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Pre 2005 Star Wars Lego: why did the designers use random colours?

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Think back to those sets released pre 2005 / episode 3. What did those sets have in common?

For a start, they were blocky and inaccurate - but that's not the point of this thread. The sets were a mix of random colours.

But why?

The TIE Bomber should have been blue, Lego made it everything from grey to brown. The original AT AT has a yellow interior. While we're talking about TIE's let's not forget the baffling blue and black TIE Fighter. I'm sure you've got your own personal 'favs' rainbow craft.

I've always theorised the inaccurate elements were deliberate (rather than incompetence, although that said...) being an attempt to make sets look like you could build them from spare lego 'look what you can achieve'.

What's your way of rationalising these designs?

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I think that the blue TIE was justified. In Episode IV, the blue screen technology of the time wasn't advanced enough to distinguish a blue ship from the blue screen, so the crew changed the color to gray. Same with R2-D2, his blue panels are corrected to black in every scene where R2 is seen in space. In Episode V and VI, the TIE gray is a dark blue, as originally intended. This is reflected in the Kenner toys.

Now, why didn't Lucas correct the gray to blue in the Episode IV special edition instead of, say, adding a rock in front of R2? We'll never know the answer.

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Maybe because they wanted you to get a diverse amount of coloured bricks when you bought a set, instead of getting tones of grey and black. They still hide colourful bricks and plates in the sets, but they are less visible now. I really hated how the 2000 AAT had blue seen from the outside.

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Lego sets used to be made only with kids in mind. Kids like bright colors. Now that they're catering to adults, they're using more realistic colors.

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I would agree somewhat with Artizan. It was to give us a more diverse color of bricks, rather than just straight blacks, grays, or tans, etc. Since most Star Wars ships are solid metal colors.

I think designers used the colors to "pop", an effect used to highlight different textures and features on ships. Kind of the same thing with Darth Maul's Sith Infiltrator. Think back to the early sets that were so simple they could be dissembled in a matter of seconds. Giving alternate builds with the number of colors we had. Remember when we had alternate builds on the back of the box? You don't see that anymore. Not since like 2006?

LEGO has really stepped their game up this past decade, making their builds more accurate, with new pieces. The sets today are so well put together, you don't even want to take them apart. Sets today use no random colors on the exterior because they have become models rather than play sets.

Also, they put random colors for interior/structures usually to be more distinguishable while building the model. Have you ever tried building Megablok's (excuse my language) models and have a heck of a time distinguishing pieces from one another?? Or their instructions Don't do a good job at explaining them....

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The cockpit of the 2003(?) AT-AT was also had red and blue parts if I recalled. I guess having different color parts can help children differentiate different pieces in the instruction booklets. I think back then LEGO was experiencing financial difficulties. They might have been told by management to use up whatever colored parts they have sitting around.

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The cockpit of the 2003(?) AT-AT was also had red and blue parts if I recalled. I guess having different color parts can help children differentiate different pieces in the instruction booklets. I think back then LEGO was experiencing financial difficulties. They might have been told by management to use up whatever colored parts they have sitting around.

I think there's a lot of truth there - the sets were just so poor in quality that a situation where designers were told to cobble together sets from surplus parts might well be the case. If so, it's a terrifying insight into how bad things got at lego.

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I think that also part/color availability might have occured earlier. I'm just guessing but I can imagine that back there in 2000s there weren't as many sets produced and sold, and the perhaps color palette for some parts was limited. And maybe it was not always possible to manufacture bricks in new color just because of one set.

Anyway, I think that most of the interior color mixes were intentional. As said above, for kids it's sometimes hard to read building instructions when one color is abused. Well and not only for kids. Most of the internal structures are designed using distinguishable colors even in UCS models. We are so familiar with that technique that we barely notice it's impact but without this it would be struggle to build big models.

What happened since 2005 is that lego models got more detailed and with new parts and possibilities Lego designers are taking the look as priority, yet a bit over the ease of build. They still use colorful bricks wherever it won't disturb the design.

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I think there's a lot of truth there - the sets were just so poor in quality that a situation where designers were told to cobble together sets from surplus parts might well be the case. If so, it's a terrifying insight into how bad things got at lego.

Don't say that too loud, there's a particular member in here who says the original sets are the best and anyone who disagree is nuts. LOL

I wish I could find that guys thread. It was entertaining.

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Don't say that too loud, there's a particular member in here who says the original sets are the best and anyone who disagree is nuts. LOL

I wish I could find that guys thread. It was entertaining.

Yep, that's it. Very entertaining, very strange.

To the original point, it's possible that the strange colors used in original sets were at least partly a result of the small color selection at the time. No dark blue, no dark red, and not much use for grays outside of Star Wars and Space, if memory serves.

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Yeah I think Lego was going through some kind of financial crisis pre 2006 so they had to pretty much use up all of the pieces they could for a set. I think that era was sort of an experimental time since it was the first time Lego had any kind of major license themed sets, Therefore the sets often were flimsy and poorly designed. I remember getting the original X-Wing for Christmas and it would fall apart a lot when I would swoosh it. I mean the dang guns and engines would fall off even when I would set it on a table.Oh yeah I think you forgot to mention the brown and tan colored at-st, that thing was ugly. But I'm really thankful for all of the cool well constructed sets nowadays.

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This question has popped up several times in Q&A's with LEGO designers. Fact of the matter is that for each piece in each colour, LEGO had to keep stock. Stock costs money and room, so one way to avoid this is by using less different colours. So what happened often was that once a model was finished, it was carefully checked if colour A could be replaced by colour B in order to avoid extra stock of a new item. Especially on interiors LEGO were keen on not introducing pieces in new colours / parts of colours that were not on stock.

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To be fair, the newer sets still can have random colours all over the place. Case in point: the latest T16 Skyhopper. It has seemingly random red, dark grey en light grey plates all over what should have been a mainly white underside.

And even LEGO's latest version of the AT-AT - essentially a big mono-coloured beast - switches for no apparent reason from light to dark grey. The different colours don't seem to represent anything and don't really make building any easier.

Not that I'm complaining - I enjoy modding the hell out of official sets. It just seems baffling now and again...

Edited by Maus

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I think there's a lot of truth there - the sets were just so poor in quality that a situation where designers were told to cobble together sets from surplus parts might well be the case. If so, it's a terrifying insight into how bad things got at lego.

Don´t be afraid, they still do it nowadays but less obvious like for example all the Star Wars advent calendars have minifigures that Lego obviously overproduced and had no idea what to do with like last years General Rieekan from the latest Hoth base set that apparently had its shelf-life cut short by around 6 months and the old Snowtrooper helmets appearing there when Lego released the updated design only a few months prior in the new AT-AT. They seem to have bettered themselves with the upcoming calendar though.

Also, they put random colors for interior/structures usually to be more distinguishable while building the model. Have you ever tried building Megablok's (excuse my language) models and have a heck of a time distinguishing pieces from one another?? Or their instructions Don't do a good job at explaining them....

No, that´s not hard at all, but I imagine it starts being problematic when you go into the 800+ pieces range which even then coloring specific parts is still not that helpful. I still had to search for multiple minutes after very common parts when building the 10188 Death Star.

I think another factor in the rainbow colors of sets is that maybe common bricks like 1x2 plates and 2x4 blocks are cheaper for Lego to put in sets in red and blue than grey because they produce large amounts of them for sets across all themes or maybe that the basic colors like blue, red, yellow are just cheaper than everything else (though that conflicts with what I heard about Lego getting their plastic in a white/greyish color that they recolor themselves during production).

To be fair, the newer sets still can have random colours all over the place. Case in point: the latest T16 Skyhopper. It has seemingly random red, dark grey en light grey plates all over what should have been a mainly white underside.

And even LEGO's latest version of the AT-AT - essentially a big mono-coloured beast - switches for no apparent reason from light to dark grey. The different colours don't seem to represent anything and don't really make building any easier.

Not that I'm complaining - I enjoy modding the hell out of official sets. It just seems baffling now and again...

With the Skyhopper I imagine the designer just wanted to give the buyer some more rare and useful pieces as white is more common and less useful in a Star Wars collection than grey and dark red so you are free to swap the good MOC parts for the more accurate and less useful parts. That kind of thing happens all the time in all themes, like the Detective Office Modular Building having 17 1x1 round plates with bar holes when only ≈5 of them actually need the holes for the sets design while all the others could easily have been substituted with normal round plates, which are apparently cheaper for Lego to produce, otherwise Lego would use them more often than in just three sets or so.

In case of the AT-AT I think the designer thought that maybe it was an accurate way to represent the shading as the dark grey plates are all more "hidden" like on the sides of the main body where they are one plate deeper into the model than the rest or the entire backside and underside with the round engines. Natural shading doesn´t always work depending on the scale of the model. Also a reason as to why the Phase 1 clone trooper helmets have those grey lines printed on their cheeks, because without them the fallen in part of the helmet wouldn´t be as prominent as on the real life counterpart that is generally bigger and much deeper so the sunlight makes it appear differently.

Edited by Navy Trooper Fenson

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With the Skyhopper I imagine the designer just wanted to give the buyer some more rare and useful pieces as white is more common and less useful in a Star Wars collection than grey and dark red so you are free to swap the good MOC parts for the more accurate and less useful parts. That kind of thing happens all the time in all themes, like the Detective Office Modular Building having 17 1x1 round plates with bar holes when only ≈5 of them actually need the holes for the sets design while all the others could easily have been substituted with normal round plates, which are apparently cheaper for Lego to produce, otherwise Lego would use them more often than in just three sets or so.

I see what you mean, but those 1x1 round plates have the same colour and the same function in that set. They don't distract from the overall look. A random 1x8 red plate in what should have been a solid white or LBG surface does distract. And it's not like a red 1x8 or a 1x2 is particularly rare or useful.

Wanting to give the buyer some more rare and useful pieces seems a bit backwards to me. If I buy a Skyhopper, I want to build something that looks like a Skyhopper. I'don't want to build most of a Skyhopper plus some random bricks. LEGO is perfectly capable of consistent colour use. Most of the City vehicles for example are actually perfect in this regard. A green lorry is a green lorry, not a mostly green lorry with some random orange parts thrown in just in case you didn't want to build a green lorry.

Granted though, the Skyhopper is a pretty bad example. It is a very unpolished set. The colours are all over the place, the detailing is extremely lazy and at some point you're supposed to stick two of those blue pins-with-stud in a technic beam. Without ever attaching anything to those studs. Seriously, they're not used and they aren't supposed to be anything. I suspect the set mainly exists to sell an expensive Tusken Raider. It's the only LEGO set I actually regret getting.

In case of the AT-AT I think the designer thought that maybe it was an accurate way to represent the shading as the dark grey plates are all more "hidden" like on the sides of the main body where they are one plate deeper into the model than the rest or the entire backside and underside with the round engines. Natural shading doesn´t always work depending on the scale of the model. Also a reason as to why the Phase 1 clone trooper helmets have those grey lines printed on their cheeks, because without them the fallen in part of the helmet wouldn´t be as prominent as on the real life counterpart that is generally bigger and much deeper so the sunlight makes it appear differently.

I think you're right in that that is what they're trying to do, but it's just not very consistent. In my opinion most of the DBG on the AT-AT's head and feet should have been LBG. And sometimes the use of colour is actually counter-productive: there are 1x1 DBG plates in the feet that actually break up what is supposed to be a continuous arch in the "actual" AT-AT.

Not that I think it's a bad set - I really liked it. I thought it was one the better ones from the last wave.

Edited by Maus

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Easy.

The reason I think the sets has wrong color scheme is because of 3 reasons.

The first reasons is when A New Hope is released in cinemas,the blue screen technology at that time don't allow the TIE fighter original color ,that is blue, look good on screen.So the crew changed the color from blue to grey as seen in 9492.

The second reasons is at the time Star Wars theme is released,some of the bricks are not available in the right color.Because of the palette and the parts limitation,TLC don't have other choice other than change the sets color scheme.

The third reasons is at the time Star Wars theme is released,TLC targeted kids as the main audience of the theme.As you know,children like bright and beautiful colors.So in order to make the children's interested to buy Star Wars sets,TLC make the sets has a more colorful color scheme.

Edited by ArmstrongYong

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Well, as someone else has already revived the thread, I might as well comment.

Occasionally, the miscoloration is due to LEGO designing sets before the film is released, which means they rely on reference photos from Lucasfilm that might not be accurate when compared to the finished film. This can explain small coloring problems with TPM and AotC sets.

As others have disputed, LEGO may intend for weird colors on the inside to aid the building process. One good example of this is the Ewok Village. In that set, you build three very similar tree trunks, and then you attach them to a large platform. This would ordinarily be very difficult, but each tree trunk's interior had a vibrant color that was different from the others so it would be easy to place them properly. It should be noted, though, that these colored pieces were completed invisible in the completed model.

In the past, though, I have found that this is ineffective, or simply crazy. To use another Ewok example, 7956 Ewok attack is a tree hideout, and the entire interior is red, blue, and yellow. It's a small, easy set with different-shaped pieces, so the color wasn't helpful in building. Also, the tree is meant to open up in the finished model so an Ewok can be hidden inside, but all the colored bricks are visible when this is done.

I have to believe that in current sets the coloring is done occasionally for ease of building or to get some rare pieces to customers, but most of the time it's because LEGO had a surplus of colored pieces.

However, I'm not quite as sure about the LEGO sets of yore. Maybe they weren't used to designing things based on a movie? I suppose before Star Wars most LEGO sets came out of the heads of designers with no pictorial reference, so they didn't have to worry as much about using the right colors. Another possibility is that they hadn't quite settled on their target audience, and as others have said, decided to cater to kids who like a lot of vibrant colors. Yet another possibility is that the color is related to the general blockiness and ugliness of the sets. It could be that, say, for a TIE fighter, the general lack of good designing would have made it look like an unidentifiable black box with black wings were it not for the blue highlights. Of course, knowing what we do now, we would tell them to use gray, but at least this theory allows us to kind of understand.

I'm just curious as to what made LEGO suddenly get drastically better at designing sets in 2005.

Edited by DarthHank

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