Proper LEGO

It of course goes without saying that all of the pieces produced by the LEGO company are, by definition, "proper" LEGO. Except that I'm increasingly coming across pieces which don't feel like "proper" LEGO to me. It's a bit hard to explain, but basically I'm referring to huge pieces which in the old days would have been made up of a number of existing pieces, but which are now moulded in just one piece. This really hit me when I was building an Indiana Jones LEGO set, Fight on the Flying Wing, and was faced by the monstrosity below :

I mean, look at it. It's huge ! And is it really necessary ? This isn't a new phenomenon - I have 10- and 20-year old sets which contain unnecessarily big pieces - but I'm certainly noticing it more these days.

It feels uncomfortably like "dumbing down" to me, almost as if the intention is to get the build out of the way as fast as possible so that there's more time to play with the finished model. I can kind of see a logic in this, except that as a child, most of the pleasure for me was in actually building the model rather than playing with the finished article, to the extent that I'd generally deconstruct it after just a few minutes of play and then rebuild it into something different, or at least try to improve upon what I'd built earlier. Maybe I just wasn't a typical kid, or else kids today find actually building the model an inconvenient barrier to playing with it. It'd be a shame if that were true, but maybe it just is.

It could be reasonably argued that the sets with these big, ugly pieces are more targeted at a younger demographic, while the older and/or less impatient builder has a pretty good choice of sets containing more 'traditional' parts. That's certainly true, but I just hope that the temptation to pander to those who would rather play with the finished model rather than build it in the first place doesn't get any stronger.

Thanks to Peeron for the above image.