@pooflady I looked up ‘Legos’, the plastic modern blocks were patented in 1958. I still never saw or heard of them growing up.
I loved my Erector Set for building, and a small Lincoln Log set that was rarely used.
@pooflady Yeah, had no Legos. Did have Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, and a small Erector set. I think the Erector set might actually have had a small motor to work as a winch (9V battery, maybe?)
A little older, several of the Heathkit line were the fun, happening things.
@pooflady My brother & I got our first Lego sets in 1970. Of course, we were visiting Norway with our grandparents at the time (don’t remember if we picked them up while traveling thru Denmark)
@daveinwarsh Have lots of older cousins; as a kid inherited quite a few classic old toys & games. Favorites were Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoy and especially the original 12" GI Joe items. Plus, my dad still had all of his Erector & Lionel from the '40s & '50s.
@mfladd@pooflady The Lincoln Logs I got as a kid were real wood, too. I never got Tinkertoys, as I made it plain [to Santa, of course] that I thought they were boring. Got my first Barbie doll for Christmas 1959, more for my mother than for me. She was a made sewer and loved all the delicately assembled clothing available for Barbie. Never was all that much interested in the doll.
@magic_cave@mfladd@pooflady i never liked barbies and felt bad as my mom saved all hers and was hoping to pass them down i think. i always dreaded having to open those distinctly barbie shaped boxes at birthday parties too.
@heartny Yeah, we had the wooden ones too.
These must have come later (after the invention of plastic) but that’s what /image found and I was too lazy to search it.
I loved them as a kid, took a break from them in high school/college, then came back to them in 2010. I now have a minifig collection over 700 strong and about 250 sets which are all broken down and sorted into parts bins for my own builds. Shoutout to r/lego and r/legotrade. Also, the plural of Lego is whatever the fsck you want it to be. Sorry, I just hate pedants and the lego vs legos argument is a pet peeve.
@jerk_nugget Yeah the argument is that if people refer to building bricks in general as “legos”, Lego could lose the copyright on the name Lego. Why should anyone other than Lego’s lawyers care about that? Megablocks having the right to say “Lego compatible” on their packaging ain’t the end of the world.
@rprebel for real! lego is doing just fine everybody calls cotton swabs qtips and facial tissues kleenex, and in some parts of the south i’m told they even call soda coke. and we’re all still here, nothing to get up in arms about.
I had some sets, but I also had a few of the big blue buckets for when I wanted to build something of my own. Still how I do things, though I have more sets now.
@turtle_2014 same. I’ve actually purchased a few dupes over the years for later resale. Lego is a legitimate investment in my mind, not just because they are pricey. A bit of luck and an understanding of the resale market and it quickly becomes a financially self-sustaining hobby.
@hanzov69 I sell resell Legos as a hobby too. You can easily double your money on them. You just have to find the people who don’t know the value of them, since they sell them considerably less than their value
@turtle_2014 Yeah, I haven’t made it in to the secondary buyers market for resale yet, but I think about it quite a bit. Mostly I buy kits that I’m interested in, doubling up on ones that I think will have a strong resale at a later date. Stick the box in the closet and then periodically take a look at eBay / different AFOL forums. When it “feels” right, sell sell sell!
@hanzov69 I don’t buy new sets to sell them later, since you never know if it will go up in value or not. I wish I would’ve bought the Speed Champions when they first came out They are crazy expensive now. It seems like if Lego comes out with a new theme, the first sets go for a lot later on. But then there was Chima, Galaxy Squad, Alien Conquest, that don’t sell for anything, so it’s a gamble pretty much.
@turtle_2014 I’ve had fairly consistent results with Star Wars UCS sets. Recently, these seem to be in bigger production/longer availability cycles which might hurt the value down the road. I fear the 75192 Millennium Falcon might be one such case.
That said, to date I’ve ever encountered a retired UCS set that I wasn’t able to sell NIB for at least a slight profit, even if it only covers basic interest / inflation.
I still regret not purchasing a second 10179 Millennium Falcon. There was a point where I saw NIB going for ~$3k
@hchavers You had mud?! Huh. We were too poor to have mud, so my sister and I had to use dirt we dug out of the back yard. Really, really hard to make it stick together to build castles and such, though.
I bought a Classic set on Black Friday. First time in my life I fussed about with LEGOs was a few weeks ago. For the moment it’s captivated my interest. Now I need more. I have no minifigs and I cannot help thinking I’m missing out on something.
How I played with Lego as a kid and how I play with them now are very different.
When I was a kid, we got sets and also bulk bricks. The sets were built once, instructions lost, and then the sum of the parts were consumed by the massive tub of Lego. I had a lot of the 80s Space and Castle sets, as well as a number of Town sets. My brother and I often built large towns, but I was always very strict about not mixing genres. There were no castles in our towns, and no gardens in our space stations.
As an adult I’m borderline Lord Business. I have a lot of sets, but once they are built they are left intact and unadulterated. I don’t “play” with them, and they are kept well out of the reach of child visitors. Which may seem mean, but trust me, I have plenty of toys in my house that they can play with.
@hanzov69 Kids are like a Lego collector’s nightmare I completely understand. I have bought Legos on eBay, etc, and pieces are sticky, bitten, colored, you name it, I’ve received it all. A huge disappointment, especially when the seller say they are in “good” condition.
i only had the big legos for little kids. (yes, they were legos.) there was one piece that had googly eyes on it, that was my favorite
the tiny legos were never on my radar at all, not sure why. as an adult i looked into the sets about five years ago bc i have friends that do them and it seemed fun but holy shit, they’re just comically expensive. so hard pass. my partner is a gamer tho, and we did have fun putting together several character sets for the lego dimensions game.
@hanzov69 yes, which are legos my parenthetical comment was just to say that they weren’t megablocks or another lego knockoff, sorry for the confusion.
and yeah the lego game is awesome! i’m inept at gaming lol so i’m at the mercy of when my partner wants to play so i can watch haha. i get to put together the sets tho and that’s the best part! the adventure time set is my favorite.
we also have the disney infinity game (rip) which is unrelated to the topic at hand but for the fact that it’s another video game that has truly wonderful real life pieces.
Sometimes I would build a small Lego box and put a firecracker inside. I was attempting to build one strong enough to stay together, but they were all shrapnel throwing IEDs…
We had a bucket of loose Lego parts and one or two generic kits (I remember a twin engine plane and a pickup truck). This is before all the licensing and movie tie-ins so they were generic. I kept the plane parts marked so we could rebuild it but they were also used for whatever assembly I or we were working on
Wood tinker-toys and Lincoln logs also, and a Gilbert erector set with a motor. And lead soldiers with spring loaded cannons that could shoot the short tinker toy dowels across the room. And Tonka construction equipment, and room in the back yard where grass didn’t grow for construction sites and mud pits and pitched battles in trenches and caves and redoubts with reinforcing structures made from all the building toys.
And we survived, eyes and intellects intact, having had more fun than many kids could even imagine.
All of the toys except the precious lead soldiers went to my nephews and nieces; hopefully they had as much fun as we did.
My parents never bought me legos, but I played with my brother’s sets with him. I’d say it was inherently sexist on my parents’ part, but I never asked for any.
@JoetatoChip@ruouttaurmind yeah, I don’t think Lego needs to be pink or purple in order for a girl to take interest in it, but I also think I was pretty directly shoved in the doll-collecting/house-playing market from a very young age. My parents started out buying very gender-specific toys for each of us, so l think I was kind of trained to play with Barbies and not Lego. Plus I had three previously indoctrinated sisters, so there was definitely peer pressure to live up to a stereotypical female expectation. I enjoyed playing with the cool forest-based sets he had. Kind of like a Robin Hood sort of feel to them.
@jitc I get it. But the “girly” colors are sort of an enabler for parents who are stuck in the gender stereotype and make it ok for girls to be interested in building stuff. Exposure to the idea that it’s ok for girls to create and build and design… I believe that can leave a lasting influence on kids.
I only got a few sets as a kid, space pirates and ninjas/samurai. Mostly just standard Legos, though. My favorite thing to build was starwars-style space ships.
As of last Christmas my daughter is now getting into Legos, which is awesome! I didn’t have my whole collection as a kid but I did still have all the figures and a lot of the “special” pieces kicking around still and was able to gift them to her. Great feels.
There were no Legos when I was a kid.
@pooflady ummm…Lincoln Logs?
@mfladd @pooflady And Tinker Toys also dirt!
@pooflady I looked up ‘Legos’, the plastic modern blocks were patented in 1958. I still never saw or heard of them growing up.
I loved my Erector Set for building, and a small Lincoln Log set that was rarely used.
@pooflady Yeah, had no Legos. Did have Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, and a small Erector set. I think the Erector set might actually have had a small motor to work as a winch (9V battery, maybe?)
A little older, several of the Heathkit line were the fun, happening things.
@pooflady My brother & I got our first Lego sets in 1970. Of course, we were visiting Norway with our grandparents at the time (don’t remember if we picked them up while traveling thru Denmark)
@daveinwarsh Have lots of older cousins; as a kid inherited quite a few classic old toys & games. Favorites were Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoy and especially the original 12" GI Joe items. Plus, my dad still had all of his Erector & Lionel from the '40s & '50s.
@mfladd @pooflady we had Lee Logs.
@pooflady Ditto. Like the others said… Lincoln logs, Tinker toys and erector sets (I saw an old fashioned set a few weeks ago in an antique store).
@mfladd @pooflady The Lincoln Logs I got as a kid were real wood, too. I never got Tinkertoys, as I made it plain [to Santa, of course] that I thought they were boring. Got my first Barbie doll for Christmas 1959, more for my mother than for me. She was a made sewer and loved all the delicately assembled clothing available for Barbie. Never was all that much interested in the doll.
@magic_cave Your mom was a made sewer? Did she ever make you a quilt that you couldn’t refuse?
@pooflady We still have my husband’s Lincoln Logs. The grandkids played with them and now we have a great-grandson getting to the right age.
@magic_cave @mfladd @pooflady i never liked barbies and felt bad as my mom saved all hers and was hoping to pass them down i think. i always dreaded having to open those distinctly barbie shaped boxes at birthday parties too.
@mfladd @pooflady @ThatsHeadly I’ve never seen Lee Logs, they must have lost the sales war with Lincoln Logs.
/image Tinkertoys
@2many2no These look like they are made of plastic. Mine were made of wood. Great for getting splinters.
@heartny Yeah, we had the wooden ones too.
These must have come later (after the invention of plastic) but that’s what /image found and I was too lazy to search it.
I loved them as a kid, took a break from them in high school/college, then came back to them in 2010. I now have a minifig collection over 700 strong and about 250 sets which are all broken down and sorted into parts bins for my own builds. Shoutout to r/lego and r/legotrade. Also, the plural of Lego is whatever the fsck you want it to be. Sorry, I just hate pedants and the lego vs legos argument is a pet peeve.
@rprebel That should be “Lego vs. Legos”
@rprebel wow, i didn’t even know such an argument was a thing. #themoreyouknow
@macromeh Why stop there? It should actually be “LEGO bricks” because who doesn’t love having lawyers tell you how to use your own language?
@jerk_nugget Yeah the argument is that if people refer to building bricks in general as “legos”, Lego could lose the copyright on the name Lego. Why should anyone other than Lego’s lawyers care about that? Megablocks having the right to say “Lego compatible” on their packaging ain’t the end of the world.
@rprebel for real! lego is doing just fine
everybody calls cotton swabs qtips and facial tissues kleenex, and in some parts of the south i’m told they even call soda coke. and we’re all still here, nothing to get up in arms about.
@jerk_nugget @rprebel Can confirm all brown caffinated drinks are coke. Southern girl for life.
I had some sets, but I also had a few of the big blue buckets for when I wanted to build something of my own. Still how I do things, though I have more sets now.
Ahem. It’s LEGO bricks, not Legos. (For rprebel)
I still collect Lego sets / minifigures, etc. Have a few thousand $$$ worth. I used to play with them when I was younger, but now I just display them.
@turtle_2014 same. I’ve actually purchased a few dupes over the years for later resale. Lego is a legitimate investment in my mind, not just because they are pricey. A bit of luck and an understanding of the resale market and it quickly becomes a financially self-sustaining hobby.
@hanzov69 I sell resell Legos as a hobby too. You can easily double your money on them. You just have to find the people who don’t know the value of them, since they sell them considerably less than their value
@turtle_2014 Yeah, I haven’t made it in to the secondary buyers market for resale yet, but I think about it quite a bit. Mostly I buy kits that I’m interested in, doubling up on ones that I think will have a strong resale at a later date. Stick the box in the closet and then periodically take a look at eBay / different AFOL forums. When it “feels” right, sell sell sell!
@hanzov69 I don’t buy new sets to sell them later, since you never know if it will go up in value or not. I wish I would’ve bought the Speed Champions when they first came out
They are crazy expensive now. It seems like if Lego comes out with a new theme, the first sets go for a lot later on. But then there was Chima, Galaxy Squad, Alien Conquest, that don’t sell for anything, so it’s a gamble pretty much.
@turtle_2014 I’ve had fairly consistent results with Star Wars UCS sets. Recently, these seem to be in bigger production/longer availability cycles which might hurt the value down the road. I fear the 75192 Millennium Falcon might be one such case.
That said, to date I’ve ever encountered a retired UCS set that I wasn’t able to sell NIB for at least a slight profit, even if it only covers basic interest / inflation.
I still regret not purchasing a second 10179 Millennium Falcon. There was a point where I saw NIB going for ~$3k
My parents couldn’t afford Legos. I build things with water and dirt, otherwise known as mud.
@hchavers - We had to use sand - we needed that mud for the garden where we grew our vegetables!
@hchavers You had mud?! Huh. We were too poor to have mud, so my sister and I had to use dirt we dug out of the back yard. Really, really hard to make it stick together to build castles and such, though.
I bought a Classic set on Black Friday. First time in my life I fussed about with LEGOs was a few weeks ago. For the moment it’s captivated my interest. Now I need more. I have no minifigs and I cannot help thinking I’m missing out on something.
Built the kits, played with them for a few days, then tore them down and put all the parts into genpop for my own creations.
@dannybeans hahaha, genpop, love it.
The Logs, baby. The Lincoln Logs.
I made some square houses. Some square vehicles and occasionally a triangle.
oh and staircases.
How I played with Lego as a kid and how I play with them now are very different.
When I was a kid, we got sets and also bulk bricks. The sets were built once, instructions lost, and then the sum of the parts were consumed by the massive tub of Lego. I had a lot of the 80s Space and Castle sets, as well as a number of Town sets. My brother and I often built large towns, but I was always very strict about not mixing genres. There were no castles in our towns, and no gardens in our space stations.
As an adult I’m borderline Lord Business. I have a lot of sets, but once they are built they are left intact and unadulterated. I don’t “play” with them, and they are kept well out of the reach of child visitors. Which may seem mean, but trust me, I have plenty of toys in my house that they can play with.
@hanzov69 Kids are like a Lego collector’s nightmare
I completely understand. I have bought Legos on eBay, etc, and pieces are sticky, bitten, colored, you name it, I’ve received it all. A huge disappointment, especially when the seller say they are in “good” condition.
i only had the big legos for little kids. (yes, they were legos.) there was one piece that had googly eyes on it, that was my favorite
the tiny legos were never on my radar at all, not sure why. as an adult i looked into the sets about five years ago bc i have friends that do them and it seemed fun but holy shit, they’re just comically expensive. so hard pass. my partner is a gamer tho, and we did have fun putting together several character sets for the lego dimensions game.
@jerk_nugget Not a pedantic comment, but I believe you’re referring to “Duplo”.
I find myself playing with them when I’m waiting at my doctors office.
Lego Dimensions… I absolutely love that game! I have all the sets at this point, and I still periodically fire it up as I work on 100%ing the game.
@hanzov69 yes, which are legos
my parenthetical comment was just to say that they weren’t megablocks or another lego knockoff, sorry for the confusion.
and yeah the lego game is awesome! i’m inept at gaming lol so i’m at the mercy of when my partner wants to play so i can watch haha. i get to put together the sets tho and that’s the best part! the adventure time set is my favorite.
we also have the disney infinity game (rip) which is unrelated to the topic at hand but for the fact that it’s another video game that has truly wonderful real life pieces.
FOOLS! TOOLS! JEWELS! AWESOME!
Sometimes I would build a small Lego box and put a firecracker inside. I was attempting to build one strong enough to stay together, but they were all shrapnel throwing IEDs…
We had a bucket of loose Lego parts and one or two generic kits (I remember a twin engine plane and a pickup truck). This is before all the licensing and movie tie-ins so they were generic. I kept the plane parts marked so we could rebuild it but they were also used for whatever assembly I or we were working on
Wood tinker-toys and Lincoln logs also, and a Gilbert erector set with a motor. And lead soldiers with spring loaded cannons that could shoot the short tinker toy dowels across the room. And Tonka construction equipment, and room in the back yard where grass didn’t grow for construction sites and mud pits and pitched battles in trenches and caves and redoubts with reinforcing structures made from all the building toys.
And we survived, eyes and intellects intact, having had more fun than many kids could even imagine.
All of the toys except the precious lead soldiers went to my nephews and nieces; hopefully they had as much fun as we did.
My parents never bought me legos, but I played with my brother’s sets with him. I’d say it was inherently sexist on my parents’ part, but I never asked for any.
@jitc LEGO has evolved in that regard, now offering several sets and themes directly targeted to girls.
@jitc @ruouttaurmind Also now toy stores are finally meshing together the “boys” and “girls” toy sections into one genderless toy section.
@JoetatoChip @ruouttaurmind yeah, I don’t think Lego needs to be pink or purple in order for a girl to take interest in it, but I also think I was pretty directly shoved in the doll-collecting/house-playing market from a very young age. My parents started out buying very gender-specific toys for each of us, so l think I was kind of trained to play with Barbies and not Lego. Plus I had three previously indoctrinated sisters, so there was definitely peer pressure to live up to a stereotypical female expectation. I enjoyed playing with the cool forest-based sets he had. Kind of like a Robin Hood sort of feel to them.
@jitc I get it. But the “girly” colors are sort of an enabler for parents who are stuck in the gender stereotype and make it ok for girls to be interested in building stuff. Exposure to the idea that it’s ok for girls to create and build and design… I believe that can leave a lasting influence on kids.
@ruouttaurmind yeah, it’s a pity that it’s a step we have to take to make that happen, but I get it.
Legos didn’t get sold in the US until 1962. I did play with Lincoln logs and and an erector set that came in a metal box before that time.
@olperfesser I recently bought a couple Meccano sets from Erector. Definitely not the same Erector kits I remember as a kid.
I only got a few sets as a kid, space pirates and ninjas/samurai. Mostly just standard Legos, though. My favorite thing to build was starwars-style space ships.
As of last Christmas my daughter is now getting into Legos, which is awesome! I didn’t have my whole collection as a kid but I did still have all the figures and a lot of the “special” pieces kicking around still and was able to gift them to her. Great feels.
POKER! JOKER! NOT MEDIOCRE! AWESOME!
I mixed all the vintage star wars sets onto a big tub and had a free for all with more money worth of Legos than I could ever know.
I was really good at stacking them…