12-03-2009, 02:39 PM
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.
"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.
