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+--- Thread: Thank you adult collector nerds for ruining another childhood toy (/showthread.php?tid=88894)
Thank you adult collector nerds for ruining another childhood toy - the_poochies - 12-03-2009
While Christmas shopping for 6 year-old Little Poochie yesterday, the cheerful checkout lady at Toys R Us commented on my purchase of a $100 Lego Indiana Jones "mine car chase" kit.
"Your son will love that. I still have mine in the original box."
I guess staring at a sealed box of Legos for a few decades is her idea of fun, but ruining the collectors value of the kit by opening the box on Dec. 25 and putting this thing together is akin to erecting a Queen Anne house out of toothpicks.
And once built - by me, of course - the thing looks as delicate as a Faberge egg. I give it 5 or 10 minutes before something falls apart and Little Poochie and I are at a loss on how to replace the collapsed section of the kit without disassembling the whole thing.
The author of this article from the NY Times seems to agree:
"Then there’s the ever-growing popularity and educational allure of so-called construction toys, like Legos; for them, building is supposed to be part of the point and part of the fun. Many such kits are no longer designed for open-ended, creative building, but rather to construct a precise model based on a licensed movie theme, for example 'Star Wars' or 'Transformers.' If a child can’t recreate the spaceship or warrior by following pages of directions, it is up to the parents to do it."
In the 1970s, if I wanted to build Star Wars spacecraft, I used existing Lego kits coupled with my imagination. Now Lego makes unique and insanely-detailed pieces for each unique, insanely-detailed and extremely fragile kit.
L.P. and I agree that it's nice to spend several days building these corporate-sanctioned Lego kits from directions, but it's more enjoyable to take the whole thing apart and build whatever the hell we want. We already assembled our own "mine car chase" scene from the 1970s Legos that Santa brought me as a kid and we are having a blast with it.
Re: Thank you adult collector nerds for ruining another childhood toy - decay - 12-03-2009
exactly. i built these from a plain box of Legos - no kit.
yes, that's Slave 1.
Re: Thank you adult collector nerds for ruining another childhood toy - OWC Jamie - 12-03-2009
<<
"Then there’s the ever-growing popularity and educational allure of so-called construction toys, like Legos; for them, building is supposed to be part of the point and part of the fun. Many such kits are no longer designed for open-ended, creative building, but rather to construct a precise model based on a licensed movie theme, for example 'Star Wars' or 'Transformers.' If a child can’t recreate the spaceship or warrior by following pages of directions, it is up to the parents to do it."
>>
In other words, the author couldn't follow the directions and his kids and the neighbor kids have never let him forget about his incapacities.
Kids couldn't posssibly be learning to follow directions nor toning thier cognitive recognitions.
Maybe his kids will learn to write meaningless tripe and actually make a living doing it.
Re: Thank you adult collector nerds for ruining another childhood toy - ztirffritz - 12-03-2009
Learning to follow directions is itself a valuable skill, no doubt. But creating something new where nothing existed before is a much more valuable skill in my opinion. My Star Wars toys as a child consisted of re-manufactured cardboard boxes that my brother and I spent HOURS creating with glue, tape, markers, and crayons. And LEGOS - boxes and boxes of random LEGOS. I hated the kits and much preferred boxes of legos from yard sales that were just random blocks.
Re: Thank you adult collector nerds for ruining another childhood toy - SDGuy - 12-03-2009
ztirffritz wrote:
Learning to follow directions is itself a valuable skill, no doubt. But creating something new where nothing existed before is a much more valuable skill in my opinion...
:agree::agree::agree::agree::agree:
Re: Thank you adult collector nerds for ruining another childhood toy - threeprong - 12-03-2009
My kid is a lego nut.
he wants the themed kits.. we build them...and in less than a week he has modified / created something new and creative.
I'm cool with that.
Lego creates these themed kits to stay in business. Once you have 4-5 of these kits, you can build just about anything... so no real need to purchase more.
Ahhhhh, there's the rub.
3p
Re: Thank you adult collector nerds for ruining another childhood toy - Acer - 12-03-2009
Speaking from the experience of a child of the 70s and a dad with 4 kids worth of modern LEGO, I think the angst over excessively specialized LEGO is overblown.
Compared to any other kind of model kit, even the worst LEGO is fabulously versatile.
In my youth, I always craved more flats, angles and rounded pieces to get smoother designs for vehicles and the like. There are a lot more of that sort of thing available in kits today.
The one exception is Bionicles, which, though LEGO, are only useful for building more Bionicles, which to my adult eye all look alike.
Re: Thank you adult collector nerds for ruining another childhood toy - OWC Jamie - 12-03-2009
They didn't have legoes when I was a kid.
Lincoln logs and tinker toys provided similar building fun.
But my father had barns with about a hundred screens that got removed and stacked up Spring /Fall / Winter.
Imagine his surprise when he came home and found all them built into a extremely long tunnelly fort .
Do they still have the lego magazines with pics and build sequences others have done?
There used to be a virtual 3D lego software, too.
Re: Thank you adult collector nerds for ruining another childhood toy - cbelt3 - 12-03-2009
I agree with Acer, with the exception of the Bionicles point.. which can be used to fabricate Baba-Yaga style huts made of various limbs and quasi-robo-organic components.
We have any number of odd little kit parts and gizmos that find themselves re purposed into a variety of fantastical structures. Which are, of course, deconstructed, dumped back in the bin, and played with a different time the next day.
Re: Thank you adult collector nerds for ruining another childhood toy - edgarbc1 - 12-03-2009
decay wrote:
exactly. i built these from a plain box of Legos - no kit.
yes, that's Slave 1.
yes, decay, you rock!!
