Shocking LEGO developments

[bcholmes]

So, I was hanging out in the toy store the other day and noticed that the people in the latest Harry Potter media tie-in LEGO aren't yellow.

According to LEGO press releases, this appears to have started last year with a set of NBA basketball sets.

I vaguely recall reading a study that suggested that kids play with media tie-in toys less creatively than "generic" toys like LEGO used to be, so I think I'm kinda against the new trend of media tie-in LEGO.

Comments

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

In a toy store last Christmas, I was really annoyed by how many toys were described by the packaging as "interactive" when that basically meant button pushing -- as opposed to Legos, K'Nex, Tinker Toys, whatever.

[thespian.livejournal.com]

are the non-tie in LEGO people still yellow, or has this been an across the board change?

[futabachan.livejournal.com]

I thought that LEGO was supposed to be getting away from tie-ins to focus on their core brick sets. Oh well.... :-/

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

What bothers me much more than such things (I'm not even sure that I think of it as bad that they now have multicoloured people) is the hyper-specialized pieces, which I suspect are much more what limits creativity. There are some sets where you can really only reasonably make a few things or even one thing with some of the pieces. Also, the tie-in legos tend to have a much smaller number of repurposable pieces, not only because of encroachment from specialized pieces, but because many have smaller counts to begin with.

Generic buckets of Lego encourage creativity much more. That has less to do with media tie-ins, solely, though, because Lego has been doing that for ages, before they were doing media tie-ins. They had a huge amount of space lego that came with specialized components that weren't media tie-ins, and pirate lego, fantasy lego, etc., before they became Harry Potter lego and so on.

I'd be interested in seeing how they measured that creativity, though. I mean, yes, if you have a bunch of Harry Potter Lego, you're more likely to make Harry Potter characters and other elements of the Harry Potter stories. However, does that reduce creativity, or just channel it elsewhere? (See also: Are fanfic writers less creative than original writers?)