Legos.
The 4 year old that I nannied for loved the Legos but the fact that he couldn't make the sets into the picture on the front of the box was always a source of frustration. His passion lay with pirates but he had no idea why he always named them Jack (aka Capt Jack Sparrow). Sigh. The effects that media has go so deep…. We started mixing the boxes of pre- formed utopian lego environments together and made an awesome spaceship. The astronauts we named "Twirly head" and "Space Cool Man". Much better.