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Holy Crap! Been gone for 2 weeks and all hell breaks loose here!! At first I thought I had been hijacked to another site.... Anyway.... any ever hear of something called "OLO"??? I thought not... neither did I... But just as Italy had Minitalia LEGO in the 1970-76 era.... it seems that Japan (first LEGO sold there in 1962)... also had an identity crisis of sorts... and it was called OLO... As with other imports... the Japanese never made it easy for imports to flourish there... even the Japanese themselves never much cared for a lot of foreign items. But due to a restricted distribution network and lack of accessibility to toy stores... TLG licensed a Japanese company called Fujisho Co. to make LEGO type sets for the Japanese market... from 1970-78... and this product was called OLO. OLO used the same type of "X" bottom bricks as Minitalia did in the 1970s in Italy. This was one of several patents that TLG had for their LEGO product... but this brick patent was apparently only used in Italy and Japan... and only in the early to mid 1970s. Here's the front of an OLO catalog.... And what is the difference between old Minitalia and OLO??? Minitalia on the left... OLO on the right... And here's the real reason that we know this to be LEGO.... the last page of the 1970 OLO catalog shows the parts packs available for the OLO system... and these are LEGO parts packs... with LEGO bricks (regular tube bottom). So OLO was sold in Japan alongside regular (not selling well) real LEGO... and OLO basic sets were about 1/2 the price of comparable sized LEGO basic sets. I've spent the last 2 weeks working on new chapters (yes there will be more than the current 73 chapters)... of my Unofficial LEGO Sets/Parts Collectors Guide... and these are just 3 of about 20 images of the rarely seen 1970s OLO sets from Japan. This chapter will be alongside the Italian Minitalia (1970-76) LEGO sets.... Gary Istok
