Unpopular Opinions about LEGO

[Lion King]

On 7/6/2024 at 12:49 PM, Murdoch17 said:

Just so you are a And aren't Brick-built items (such as animals) the literal point of LEGO?

Sure but so what? Alexandria doens’t like builtable creaures and you like them.  And I don’t like buildable creatures myself. This is our unpopular opinion. 

However I can understand that Jaws shark is such larger than humans. It’s really nice to pose easily fo a display. If you love that shark, YAY!

J

 

Anyways, this topic is drifted away somehwere…. I agree with TeriXeri.  Sharks are killed globally, might upsetting a natural balance. Sharks have important role in ocean - they get rid of sick fish by keeping oceans more healthy. t They actually kill humans LESS than falling coconuts. I feel it’s a bad idea to produce a sparking-killing set to inspire potential extinciton of sharks (even Greatk White Shark) …. Sorry I’m fired up over this set. I understand it’s just a movie stuff but…. But it’s sad to see the diminishing numbers of shark spieces in our time. 

I don’t think this will appeal to a wider audience, such AFOL conservationalists.

Edited July 8, 2024 by Lion King

[Peppermint_M]

Znap is kind of neat and the parts I have are interesting to work with.

Now there is an unpopular opinion 

Also, when there is a lot to play about with, Galidor can be quite fun.

[Feuer Zug]

1 hour ago, Peppermint_M said:

Znap is kind of neat and the parts I have are interesting to work with.

Now there is an unpopular opinion 

Also, when there is a lot to play about with, Galidor can be quite fun.

Intergrating ZNAP pieces into MOCs is fun when they form a functional part of the structure.

We'll have to disagree about Galidor. That is an unpopular opinion you have.

[MAB]

2 hours ago, Peppermint_M said:

Also, when there is a lot to play about with, Galidor can be quite fun.

Galidor can be fun, especially if you see at as semi-realistic human and robot parts that can connect with system built parts. I remember spending hours with my kids making arms and legs and occasionally heads to attach to the Galidor bodies. 

My (possibly unpopular but maybe not) opinion about Galidor is that many of the haters are only haters as they have been conditioned into thinking that by others without actually playing with it.

[Peppermint_M]

I was not a fan of the series, the sets were expensive when in shops and at the time, I would have wanted to spend my limited money on system sets. However, after meeting someone with a real interest in something so far off the norm of LEGO who had built up an extensive collection of parts, it was a lot of fun. We are talking a pretty big collection to work with, so all kinds of weird and interesting figure could be built. We are talking a huge pile of parts to play with, so it was genuinely fun to mess around and make strange and abstract creatures.

[Feuer Zug]

22 hours ago, MAB said:

Galidor can be fun, especially if you see at as semi-realistic human and robot parts that can connect with system built parts. I remember spending hours with my kids making arms and legs and occasionally heads to attach to the Galidor bodies. 

My (possibly unpopular but maybe not) opinion about Galidor is that many of the haters are only haters as they have been conditioned into thinking that by others without actually playing with it.

I do have two Galidor sets with a few extra parts I've acquired over the years. My biggest issue was they didn't really go well with a minifig sized world and creations. I will admit it is fun to graft different parts and limbs onto them.

[MAB]

1 hour ago, Feuer Zug said:

I do have two Galidor sets with a few extra parts I've acquired over the years. My biggest issue was they didn't really go well with a minifig sized world and creations. I will admit it is fun to graft different parts and limbs onto them.

Yes, but then that is similar to the more recent buildable action figures. These have many more attachment points for system parts, but still out of scale with minifigure worlds.

[Gorilla94]

I don't get why Lego added so many just slightly different skin colours to flesh minifigures in the last year and the renaming of colours is just confusing and stupid :/ It makes kitbashes prettymuch impossible now. Echos printed arms from the Marvel cmf for example would look so awesome on a dwarf warrior I build, but the new skin colour does not match :(

Besides the practical issues when it comes to building stuff the yellowish "light tan" used for asian characters (even Cho Chang, who in fact perfectly matches the light flesh skin colour in real life - unlike many "white" people, which still get made in that colour) seems in fact racist to me...

 

[Classic_Spaceman]

2 hours ago, Gorilla94 said:

Besides the practical issues when it comes to building stuff the yellowish "light tan" used for asian characters (even Cho Chang, who in fact perfectly matches the light flesh skin colour in real life - unlike many "white" people, which still get made in that colour) seems in fact racist to me...

Look at her beside Harry in even lighting - Her skin is a bit darker and lacks the pink undertones that Harry (light nougat) has. 

2 hours ago, Gorilla94 said:

unlike many "white" people, which still get made in that colour

Cara Dune was rendered in nougat, despite Gina Carano being white; the new medium tan would have been perfect for her, but it was not in production at the time. 
 

[Aanchir]

My main gripe with some of the new skin tones is that they're still ONLY being used as skin tones in sets, when some of them could be extremely useful elsewhere. A color like Warm Tan would be perfect for a lot of treated wood furniture and flooring that Brick Yellow/Tan would be too pale for, but Bright Yellow would be too vibrant for (including the wood floors my wife and I have in the living room area of our apartment). They could also potentially make good hair colors for some minifigures and mini-dolls.

I'm thankful that we have gotten some more basic building elements in Warm Tan thanks to the Mona Lisa, BrickHeadz, etc, but even that is very limiting compared to the sheer variety of uses we see for other colors on LEGO's current color palette.

[Renny The Spaceman]

I don't know if this counts but is it a generally noticed thing how the graphic design style of the first 2 CMFs, compared to the usual LEGO style, is slightly different?

Like there's the obvious thing in how they have any wrinkles or other contours of faces done with lines the same colour and thickness of their mouths but it's also more than that

I don't know how to explain it properly but I swear they have more angular/slightly thicker (?) look, mixed with the colours used makes their design feel very noughties to me.

Maybe I'm going insane here but I get a strong feeling whenever I see so many of these figures that LEGO simply would not make them look like that today.

Spoiler

 

[Aanchir]

Part of the reason for this is probably that Medium Nougat wasn't on the LEGO color palette in 2010. Moreover, LEGO's current minifigure style guide also came out in 2010, so it's likely that the 2010 minifigs were released before those guidelines were finalized.

Note that in the below tweet, minifigures from the first three blind-bag series appear on the cover of the minifig style guide, which would appear to reinforce that they were designed before the guide itself was published (though since the style guide was put together by people who were on the design team for the CMFs, they certainly exhibited a lot of the same features which would end up in the finished style guide, like eye and mouth placement).

 

Edited July 10, 2024 by Aanchir

[Classic_Spaceman]

15 minutes ago, Aanchir said:

Moreover, LEGO's current minifigure style guide also came out in 2010, so it's likely that the 2010 minifigs were released before those guidelines were finalized.

TIL this existed! It makes sense that LEGO would have some kind of internal documentation regarding Minifig design (to prevent late-90's/early-00's abominations!), but I was not aware that this was publicly known. Do we have any scans of the style guide, or pics of some of the pages? I am very curious to see what LEGO's specific standards are! 
 

[Horation]

16 hours ago, Classic_Spaceman said:

Do we have any scans of the style guide, or pics of some of the pages? I am very curious to see what LEGO's specific standards are! 
 

Most of it is likely rather boring (ex : legal or production requirements), but they probably also explain how to "lego-ify" someone correctly. You can surely send that man a message requesting a copy or ask Lego's customer services for it. They might just let you take a look.

Edited July 11, 2024 by Horation
Small rewrite

[Gorilla94]

On 7/10/2024 at 5:58 PM, Aanchir said:

My main gripe with some of the new skin tones is that they're still ONLY being used as skin tones in sets, when some of them could be extremely useful elsewhere. A color like Warm Tan would be perfect for a lot of treated wood furniture and flooring that Brick Yellow/Tan would be too pale for, but Bright Yellow would be too vibrant for (including the wood floors my wife and I have in the living room area of our apartment).

This reminds me so much of that American Dad joke "Have you seen that woman?" - "Oh, I know her. Want me to introduce you?" - "Oh, no it is about her sunburned skin. I thought about exactly that colour for a new leather couch" - "Oh, yeah, that would be neat"... :,D

To be honest, I'd be gratefull, if Lego made more of the standard elements in the older existing colours first. For my newest prroject I had to get several really basic parts like certain standard Tiles in dark green from other companies... and I was lucky at least those had them.

On 7/9/2024 at 9:29 PM, Classic_Spaceman said:

Her skin is a bit darker and lacks the pink undertones that Harry (light nougat) has

Oh, I see... Hm... Well, I still don't see the yellowish light tan fitting her, but I understand now why light flesh was not chosen.

On 7/9/2024 at 9:29 PM, Classic_Spaceman said:

Cara Dune was rendered in nougat, despite Gina Carano being white; the new medium tan would have been perfect for her, but it was not in production at the time. 

Yeah... that is one more reason I don't understand the concept of "white", "black" and so on. I would never have thought of the actress being "white" to begin with to be honest... Besides that I do not see any worth in this cathegorisation. In Germany everyone thinks you are a Nazi, If you just mention the term race applied to humans, because of our history.

[Classic_Spaceman]

9 hours ago, Gorilla94 said:

Yeah... that is one more reason I don't understand the concept of "white", "black" and so on. I would never have thought of the actress being "white" to begin with to be honest... Besides that I do not see any worth in this cathegorisation. In Germany everyone thinks you are a Nazi, If you just mention the term race applied to humans, because of our history.

I was just showing that LEGO decides what colour to use for characters based on what colour in the palette best matches their on-screen skin tone, rather than by arbitrary racial definitions - Specifically in reference to their using medium tan for Cho and Sabine (who were too dark and too light respectively in LEGO form, until the introduction of medium tan). 
 

[Renny The Spaceman]

On 7/10/2024 at 8:16 PM, Aanchir said:

Part of the reason for this is probably that Medium Nougat wasn't on the LEGO color palette in 2010. Moreover, LEGO's current minifigure style guide also came out in 2010, so it's likely that the 2010 minifigs were released before those guidelines were finalized.

Note that in the below tweet, minifigures from the first three blind-bag series appear on the cover of the minifig style guide, which would appear to reinforce that they were designed before the guide itself was published (though since the style guide was put together by people who were on the design team for the CMFs, they certainly exhibited a lot of the same features which would end up in the finished style guide, like eye and mouth placement).

 

That's really cool, didn't know about this. I'm glad that they were produced before this as I'm quite partial to the look of those first 2 CMFs. I think they look a bit more close to the Matthew Patterson concept art. It's also nice to have some minifigures who are stylistically distinct in the face without being dubiously racist.

 

On 7/11/2024 at 12:34 PM, Horation said:

Most of it is likely rather boring (ex : legal or production requirements), but they probably also explain how to "lego-ify" someone correctly. You can surely send that man a message requesting a copy or ask Lego's customer services for it. They might just let you take a look.

[danth]

Not sure if unpopular but:

The current state of CMF collecting is...pretty good.

Scanner apps are way better than trying to feel through bags, which I was never good at. If people want specific figs, getting and using the app is doable. But it's just enough jumping through hoops that kids/and or casuals will still buy randomly.

I was able to get multiples of exactly what I wanted of the Space CMF easily with a scanner app, but never by feeling. Honestly if Lego was smart they would make their own scanner app and gamify it a little bit.

[JohnTPT17]

2 hours ago, danth said:

Not sure if unpopular but:

The current state of CMF collecting is...pretty good.

Scanner apps are way better than trying to feel through bags, which I was never good at. If people want specific figs, getting and using the app is doable. But it's just enough jumping through hoops that kids/and or casuals will still buy randomly.

I was able to get multiples of exactly what I wanted of the Space CMF easily with a scanner app, but never by feeling. Honestly if Lego was smart they would make their own scanner app and gamify it a little bit.

I think the other half of that is that they've done away with "rarities" in a particular box - you're always going to get three sets per box, guaranteed, without leftovers (barring packing errors). Not only does that mean there's probably less of the "bad" ones left on store shelves, but there's more opportunities to get the "good" ones, that might have otherwise been in lower supply. I do wish series were a little bigger - some could really go beyond just a dozen minifigs - but that's the only downside I see.

[MAB]

11 hours ago, JohnTPT17 said:

I think the other half of that is that they've done away with "rarities" in a particular box - you're always going to get three sets per box, guaranteed, without leftovers (barring packing errors). Not only does that mean there's probably less of the "bad" ones left on store shelves, but there's more opportunities to get the "good" ones, that might have otherwise been in lower supply. I do wish series were a little bigger - some could really go beyond just a dozen minifigs - but that's the only downside I see.

When I collected them, we were used to getting 48 unlicensed characters per year, 16 per series. That has obviously been cut to just 12 per year now, with the smaller number per series and two licensed series per year taking the place of unlicensed series.

For unlicensed series, they seemed to run out of ideas as they started repeating ideas too frequently and there were also complaints about the difficulty of keeping up with collecting the whole series before they disappeared from stores (before the days of buying whole boxes). I guess that partly fed into the changes, although sales numbers going down for the unlicensed series while having strong sales when the licensed series were introduced is probably the main driver for what we have today.

[Black Falcon]

6 hours ago, MAB said:

When I collected them, we were used to getting 48 unlicensed characters per year, 16 per series. That has obviously been cut to just 12 per year now, with the smaller number per series and two licensed series per year taking the place of unlicensed series.

Which is just not true. We had at least one unlicensed series and one licensed each year, with the third beein either of both.

And honestly, sure there are repeats in the series, if we just look at the number of knights for instance. But in the end they are one of the most popular figures in each series they are included and it isn´t like they all look alike, so I am totally fine with getting more knights ;).

Edited July 27, 2024 by Black Falcon

[MAB]

9 hours ago, Black Falcon said:

Which is just not true. We had at least one unlicensed series and one licensed each year, with the third beein either of both.

And honestly, sure there are repeats in the series, if we just look at the number of knights for instance. But in the end they are one of the most popular figures in each series they are included and it isn´t like they all look alike, so I am totally fine with getting more knights ;).

What exactly do you think is not true? There were three unlicensed sets per year up to 2014, although in the UK we got the extra Team GB in 2012. 

[Black Falcon]

2 minutes ago, MAB said:

What exactly do you think is not true? There were three unlicensed sets per year up to 2014, although in the UK we got the extra Team GB in 2012. 

That we are getting two licensed Series each year lately. We had that happening, but it is just not true that it happens every year now. I mean, this year we had two unlicensed so far, and with DnD will only get one licensed for example. Last year it was 2 licensed and one unlicensed but 2022 is was 2 unlicensed again with only one licensed.

[MAB]

8 hours ago, Black Falcon said:

That we are getting two licensed Series each year lately. We had that happening, but it is just not true that it happens every year now. I mean, this year we had two unlicensed so far, and with DnD will only get one licensed for example. Last year it was 2 licensed and one unlicensed but 2022 is was 2 unlicensed again with only one licensed.

And in the early days of CMF we were getting three series of 16 = 48 unlicensed minifigures per year which you claimed was just not true. It is true. 

[Black Falcon]

2 hours ago, MAB said:

And in the early days of CMF we were getting three series of 16 = 48 unlicensed minifigures per year which you claimed was just not true. It is true. 

Lol you even asked what I meant with beeing not true, and I explained it to you.

Well to be honest, when I read my original answer I would get that impression to, since I am missing the word lately there, my bad.