Unpopular Opinions about LEGO

[1974]

1 hour ago, MAB said:

OK, but were your spacemen ever medieval soldiers?

Sure. I LOVE the IDEA Books (6000, 200 & 250) and theme mashups was always a part of those

[The Brick Boss]

Another unpopular opinion: the Ocean Exploration Ship is overpriced. You go on Ebay and some of those are going for up to almost $250. 

[MAB]

2 hours ago, Poodabricks said:

Another unpopular opinion: the Ocean Exploration Ship is overpriced. You go on Ebay and some of those are going for up to almost $250. 

So buy from a retailer rather than the secondary market.

[The Brick Boss]

1 hour ago, MAB said:

So buy from a retailer rather than the secondary market.

LOL! Those ones be overpriced too. 

[The Stud]

This is a bit of an odd one: there are too many colons in Lego set names these days.

Names like:

75958 Beauxbaton’s Carriage: Arrival at Hogwarts

75947 Hagrid’s Hut: Buckbeak’s Rescue

76180 Batman vs the Joker: Batmobile Pursuit

It’s very prevalent in Harry Potter but I’ve seen it in other themes too. They don’t roll off the tongue and are usually absurdly long. 

[ShaydDeGrai]

23 minutes ago, The Stud said:

This is a bit of an odd one: there are too many colons in Lego set names these days.

Names like:

75958 Beauxbaton’s Carriage: Arrival at Hogwarts

75947 Hagrid’s Hut: Buckbeak’s Rescue

76180 Batman vs the Joker: Batmobile Pursuit

It’s very prevalent in Harry Potter but I’ve seen it in other themes too. They don’t roll off the tongue and are usually absurdly long. 

It's probably because so many of these subjects have been visited and revisited it's hard to come up with a short name without confusing a new set with an old one.  Just be thankful we haven't gotten to the point of:

Star Wars - 

Darth Vader's TIE FIghter: From Episode IV right after Han and Chewy show up over the trench

Snowspeeder: The pretty good but smaller than UCS edition

Imperial Star Destroyer: The one for people who already have a coffee table and want something a little smaller

AT-AT: The one that started off as a Mindstorm's elephant but ended up as a Star Wars kit instead

X-Wing Fighter: This is how we haze new designers on the SW team, everyone has to make an X-Wing before they get to work on new stuff.  Meet Bjorn...

Architecture - 

The Empire State Building : Freud told us to build it in a dream

The Eiffel Tower : France told us we haven't done it justice yet

The Burj Khalifa : Dubai heard about the new Empire State Building kit and called to remind us that their tower is bigger...

City - 

High Speed Passenger Train : We had a load of helicopter noses left over from last year that management wanted us to use up...

Police Chase: There's been at least one Lego police car on store shelves for 50 years, why stop now?

 

 

[dr_spock]

1 hour ago, The Stud said:

This is a bit of an odd one: there are too many colons in Lego set names these days.

Names like:

75958 Beauxbaton’s Carriage: Arrival at Hogwarts

75947 Hagrid’s Hut: Buckbeak’s Rescue

76180 Batman vs the Joker: Batmobile Pursuit

It’s very prevalent in Harry Potter but I’ve seen it in other themes too. They don’t roll off the tongue and are usually absurdly long. 

It's the same in the book publishing business with comic and graphic novel titles.  

[Aanchir]

4 hours ago, ShaydDeGrai said:

It's probably because so many of these subjects have been visited and revisited it's hard to come up with a short name without confusing a new set with an old one.  Just be thankful we haven't gotten to the point of:

I think in some of those cases, it might also be to give the sets better SEO (search engine optimization) — especially since all those examples listed above are from licensed themes, and include significant trademarks for their respective brands in both the "title" and "subtitle".

This way, any time somebody searches a site like Amazon for keywords like LEGO Batmobile, LEGO Batman, or LEGO Joker, set 76180 is likely to show up prominently in their search results. Likewise, the Beauxbatons Carriage is a relatively minor part of the Harry Potter brand that not a whole lot of people might be specifically looking for — but with the subtitle, it will also appear prominently in search results for more frequent queries like LEGO Hogwarts, boosting its chances of getting Harry Potter fans' attention even if it wasn't a set they were previously interested in or even aware of.

Also, for what it's worth, LEGO Batman sets tended to be branded this way even during the Batman theme's original 2006–2008 run. So it's entirely possible that DC Comics' merchandising department likes to encourage this sort of naming scheme in general. Like, to give a hypothetical conversation from a licensing meeting: "Great work! this 'Batmobile Pursuit' set seems to check all the right boxes. But could you work Batman and Joker's names into the title somehow? We want to make sure we're doing all that we can to promote our big-name characters."

[Flak Maniak]

Tell me if this counts as truly unpopular: I don't like how much leg printing these days is matched up to torso printing. In fact, I'm not even that into leg printing to start with. I think if Lego had set the precedent about ten years ago that leg printing would appear hardly ever, and then stuck to it, we'd still be used to plain legs with maybe different-colored hips, and it would look fine to us. You don't look at old Aquazone minifigs and say "this needs leg printing".

But, more to the point, if there's going to be leg printing, I want it to end decisively at the hips, in a belt. So that it's useful with more torsos. Super-matched printing creates a nice one-off minifig, but in general I want the torso print to have a conclusive end at the bottom of the torso, so that it will look plausible against various printed (and unprinted!) legs. I don't mind that generally Lego has decided to do more printing over time, and that it gets more intricate and slowly changes style. I just want the modularity preserved.

[MAB]

Yes, I feel the same way. There are many legs that are useless without the correct torso. I also don't like it when the print alignment is off, so the patterns on the legs and torso don't join properly.  And even when aligned there is normally a gap as lego cannot print all the way to the edges. In that respect, the clone and fake companies are often superior to lego.

[BrickG]

My quoted text seems to ignore that in the same post later I was pro-personalization and was wrong.

But also those minifigures in my mind aren't personalised except I guess the dog.

[TeriXeri]

In future sets, I'd like to see LEGO greatly reduce the amount of figures using short legs with medium legs, medium legs finally appeared in City this year, so hopefully will expand to more themes (like 3-in-1 for example) and more frequently.

While short legs still have a place, they are just less useful imo.

 

 

Edited April 14, 2021 by TeriXeri

[Aanchir]

On 4/14/2021 at 9:02 AM, TeriXeri said:

In future sets, I'd like to see LEGO greatly reduce the amount of figures using short legs with medium legs, medium legs finally appeared in City this year, so hopefully will expand to more themes (like 3-in-1 for example) and more frequently.

While short legs still have a place, they are just less useful imo.

I feel like LEGO has achieved a pretty good balance as of this year, honestly. Most of the characters who still use short legs are either little people (like Jacob Pevsner, Professor Flitwick, and The Penguin), preteen kids (like Madison Yea, young Lloyd Garmadon, and "Tiny Tim" Cratchit), and non-human characters (like Yoda, Dobby, and Santa's elves). And especially now that the minifigure baby exists, it'd feel a bit odd if "child" characters jumped straight from that height to only slightly shorter than a full-grown adult!

If anything, I hope that in the future, characters in their early to mid teens start using the medium-length legs instead of full-length legs. Some examples of characters from recent themes who'd fall within that category include Peter Pan from Disney Minifigures Series 1, Jack and Parker from LEGO Hidden Side (age 13), Violet Parr from The Incredibles (age 14), Ahsoka Tano at the beginning of Star Wars: The Clone Wars (age 14), and Ezra Bridger at the beginning of Star Wars: Rebels (age 14). This way, they could have a more noticeable height difference from the adult characters in their respective themes.

But LEGO is definitely already beginning to do better about this sort of thing, using medium-length legs on recent minifigs of characters Padme from Star Wars: Episode I, third- and fourth-year students from Harry Potter, the kid protagonists from Stranger Things, and Damian Wayne (the current Robin) from DC Comics. So I'm definitely hopeful that they might be more consistent about this sort of thing in the future.

One other thing they haven't done yet, but will probably need to do at some point in the future, is introduce dual-molded versions of the medium-length legs, like they currently have for short and full-length legs. Most characters with medium-length legs so far have been fine without a dual-molded version, but introducing one would allow for stuff like teenage characters with swimming trunks, and also allow more detail on certain animal characters.

Edited April 15, 2021 by Aanchir

[TeriXeri]

2 hours ago, Aanchir said:

I feel like LEGO has achieved a pretty good balance as of this year, honestly. Most of the characters who still use short legs are either little people (like Jacob Pevsner, Professor Flitwick, and The Penguin), preteen kids (like Madison Yea, young Lloyd Garmadon, and "Tiny Tim" Cratchit), and non-human characters (like Yoda, Dobby, and Santa's elves). And especially now that the minifigure baby exists, it'd feel a bit odd if "child" characters jumped straight from that height to only slightly shorter than a full-grown adult!

I should probably have mentioned that I meant unnamed characters like City/Creator instead of Licensed etc.

[Aanchir]

54 minutes ago, TeriXeri said:

I should probably have mentioned that I meant unnamed characters like City/Creator instead of Licensed etc.

Even then, I think it's really nice when sets like the Skate Park or Family House include both the short and medium-length legs to differentiate between older and younger kids and/or older and younger siblings. And for that matter, it'd be a little weird if the figure riding in the bike basket in the Shopping Street set resembled a teenager instead of a young child!

I definitely see how hypothetically, the farmer's daughter in this year's Tractor set could've used medium length legs without much negative impact (although it wouldn't be quite as adorable as portraying her as a little girl with a pet bunny). But all in all, I feel like LEGO is doing a pretty good job using the short legs on child characters mainly when that sort of younger appearance makes sense in the context of the set.

Edited April 15, 2021 by Aanchir

[Lord Insanity]

My unpopular opinion would be that LEGO needs to start taking their competition seriously instead of treating them like insignificant nothings.  Lego is currently the number one toy company world wide.  There is only one direction to go from that position.  Rival brick companies used to be obviously inferior to LEGO brand but that hasn't been true for several years now.

In certain things the competition is better quality than LEGO right now.  Look at how many stickers the MegaConstrux Masters of the Universe sets use.  None at all, the decorations are all prints.  Unlike the older MegaBloks the newer MegaConstrux plastic quality is nearly indistinguishable from LEGO.

You could buy a Chinese production of a brick built Van Gogh's Starry Night on Amazon before LEGO even announced it as a "winner" of becoming an Idea's set.  As the image of the painting is public domain and anyone can translate it "into the brick", there is nothing LEGO can do about it.  If LEGO's version isn't at least as good as the one already for sale before they even announced it would become a set, they shouldn't have even bothered.

Make no mistake, I still have a near exclusive preference for LEGO brand.  However, my purchasing power should not be taken for granted.  LEGO really needs a serious reality check.

[Toastie]

4 hours ago, Lord Insanity said:

In certain things the competition is better quality than LEGO right now.

Can't agree more. And this will continue, for sure.

I mean mold injection of ABS has been around for half a decade of decades - even longer. In the beginning it was unreachable for many because of the tooling and the process itself, set aside mass production etc pp. But after more than 50(!) years - competition improves. Particularly when the basic patents run out - and the garden fence of follow-up patents (falling apart as well after 30 years to be "renewed" with something else) has to keep up the defense - and in principle the same technology and processes for production is used - then competitors should be taken very, very seriously.

And then imagine, quality becomes equal or better than the original and then is sold at half the price and less. Has happened to so many large companies out there.

I am a loyal TLG fan, just did bad things twice. And was very surprised as I believed: This won't be even nearly as good in quality as a LEGO set. Well. Not true. In contrast.

Now since that experience I frequently have terrible thoughts: What if some really bad guys with highest-quality mold injection machines (as they are out there, all over the place) do make their bricks with LEGO logo and corresponding number. That is of course criminal behavior at its worse. But you could not tell the difference anymore. Well, I couldn't.

They don't do it, as far as I know. It seems to work without logo pretty well; otherwise I cannot understand how many of these companies can survive or even rapidly grow: Their products seem to sell very well. Worldwide that is.

5 hours ago, Lord Insanity said:

Make no mistake, I still have a near exclusive preference for LEGO brand.  However, my purchasing power should not be taken for granted.  LEGO really needs a serious reality check.

Yes.

Best
Thorsten

[TeriXeri]

11 hours ago, Aanchir said:

Even then, I think it's really nice when sets like the Skate Park or Family House include both the short and medium-length legs to differentiate between older and younger kids and/or older and younger siblings. And for that matter, it'd be a little weird if the figure riding in the bike basket in the Shopping Street set resembled a teenager instead of a young child!

True, I'm not saying to do away with short legs 100% of the time, but I do hope the appearance of medium in City instead of just mostly Harry Potter is a sign of wider useage.

That said, I do hope eventually that City People Pack type sets will re-appear , seems to be perfect opportunity to have mixed usage of more short/medium legs in varied colors.

[MAB]

2 hours ago, Toastie said:

And then imagine, quality becomes equal or better than the original and then is sold at half the price and less. Has happened to so many large companies out there.

I am a loyal TLG fan, just did bad things twice. And was very surprised as I believed: This won't be even nearly as good in quality as a LEGO set. Well. Not true. In contrast.

 

 

I occasionally buy "fake" minifigures from ali express. They are not really fake as they are ones LEGO doesn't produce, but fake in the sense that they are minifigures but not genuine LEGO. I often do it just for the accessories, I tend to dump the figure parts on the kids or sell them on, keeping the accessories. These companies have often done figures LEGO failed to do - Gondor soldiers, elf soldiers, dwarf soldiers, and so on and that is just for LOTR/Hobbit. I find the accessories are as good as LEGO although often there is still a bit of flashing or sprue marks and sometimes more heavy seams than on similar style LEGO parts. Nothing too serious that cannot be cleaned up with a sharp craft blade. I'll even buy fake LEGO figures (of real LEGO ones) if they come with non-standard heads or hairpieces that I am going to modify or paint. No point in paying top dollar for a part if I am gong to cut it up anyway.

 

[Aanchir]

8 hours ago, TeriXeri said:

True, I'm not saying to do away with short legs 100% of the time, but I do hope the appearance of medium in City instead of just mostly Harry Potter is a sign of wider useage.

I definitely agree there! They've also been used for Pigsy from the Monkie Kid theme since its debut, and for the Pug Costume Guy from Minifigures Series 21. Hopefully it won't be too long before we start to see them in even more non-licensed themes like Creator 3-in-1, Ninjago, the Chinese Festival sets, and 18+ sets like the Modular Buildings, Winter Village, and Fairground collections. Some of those 18+ examples would be especially fitting for them since they often feature family members of varying ages, so it'd be easy to throw a few teenage characters into the mix.

14 hours ago, Lord Insanity said:

My unpopular opinion would be that LEGO needs to start taking their competition seriously instead of treating them like insignificant nothings.  Lego is currently the number one toy company world wide.  There is only one direction to go from that position.  Rival brick companies used to be obviously inferior to LEGO brand but that hasn't been true for several years now.

In certain things the competition is better quality than LEGO right now.  Look at how many stickers the MegaConstrux Masters of the Universe sets use.  None at all, the decorations are all prints.  Unlike the older MegaBloks the newer MegaConstrux plastic quality is nearly indistinguishable from LEGO.

You could buy a Chinese production of a brick built Van Gogh's Starry Night on Amazon before LEGO even announced it as a "winner" of becoming an Idea's set.  As the image of the painting is public domain and anyone can translate it "into the brick", there is nothing LEGO can do about it.  If LEGO's version isn't at least as good as the one already for sale before they even announced it would become a set, they shouldn't have even bothered.

Make no mistake, I still have a near exclusive preference for LEGO brand.  However, my purchasing power should not be taken for granted.  LEGO really needs a serious reality check.

I don't really see any reason to think that LEGO isn't taking their competition seriously. After all, there's lots of stuff that LEGO is already doing that helps to give them an edge on their competitors: for example, investing in their in-house properties like City, Friends, Ninjago, and Monkie Kid; acquiring popular licenses and building themes around them (which keeps them out of the hands of competitors); experimenting with new physical and/or digital play features to set their sets apart from other construction toy brands; and promoting their brands and products through TV, print, and online formats.

Needless to say, there's nothing they can really do to prevent clone brands from rushing a "Starry Night" set (or any public domain concept from LEGO Ideas) to market before them, but it goes without saying that they're going to try and make the eventual LEGO version as appealing as they possibly can.

As for Mega Construx, just glancing at the Castle Greyskull promotional video on Mega Construx's own website, the bricks still have sort of the same icky, waxy look I remember from Mega Bloks products of my childhood (back before the parent company Ritvik was renamed Mega Brands or acquired by Mattel). Although the colors are much richer than they were back then, the color of the bricks still seems wildly inconsistent in places, such as among the "sand green" standard bricks, round bricks, and hinges on the interior walls 14 seconds into the video. Even the brick shapes are inconsistent/imprecise, as can be seen with the uneven edges of the stacked plates in the lower right corner of the video at around 30 seconds in.

I get that you might consider stickers a quality issue, but there are a lot of LEGO fans (even in this very thread) who either have no preference between stickered and printed decorations, or who even ENJOY the process of applying stickers to their sets. "Taking their competition seriously" doesn't mean assuming their competitors always know best about what customers actually care about.

Edited April 16, 2021 by Aanchir

[Toastie]

2 hours ago, Aanchir said:

Needless to say, there's nothing they can really do to prevent clone brands from rushing a "Starry Night" set (or any public domain concept from LEGO Ideas) to market before them, but it goes without saying that they're going to try and make the eventual LEGO version as appealing as they possibly can.

I really can see all your points. There is a saying at least in research though (you are well aware of) that you can try to make your results as appealing as you possibly can, but others will earn credit because they published something less appealing - faster. As far as I am concerned: To survive with that as appealing as possible approach you need to have a customer base that does appreciate exactly that: As good as is it possibly gets. This was for sure the case in the past. Legacy. But times change. The concept of assembling bricks doesn't.

2 hours ago, Aanchir said:

As for Mega Construx,

Yes. But then have a look at Mould King stuff. Colors: Perfect: shapes: Perfect. Clutch power: Stronger (not good for playing(!), but very good for delicate modeling). And I bet they could adjust that, if they want to. Another thing I learned in research: Don't look at the less perfect, always look at the ones with the highest finesse (to gauge what is maybe in your way). This is sort of contradicting the above, but attempting to find a point where finesse needs to be compromised by publication date. The former is Doing and the latter is Calibrating. And these need to be well-balanced. Particularly, when you ask for input from the public domain (e.g., Ideas).

IMHO that is.

Best regards,
Thorsten

 

Edited April 16, 2021 by Toastie

[Lord Insanity]

 

2 hours ago, Aanchir said:

As for Mega Construx, just glancing at the Castle Greyskull promotional video on Mega Construx's own website, the bricks still have sort of the same icky, waxy look I remember from Mega Bloks products of my childhood (back before the parent company Ritvik was renamed Mega Brands or acquired by Mattel). Although the colors are much richer than they were back then, the color of the bricks still seems wildly inconsistent in places, such as among the "sand green" standard bricks, round bricks, and hinges on the interior walls 14 seconds into the video. Even the brick shapes are inconsistent/imprecise, as can be seen with the uneven edges of the stacked plates in the lower right corner of the video at around 30 seconds in.

I have actually built that set.  (Masters of the Universe being one of the few non-LEGO toys I had as a child, I couldn't resist the combination of brick based building toy and Castle Grayskull.)  Old MegaBloks was crap quality.  Modern MegaConstrux plastic quality is virtually identical to LEGO.  The "wildly inconsistent" color is completely intentional.  There are three separate green colors used in Grayskull.  The instructions and the inventory rather specifically differentiate the bricks of the same shape and size that are "slightly" different in color.  Under good lighting the difference is as obvious as "gray" vs "blay" and is used to good effect to make the castle have that iconic mottled look.  The uneven plates is just the same laziness (of not pushing the pieces together all the way) LEGO's own marketing department also routinely shows in promotional images of actual product.  The design of the build is fantastic.  I would love LEGO to produce an AFOL targeted castle that is even half as well designed as MegaConstrux's Castle Grayskull.

I have no problem with people flat out not wanting to support other brands.  But do so as an informed choice and not just assuming they're still the same quality they were 20 years ago.

Edited April 16, 2021 by Lord Insanity
there, their, they're not the same

[Toastie]

42 minutes ago, Lord Insanity said:

I have actually built that set.

And I believe makes a BIG difference.

Hearing about, looking at videos, and so on is one thing. Doing it is another. I don't want to reiterate over and over again, but the best way is to experimentally find out. Test, gauge. When I purchased the Black Pearl for $29.99, I was feeling terrible. There were discussions here at home, betraying and so on. I assembled the Pearl (no issues whatsoever) and then modded her. Used lots of LEGO bricks - will never show it here, because. The Pearl was because I love Captain Jack Sparrows - and looking on BL/Amazon/eBay told me: Get another job.

And then I learned about the Flying Dutchman from MK. That model dwarfs any ship TLG has ever released and is superior in many regards (colors, pieces, building experience). It is a model. Not for play.

Point is: "They" are at least getting close - with their own "ideas". From experience.

Best
Thorsten

[zoth33]

21 hours ago, Toastie said:

And I believe makes a BIG difference.

Hearing about, looking at videos, and so on is one thing. Doing it is another. I don't want to reiterate over and over again, but the best way is to experimentally find out. Test, gauge. When I purchased the Black Pearl for $29.99, I was feeling terrible. There were discussions here at home, betraying and so on. I assembled the Pearl (no issues whatsoever) and then modded her. Used lots of LEGO bricks - will never show it here, because. The Pearl was because I love Captain Jack Sparrows - and looking on BL/Amazon/eBay told me: Get another job.

And then I learned about the Flying Dutchman from MK. That model dwarfs any ship TLG has ever released and is superior in many regards (colors, pieces, building experience). It is a model. Not for play.

Point is: "They" are at least getting close - with their own "ideas". From experience.

Best
Thorsten

How long have you had the Mega sets?  Do the colors fade?  Does the clutch power hold? 

I had some D@D sets and wasn't impressed with the quality at all and the figs are horrible.

The figs for Masters of the Universe still look wonky to me.  Maybe the quality is better I might pick up a set to see for myself.  But I was not Happy with the Drizzt fig and the parts were just bad and felt cheap and flimsy.  

[Toastie]

9 minutes ago, zoth33 said:

How long have you had the Mega sets?  Do the colors fade?  Does the clutch power hold?

To be clear: I was only talking about two sets I have (so far) - the Black Pearl from (I forgot - I don't even know whether there was a company name) and the Flying Dutchman from Mould King. The former is 2 years old, mostly -  well black, modded with original LEGOs, and yes still good. I am not a fan of minifigs, so I can't tell, as I gave them away to kids). The FD is only 4 and 1/2 months old. No minifigs, as tihis is meant to be a "model". Both sit part of the day in the sun during summer in my attic, but I like seasoning, so no worries. Should some bricks become brittle ... well some LEGOs do as well. On the Pearl we'll see: Maybe only the original LEGOs will survive. It is tough up here. But honestly? I doubt that. As of now it is as it was when I opened the box. Regarding the FD I can assure you that both color and clutch power are perfect. The latter for modelling, as the FD is not supposed to be played with but displayed only. Nice building techniques, which would be never be approved by TLG: Too flimsy. I don't care as I want her to part the waters up here on a shelf.

What is really important: Mould King is what I am referring to as of even or maybe even better quality - for modeling(!!!). I am not the only one feeling like that. Youtube has some videos of "Held der Steine" - it is in German though - he is pretty much independent and talks about TLG sets and others as well. In an educated way, I'd say. Maybe not, I am just working here

Oh well - time will tell.

All the best
Thorsten