Top Five Things I Miss About Old School LEGO

madforLEGO · September 2012

CCC said:
^^ Children can still use their imagination. My son is currently playing with a pile of S6 aliens and space girls and a few galaxy patrols. From what I can tell, the aliens are the goodies, and their planet is being attacked by the space girls. Their leader (a girl) seems to have an evil knight's head, the one with red eyes. Not only is a boy playing with pink lego, but the goodie - baddie roles seem to be reversed from what you might otherwise expect. The wonder of imagination. And modern lego.

While I know kids have imaginations, at least most children, toy companies obviously do not see it that way.. I mean take a look at most toys now -with their loud colors and bizarre graphics- and you can tell they were made for an era where ADHD is used as an excuse for everything. I listened to my nephews talking about how they would use pieces in a LEGO grab bag for all sorts of things, so I know kids still have imaginations, but it is clear that most LEGO sets are now designed for one use. Regardless of their blocky basic parts sets, which also existed in the 80's but those were more geared also for extensions to existing color sets (basic colors and not these weird fluorescent colors). They had more basic sets that had 1 by 'X' brick than they do now, IMO, and also the 80's sets were built in mind of kids wanting to have something flexible enough to build other things. It was neat to see the alt buildings on the boxes to see what else could be come up with. I think that while more inventory of parts is nice and helps build 'more realistically' I think people forget that LEGO was its own universe and that stuff was going to be blocky. That and while the plethora of colors is nice it kinda starts to beg the question is all of this too much? I mean HOW many different wheels/tires does LEGO have now? IMO The new Motorcycles are not really to scale or feel for what LEGO is whereas the old 80's motorcycle seems more at home with the minifig. I just feel that with LEGO the part limitations gave you more reason to have creativity for building techniques and now it just seems like cheating a bit with the parts they have now. Do not get me wrong, I like the new stuff as well, but I kinda miss the 'simpler times' of the 80's LEGO

Redbullgivesuwind · September 2012

^Except the 80's and 90's were the period when lego churned out specifically made peices for all their sets and used BURPS with free abandon. It was the thing that basically wrecked the company as these parts were useless for anything else. The parts and colour numbers are alot less these days than there were in the 80's and 90's.

CCC · September 2012

madforLEGO said:
but it is clear that most LEGO sets are now designed for one use.

Yeah, I agree with that. I imagine most sets are only ever built into the picture on the box and that is it. If you are going to do that, you might as well just buy a toy house / spaceship / dinosaur. Which is why I encourage my kids to build their sets, enjoy the build, then mix them up and build freestyle. Of course, second hand value is dropped if the sets are no longer complete/sorted, since other people want sets. But we rarely sell off used lego anyway, so don't care about this.

madforLEGO · September 2012

Redbullgivesuwind said:
^Except the 80's and 90's were the period when lego churned out specifically made peices for all their sets and used BURPS with free abandon. It was the thing that basically wrecked the company as these parts were useless for anything else. The parts and colour numbers are alot less these days than there were in the 80's and 90's.

Mostly 90's but I would not classify ALL 80's and 90's sets of doing this, also LEGO did not do what you are thinking in the 80's the color choices are also FAR more than what was offered back then.. The basically had Red Green Blue black White gray dark gray if I am not mistaken. and the parts were not specifically made for one set as much as they are now. You may be thinking of the late 90's with Junior-ization, but the 80's and early 90's were far better than what you are saying IMO and used the same catalog of pieces for many uses.

mressin · September 2012

Regarding parts specifically made for one set:

There was a period from the mid- to late-80's on when I felt that a number of parts were less generic in use than other parts. Compare for example #6970 with #6953. The former set is/was much more variable (as in: build a car/house/plane/rocket/phantasiafoglu out of its parts) than the latter.

vwong19 · September 2012

What i miss most about old school Lego or how I grew up with Lego in the 80's was the lack of value associated with each minifigure or set. I missed not knowing or caring about the value of my collection. I used to take them out to the backyard, mix and match them with my sets to create MOC, handle my minifigures while eating Cheetos, dump them into my toy bin. Now that I'm older and wiser, I have a tough time letting my children make the same "mistakes" that I did with some licensed themes.... at least they can with some of the less desirable themes (i.e Toy Stories and Cars, etc).

I don't miss much about the old school Lego.
- I love having the option to buy licensed themes (Super Heroes, LOR and SW)
- I love all the minifig face expressions (skies the limit)
- I love having different skin tones
- I love all the details and accessories for the minifigs

I have no problem with dumbed down instructions, I prefer that there is no confusion. Nothing worse than to find extra pieces and to wonder if they are extra.

Packaging is fine. I don't look at the box anymore, since I scout out the sets on Brickset months before the set is usually released. Once opened, the box is flattened and stowed away.

Baseplates are available at an extra cost if one needs them.

bmwlego · March 2013

I miss the old school yellow diagonal "LEGOLAND" stripe on the classic LEGO set boxes and instructions of my childhood.

TheLoneTensor · March 2013

Honestly, the thing I miss about old school Lego is when there were the awesome quantum leaps as far as parts go. I remember the pinnacle of this for me were the 1985 Space sets like the #6931 FX Star Patroller and the #6891 Gamma V Laser Craft. Those sets introduced an insane amount of new pieces such as:

Colored cockpit canopies
Flexible hoses
Blue 1x2 slopes with the CB-microphone print
Stick-shifters
Small radar dishes (in clear colors!)
Clear small nosecones
Clear antennae
Jet-pack minifig harnesses
Robot arms
Arrow-printed tiles
1x2 printed "union jack" computer tiles
Honeycomb bulkheads
And so on!

New parts come out every year, but that year was by far the greatest single-year advancement of parts ever for me.

Yellowcastle · March 2013

I miss the catalogs that were included with each set. And via those catalogs, I very much miss the dioramas.

emmtwosix · March 2013

^Yes! I toted those little catalogs with me everywhere I went when I was a kid. I still have a few of them. Before the internets, these things were one of the few ways a kid would know what was going on in the world of Lego.

I remember cutting out and collecting Lego points from the corners of instructions and "buying" some small Lego kits from the mail-in form in the catalogs. Kids these days have it easy :)

Top Five Things I Miss About Old School LEGO

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