Repetitious Childhood

I have rediscovered a joy from my younger years. I keep rediscovering this particular joy, which makes me wonder whether or not I really lost it in the first place, but there have at least been droughts. My point is:

LEGOS! I grew up during the Golden Age of Legos, when they first started expanding on the generic bricks, bringing in themes and storylines, designing more complicated masterpieces, and printing the LEGO magazine to go with it all. Some people bemoan and lament the loss of creativity that comes with the pre-designed project, and I agree that it would not do to get away from the free-form days of the "Bucket-Full-O-Bricks-and-No-Instructions" that characterized LEGO's early days. But anyone who has actually continued the LEGO tradition through the time of these designed projects knows that after a week of proudly displaying your finished work on top of your dresser or toy shelf, the 'masterpiece' would be torn apart, cannibalized and re-built in a new creation. I was always fascinated by the level of true engineering that went into these sets - making sure that not only did they look right, but they were structurally sound. Inventing new pieces that fit the theme and allowed for amazing new functionality - not just in the specific application imagined for the project piece, but in our own imaginative creations as well. Hinges were a big one for me, as was the advent of accessorizable people - swap heads, bodies, hands, feet, weapons, capes, helmets, bandannas, etc. etc. etc.

The result is that when I finally went back to digging through a random bucket of collected pieces, there were new opportunities opened up to me, and I had learned much about how to build a solid design of my own. And if a cowboy occupies a spaceship cockpit as it soars over a medieval castle guarded by Luke Skywalker and R2-D2, surely the submarine rescue crew won't notice that the ninjas have ganged up on Harry Potter...

Then there was the "Technic" subset of LEGO - a veritable erector set that eventually evolved to include programmable robots and science projects. This I think set the new direction for LEGO as they turned back to making their own original story lines. Bionicles entered the scene. This is after I first really quit playing with them, and I see it as part of the next era, an era I never fully belonged to. Bionicles were much bigger, but the emphasis was on the characters, and the storylines in the mini-comic books that LEGO put out. Build the characters, re-enact the comic book. There were no sets, no vehicles, no hideouts or strongholds. You didn't build places and things anymore, you built people. But basic pieces from the Technic sets are still visible - old technology and design ideas clearly used in these new sets. Now they have Kingdom Knights - similar pieces, but more typical design. The Bionicles were almost alien - insectoid - robotic - the Kingdom Knights are clearly supposed to be human - they are like their earlier medieval counterparts but on steroids.

Today I am playing LEGOs with my 10-year-old brother. We have designed and built our own "Mountaintop Waterfall Fortress" from pieces dating back to my childhood. No Bionicles or Kingdom Knights. Sorry for the long post, nostalgia will do that to ya. Now I've gotta go - the bandits are coming.