Plugged together, they had formed the body of the ship unplugged, they were totally useless.
I had applied my imagination to New Age Lego, but I was still stranded with four large sloping panels of plastic. My rodent had black radio-dish ears, like Mickey’s, and a revolving abdomen. The pivoting antennae from the spaceship were now the cat’s whiskers. An hour later, I had turned it, or tamed it, into a cat and a mouse. I went back to my Saucer, took it apart, and stared at the pieces. Nowadays, you open the box and a whole car, pre-fucking-built, pops out-the car itself is all one piece. Say they buy a Lego car kit-in the old days you’d open the box and out tumbled sixty pieces you had to assemble to make the car. You know what really depresses the hell out of me? The way that kids nowadays don’t have to use their imagination when they play with Lego. It is voiced most ardently by Bug, a computer jock in Douglas Coupland’s novel “Microserfs”: This is the nub of the charge-half lament, half complaint-that older Lego lovers level at the company of today. The path from components to finished product was so smooth, and so hostile to improvisation, that I felt less like a child at play than like the last man on the assembly line. (The Swedish furniture manufacturer Ikea approached Lego for advice on this point.) And yet I can’t say that I had any fun. I encountered no major construction problems Lego instructions, wordlessly international, are known to be among the clearest in the world.
After deep deliberation, I plumped for the Cyber Saucer-a hundred and thirteen pieces, and mine for only $21.99.īack in the safety of my bedroom, I made my Saucer. For forty dollars, I could have had the high-tech Mummy’s Tomb, but it was clear that its designers were cashing in on “Stargate,” and I wasn’t in the market for merchandising. Hotter by far was the new range of Adventurers, which was released in January. I was tempted by the Dark Forest Fortress, but Bligen demurred. Even the basic backbone of the product line, Lego System, comprised a number of subsets, such as Aquazone, U.F.O., ResQ, Castle, Extreme Team, and the daringly antiquated Town and Boats.Īll at sea, I enlisted the aid of Jason Bligen, F. I could choose between Lego Primo, for infants Duplo, for children one and a half and older Technic, for those aged seven and up and something called FreeStyle, which seemed to mean a load of Lego bits thrown into a bucket, like chicken wings. Schwarz, on Fifth Avenue, discovering such delights as the Riptide Racer, the Speed Splasher, and the Fright Knights. I recently spent a day cruising the Lego department of F. There are currently four hundred and thirty-three different Lego sets available, two hundred and seven of which came out this year. These days, I gaze in disbelief at what Lego has become.
Lego posed a formidable challenge: being essentially curveless, it seldom bothered with anything as fancy as aerodynamics. I find it heartbreaking to comb through the bricks of my childhood-not because the click of stud into hole promises, like the uneven flagstones in the courtyard of the Guermantes mansion, a Proustian retrieval of lost bliss but simply because I am touched to discover that even when I was six my engineering concepts were crap. The rule that governs any self-respecting box of old Lego is that it should contain not just single bricks but the exciting debris of half-made projects: a three-wheeled chassis, a robot’s lonely torso, a plastic Piranesi ruin. Half, as far as I can make out, are in my attic. Most of them, given the unbreakable longevity of the product, must still be in circulation. At last count, Lego had filled the world with a hundred and eighty-nine billion molded elements. If you discover that there are a hundred and two million nine hundred and eighty-one thousand five hundred ways in which those six pieces of plastic can possibly be combined, then Lego it is.ĭuring the past forty years, some three hundred million children have played with Lego, and it is estimated that in the course of a single year these children spend five billion hours amid the bricks. If you’re still not sure, gather five more bricks of the same design and start clicking them together. Is it plastic? Does it have eight knobs on top and three tubular holes underneath? Is it, would you say, molded to a tolerance of five-thousandths of a millimetre? If so, you are probably holding a piece of Lego. Norman Mailer’s Lego city, a futuristic Mont-Saint-Michel, which sits in his living room.