Today the Rambling Brick turned one. I didn’t expect the year would go quite so quickly, or that we would achieve as much as we have!
Here are some Fun Facts Continue reading
opinion
Taking a Trip Down Memory Lane on a Double Decker Bus…(RetroRebuild 40220)
Previously on the Rambling Brick…
After obtaining set 40220 London Bus as part of the shop.LEGO.com promotion in November, the Rambling Brick was duly impressed, and put all of the stickers onto the set. But there was a bonus sticker sheet in the set that featured Lester, the LEGO Minifigure Mascot for the New Flagship LEGO Store in Leicester Square. This led to a tenuous link between Tim Brooke Taylor, Monty Python and the store’s opening week giveaways. Overcome by a wave of nostalgia, he started imagining that he was back in 1976…
NOW read on….
An unhealthy fix of nostalgia.
As I looked at the 40220, and considered it’s design, it reminded me of all of many vehicle sets from the mid-nineteen seventies. The vast majority of LEGO Vehicles were four studs wide: whether a police car, an excavator, a bus or container lorry.
Why would you ever buy LEGO at full price from the LEGO store?
Double VIP points.
Free Gift with Purchase over $AU120
Free Shipping on purchases of $AU200.
This is what I was hearing from the shop.LEGO.com banner ads as October 2016 got underway. Should these statements affect whether or not I go to the online LEGO store? I sat down to work out a solution to this conundrum, and who knows, it might just influence my behaviour in the future…
[Editors note: the principles of calculating the best value time to purchase from shop.LEGO.com, or your local LEGO store are consistant, however individual thresholds for shipping and the value of special offers vary between markets. You should always make your own decisions regarding your own money. The LEGO Group is sure to release something else that you wish to buy in the future, so don’t worry if you can’t spend all of your money at once. Now read on…]
The shop.LEGO.com promotion for October, if ordering from Australia, was the London bus set (40220). Initially revealed around the same time of the ‘Big Ben’ Creator set, it instantly appealed to me. Decidedly smaller than minifigure scale, it reminded me almost instantly of the sets available in my childhood. In those days, many ‘LEGOLand’ vehicles were 4 studs wide, whether they were a go-cart, family car, a fire truck, and earthmover or a semi-trailer. This is a set that I was terribly keen to get my hands on.
And it got me thinking: What should encourage me to make a purchase from shop.LEGO.com, when many of my local major retailers regularly offer 20% purchase price? Continue reading
Living with DiverCITY: changing depictions of gender roles with LEGO minifigures in the post-Friends era.
This post has been a while coming. It’s a bit long. It may take a while to read…best get a drink.
Sorry about that!
When I was a boy, and we rode dinosaurs to school, life was a little more simple than it is today. When the first LEGO mini figures were introduced, they were people. Not really men or women, just people. Their faces all looked the same: depicting the now classic smiley face. The only attempts to define gender, in terms of appearance, came in the form of the hair piece they had on if they were not wearing a hat! In that first year there were four ‘female’ mini figures released: they had hair with pigtails. If they were wearing a hat, you could quite happily identify that knight, policeman or astronaut as male or female as you should choose.
Two of these ‘people with hair, defining their gender as female’ came as the only figure in their sets, along with vehicles: one an ambulance (606) and one a ‘Red Cross’ car(623). Another worked at the service station (376) and the final one came with a home (377). There was also a female passenger with a railway carriage. in 1979, the first classic ‘male’ minifigure hair appeared. In this first year, printed torsos were still a year or two away, and defining your minifigure’s identity came down to the sticker that you placed on the torso piece.