Such happy memories! (Lego in General)

Member Name: SusanLesley

Product:	Lego in General
Date:	03/11/01 (194 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to play, Everyone can join in, Great fun

Disadvantages: Not so much imagination needed these days

I vividly remember my eleventh birthday. It fell on a Monday and I was allowed to open my main birthday present on the Sunday so that I would have a chance to play with it. It was a Lego set!

Now the younger ones amongst you will not know what I mean by this as things have changed dramatically over the years.

When I had my first Lego set it was in 1965 when it was THE new toy – and, yes I am that old!

When Lego (from the Danish Leg Godt meaning play well) first took the toy market by storm the only choice available to the consumer was the size of the set that you were going to buy. They were all basically the same except for the fact that the more you paid the more Lego bricks you got – logically enough.

The available bricks consisted of the following:-

Bricks with eight bumps on the top arranged in two rows of four
Bricks with six bumps on the top arranged in two rows of three
Bricks with four bumps on the top arranged in two rows of two
Bricks with two bumps on the top
Bricks with a single bump on the top
Bases on which to build which were about 30 by 15 bumps
The bricks were available in red or white and the bases were grey.

This was as technical as it got and you had to build your own things by using your imagination.

I seem to remember that there was a set of pictures on the back of my Lego box to show the sort of things that you could make with the contents of the box, but that was it.

You could then add to the original set by buying small boxes of the individual sized bricks, so I used to get these at Christmas and my birthday off various family members and I soon collected quite a box full.

Then new innovations began – green roof tiles appeared and finally those houses that we built looked more like houses!

But then the real excitement came with – wait for it – a transparent brick with eight bumps on the top contai
ning a tiny light bulb! Wow! All we needed was a huge battery with those metal flaps on the top so that the wires to the bulb could be connected and hey presto – an illuminated house! It doesn’t take much to make me happy!

Of course since those days Lego has come on in leaps and bounds. Most of the sets sold today contain all the necessary bricks to build a specific item, usually linked to the current trend – Thunderbirds, Harry Potter, James Bond, etc. There are also Lego Technic sets to build robots, cars, space ships etc.

What really amused me a few years ago was when Lego brought out a ‘new’ idea – they were selling a bucket containing a range of loose bricks with which to use your imagination and build whatever you fancied and they called it Lego Freestyle! I think that I had been here before somehow!

There is also a version of Lego produced for very young children called Duplo, which is exactly the same principle as standard Lego but with bigger bricks. This is ideal because they are easier for little hands to manage and also small children may well choke on the standard Lego bricks. I believe that the standard Lego and Duplo will actually fit together, but if I’m wrong here will someone please correct me?

When we visited my sister in Essex once she and her partner took us shopping at Bluewater where they have a Lego shop. It was an amazing place. There was information about the history of Lego and how it developed. There was a wide range of Lego for sale and for playing with in the shop. Dad and I were happy reliving my eleventh birthday!

There were also some fantastic models, some of which were taller than I was! Now that’s a job I think I could enjoy – imagine building Lego for a living. What a chat up line that would be in the nightclub!

There is even a Lego table in the waiting room at the dentists surgery with bases set into the table top and piles
of bricks of all sizes! How I resisit the temptation I do not know!

Summary: