Lego does Frank Lloyd Wright

While delighted about Lego's new success I'm more afraid that Lego seems to have begun to productize their pieces too much since my childhood in the 80's. These days I have kids myself and the Legos I've bought them have more special parts designed to fit one particular model, and to merely make them look cool.

It was different back then when I was playing with Legos. The model you bought (well, or more likely were given as a present...) was merely a single example of what you could do with the given pieces. The gist was to build and scrap the model and then combine the new, cool bricks and gears and mechanisms with everything else that you got before.

You basically bought new models to get new parts and more parts. The new parts were all very generic which was the whole point: they didn't look as realistic as now but you could make anything from them. You could use all parts in a helicopter model to build the greatest Jeep ever.

My kids Legos have large, special pieces like an automotive chassis, that are only useful for that particular model. In the 80's you built the damn chassis yourself, and you could invent a hundred different ones yourself. This was so even in the sets designed for 5-6 year old kids, and totally so for those designed for teenagers.

Ok, my kids are young enough to not have the large Technics sets yet but what I've seen doesn't look promising. The Technics sets also seem to have specially curved / formed pieces to make the model good look but that are rather useless elsewhere. I haven't even found Technics supplementary packs like in the 80's where you could buy packs of girders, gears, axles, electrict equipment, motors etc. as a separate expansion pack.

Now everything seems to be about the models and themes themselves: the Technics sets I've reviewed also contain many special parts that aren't generally useful. It feels like the mindset now is to have the kid build that one model and play with it -- which is exactly the most boring thing ever about Legos! Why build something that's pre-designed when you can build anything you can come up with?!

Granted, Legos are so good that you can still build other things from basic Legos and Technics these days. And there's the programmable MindStorm thing, too. Still the percentage of generic parts seems to be lower. But what is more alarming that the mindset seems to be toward predesigned models only.

I hope I'm wrong.