Review of The Lego Story: how a little toy sparked the world's imagination

[EamonnMR]

The first few chapters that cover up to the 70s are great, but once we hit the 80s and 90s it really pulls the focus away from the lived experience of the people described, away from the development of the product, and becomes more and more like a corporate brochure.

 

The print quality is lavish for a regular sized hardback-not too glossy, still fun to turn the pages. But it's the same problem; the Peace Gun (ha, for all of lego's pacifist posturing, they sold a full on working kid sized toy gun as one of their first plastic products!) gets several pages of description, whereas the entire 90s/2000s push towards video games and multimedia is basically glossed over.

 

Maybe it's just that the 80s and after just don't have enough room. There's vague discussion of the parade of suits walking through the boardroom, but collapses and meteoric rises in revenue are treated as acts of god with no explanation of what the company was doing right or wrong. There's one gripping section where they were about to do a huge layoff, then revenue surged up and yay, they didn't. No attempt to explain why.

 

It almost feels like two books. One is a saccharine account of a bygone era and the other is the world weary account of an adult doing adult things. This makes sense, because at end of the day that maps to Kjeld's childhood and Kjeld's adulthood. A lego fan will thrill in the early details of the company's rocky start, but a seasoned business professional will be bored to tears of the second part, and I cannot imagine who else it's aimed at.

 

One thing that's also fairly disappointing is that it really only covers leadership, not anyone on the creative side. The second part of the book could have been written about any large company, there's nothing that made it especially appealing to the Lego fans that the first part courts.

[EamonnMR]

Just reviewed the other big book about lego, won't copy paste the whole thing here: https://blog.eamonnmr.com/2024/12/brick-by-brick-david-c-robertson-with-bill-breen-2013/

 

are there any other books on the history of Lego, especially ones that focus on the difficult period from the 90s and early 2000s? These two books had some insights but neither felt like the whole story.

[Murdoch17]

1 hour ago, EamonnMR said:

Just reviewed the other big book about lego, won't copy paste the whole thing here: https://blog.eamonnmr.com/2024/12/brick-by-brick-david-c-robertson-with-bill-breen-2013/

 

are there any other books on the history of Lego, especially ones that focus on the difficult period from the 90s and early 2000s? These two books had some insights but neither felt like the whole story.

Try 'The secret Life of LEGO Minifigures', (a non-exclusive edition is coming, I think) for all kinds of interesting tidbits, and 'LEGO space 1978 - 1992' if you want to see how that came about.

Edited December 18, 2024 by Murdoch17

[EamonnMR]

Thanks! That second one is especially interesting. Does it have a lot of text or is it largely photograph? Wish it covered 92-0*

[Murdoch17]

29 minutes ago, EamonnMR said:

Thanks! That second one is especially interesting. Does it have a lot of text or is it largely photograph? Wish it covered 92-0*

a good mix of both photographs and background info, with a side of a slight connecting story.