What happened in 2006-2007?

[tppytel]

As a kid, I spent endless hours building things out of a pile of bricks made up of the earliest Space and Castle sets. I dropped out somewhere around the era of the Forestmen and never really looked closely at Lego again until I bought my son Luke's Landspeeder last Christmas. Since then, I've been building, researching, and buying incessantly. And what's really obvious in reading about old sets is that - in nearly every theme - 2006-2007 was a clear turning point in set design. Minifig printing became much more detailed, sets started looking much more realistic, the color palette expanded drastically, play features became more intricate and clever, etc. Even Technic shifted and started going studless.

Now, I know people have different opinions on the merits of the new style vs. the old one, and I don't really want to open that debate here. But I'd love to hear, from people who were around at the time, how and/or why exactly this shift took place. Was Lego responding to flagging demand? Were there a whole new crop of designers hired? Was there some kind of market research involved? What did the community think at the time? Was there a big announcement that Lego was changing, or did it just kind of happen? It seems like there must have been some interesting events going on, because the difference between, say, a set released in early 2006 vs one from late 2007 is night and day, like a whole new company took the idea of Lego bricks and completely rebooted it. That couldn't have happened without some excitement of some sort.

So, what happened?

[Brickdoctor]

I'm sure Aanchir can answer this better than I can, but in a nutshell, TLG was losing money and almost went bankrupt before then, so they rethought their themes and overhauled the color palette (including the changes from greys to bleys and browns to reddish browns).

[lightningtiger]

The good doctor is right, Lego started to fall apart way before 2006-2007 and it appears Star Wars Lego kept them afloat while they were trying to figure out what kids wanted for real and regain the ground lost to the evil MB !

They are still make the now and again boo-boo, like discontinuing Batman too early and trying Speed Racer out.....oh, dear.

Maybe they have learn't from their mistakes now eh ?

[David Thomsen]

I'm sure Aanchir can answer this better than I can...

Aanchir wrote the book called 'What Happened to Lego in 2006-2007'.

Incidentally I don't think the Speed Racer was so bad... how were they to know the movie would fail so badly? The cars themselves were actually quite good. Unfortunately they didn't bother creating proper headgear for a lot of the figs, which was something they should have done in the Last Airbender theme as well. I don't think they've made the same mistake since then, though.

[LEGO Guy Bri]

Whatever happened, thank Heavens they got out of Town Jr. and World City... That was a major disappointment. My dark age covered most of that time, so not too many sets I wanted that I had to find

[Yatkuu]

Interesting topic I must say. This "shift" occurred during my DA and when I came out I did not really asked myself what had happened to the smiley faces and old school Lego sets I knew as a kid - I just welcomed the change with enthusiasm.

That being said, no matter how successful these changes turned out to be I think a lot of people are still considering Lego as it was back then though – I see the reactions of people when they check my MF on my desk – “what? Is that Lego?”

Anyway – I would be happy to read what Pr. Aanchir (PhD in Legology) has to say about this!

[youtoo]

what had happened to the smiley faces and old school Lego sets I knew as a kid...

They transformed the original minifigs, blank avatars where to kids can project themselves (sorry this is the game designer in me talking) into ""cool"" bad boy characters (grins, scars, etc...)

They also brought guns into the mix, because kids probably like guns.

As you can see, not a big fan here... I still like many of the new sets, but I have to modify them to my own old-fashioned idea of Lego :)

Aanchir wrote the book called 'What Happened to Lego in 2006-2007'.

Where can we read that "book". Is there a thread explaining what happened?

[Joebot]

In short, I would say that Lego "lost their way." They got sidetracked by video games, amusement parks, clothes, and furniture, and they lost their focus on where their real value was -- a system of little plastic bricks. I think it was in '04 when they had a really dire financial report, after which they jettisoned a lot of that extraneous stuff, including selling off their amusement parks, and returned their focus to their core product.

Within 2-3 years, you saw the results in the revitalization of pretty much their entire product line. For those of us who lived through The Dark Times of Town Jr. and Galidor, it's been a pretty remarkable turnaround.

Not everything is all rainbows and unicorns though. Lego still makes mistakes, but they're fewer and less damaging. For example, I think Prince of Persia is largely regarded as a failure of a license, but even so, the sets and mini-figs were pretty cool. I had no interest in the license, but still bought about half of the theme.

And they've had some massive successes recently too, like the Collectible Mini-Figs. I'm also thinking that the Marvel / DC licenses are going to be like printing money. That could end up rivaling Star Wars.

[CP5670]

2003 was their really bad year, and they had been making steady losses for several years prior to that. Interestingly, they had actually turned around many things in 2003 and came out with some very good sets that year. However, there was a lot of bad stuff too. Also, many sets were remarkably cheap that year, with lower prices than we have ever seen before or since then. They had obviously tried to increase their volume of sales, and it was great for buyers like us, but turned out bad for them. 2004 was a better year in which they did at least break even.

In 2006-07, the main things that come to mind are the return of Space (Mars Mission) and non-police/fire/construction City sets, and the introduction of modular buildings with the Cafe Corner. That was also the time when they started various cost cutting and outsourcing operations that caused brick quality to suffer.

[Aanchir]

Guys, stop flattering me. I'm not sure I can live up to the reputation I seem to have acquired.

As a kid, I spent endless hours building things out of a pile of bricks made up of the earliest Space and Castle sets. I dropped out somewhere around the era of the Forestmen and never really looked closely at Lego again until I bought my son Luke's Landspeeder last Christmas. Since then, I've been building, researching, and buying incessantly. And what's really obvious in reading about old sets is that - in nearly every theme - 2006-2007 was a clear turning point in set design. Minifig printing became much more detailed, sets started looking much more realistic, the color palette expanded drastically, play features became more intricate and clever, etc. Even Technic shifted and started going studless.

Now, I know people have different opinions on the merits of the new style vs. the old one, and I don't really want to open that debate here. But I'd love to hear, from people who were around at the time, how and/or why exactly this shift took place. Was Lego responding to flagging demand? Were there a whole new crop of designers hired? Was there some kind of market research involved? What did the community think at the time? Was there a big announcement that Lego was changing, or did it just kind of happen? It seems like there must have been some interesting events going on, because the difference between, say, a set released in early 2006 vs one from late 2007 is night and day, like a whole new company took the idea of Lego bricks and completely rebooted it. That couldn't have happened without some excitement of some sort.

So, what happened?

I'm not entirely sure about all the things you mention about 2006. The color palette didn't expand too significantly-- the big color palette change I know of was in 2004, when a lot of old colors got discontinued and a lot of new colors were introduced. From 2006, I remember more about certain colors being discontinued than about new colors being introduced.

In 2006, the most significant color change was that 147 Sand Yellow Metallic (Bricklink's Flat Dark Gold) was replaced with 297 Warm Gold (Bricklink's Pearl Gold). Additionally, by 2007, many other old metallic colors were discontinued: 127 Gold (Bricklink's Pearl Light Gold), 145 Sand Blue Metallic (Bricklink's , and 189 Reddish Gold (one of three or so colors Bricklink calls Copper).

Additionally, 131 Silver (which I think is the earliest color Bricklink calls Pearl Light Gray) was discontinued, replaced with 296 Cool Silver (also identified as Pearl Light Gray). Cool Silver was slightly lighter than 131 Silver, and it was short-lived-- in 2007, 296 Cool Silver was discontinued and 131 Silver was reintroduced, remaining on the palette until last summer when it began to be phased out in favor of the new 315 Silver Metallic (which Bricklink identifies as Flat Silver).

2006 was also the last year for 217 Brown (Bricklink's Dark Flesh) and 50 Phosphorescent White (Bricklink's Glow-In-Dark Opaque), the latter of which was replaced with 294 Phosphorescent Green (Bricklink's Glow-In-Dark Transparent). Many Clikits colors, some of which Bricklink doesn't even identify, were also last seen in 2006. So there were changes to the color palette, and bigger ones than would be seen again in future years, but there wasn't a great expansion of it-- that had mostly taken place in 2004, and some of 2006's changes just simplified the confusing palette that 2004's restructuring had left behind.

There were a couple other new colors in 2006, such as 304 (unnamed, equivalent to Bricklink's Speckle DBGray-Silver) and 306 Defused Copper (Bricklink's Speckle Black-Copper). I'm not sure if either of these was ever used after 2006.

I think most of the changes in 2006, including color changes, were just a continuation of changes that had been taking place since at least 2004 when Jorgen Vig Knudstorp became CEO. It was a step in the revitalization of the LEGO brand, but changes to the color palette and set design had been ongoing for years before 2006, when a lot of these changes came to a head.

I can't really describe the LEGO community's reactions at the time since I wasn't a part of any LEGO communities besides some online BIONICLE fansites. In the BIONICLE community, 2006-2007 was a period with a bad reputation, blamed for a lot of changes in the theme, such as the removal of most gear functions from sets, the introduction of certain torso pieces which kept being used all the way through 2009, the increased size of sets (which had been ongoing for some time, but in 2006-2007 reached the peak it tended to remain at until 2010), and the end of blind-packaged "collectibles", replaced with identical ammo packs and then in mid-2007 discontinued completely. But I don't think any of these changes had any significant impact on the rest of the LEGO fandom, since they didn't reflect any considerable production changes for other sets.

So in short, I think that 2006 was not a solitary "turning point", but rather just the climax of a process that had begun around 2004, with sets becoming more complex, the color palette being reimagined, and many conceptual changes in themes like Technic and BIONICLE making their debut.

[CP5670]

Yes, I don't think we saw a whole lot of changes in 2006 specifically, except for the quality reductions. The modern style City sets (6-wide vehicles, mudguards, cheese slopes, etc.) and varied minifig prints had already caught on a few years earlier. In Technic, the move to studless construction started way back in 1998 or 1999, and the current style of completely studless models began in 2003.

[1980-Something-Space-Guy]

What was the purpose of color changes such as old brown to new, reddish brown? This must have cost Lego, so there must be some reason why it was expected to generate revenue, but I can't think of one.

[Brickdoctor]

What was the purpose of color changes such as old brown to new, reddish brown? This must have cost Lego, so there must be some reason why it was expected to generate revenue, but I can't think of one.

I think they decided the new colors were more vibrant and appealed more to the targeted audience.

[davee123]

2006-2007 was a clear turning point in set design. Minifig printing became much more detailed, sets started looking much more realistic, the color palette expanded drastically, play features became more intricate and clever, etc. Even Technic shifted and started going studless.

I think those trends have been pretty general. Technic's been going studless since the late 1990s. Also, play features have been getting more complex pretty gradually too-- but that's been a trend since as early as the late 1980's.

Figure detail has also been pretty gradual-- sets from the 1980's had very idealized printings on torsos, but slowly in the late 1990's and early 2000's, torsos started getting realistic touches like wrinkles in clothing (started becoming very common with Star Wars and Harry Potter).

But I'd love to hear [...] how and/or why exactly this shift took place.

So would we! It might be good to cite some specific examples from "before" and "after" so that we can see exactly what you're talking about. But in general, it's mostly been a gradual trend rather than a sudden one.

There were a few things that happened-- LEGO started looking to the hobbyist community in the early 2000s. They started hiring set designers from the pool of LEGO hobbyists in roughly 2005 onward, but the number of hobbyists employed by LEGO has been gradually growing-- it wasn't a sudden change, really.

When Jorgen took over in late 2004, he also changed quite a lot of how the company operated. The company was entrenched in a lot of age-old practices that were keeping quality levels pretty high, but were costing the company tons of money. They were also obsessed with certain "value" principles which slowly started getting weeded out, like more modern weaponry being allowed in sets (see Batman theme).

As for the community's reaction, it's been all over the place. Hobbyists were OUTRAGED (they don't make a font large enough) at the color change in 2004, to such a degree that I don't think we'll ever see it again. They were also pretty disappointed in 1997 with the advent of Juniorization (and have complained about it mildly ever since). But the fans have been really happy with the increased complexity and detail level of set design that's been introduced over the years-- as well as the increase in the variety of the color palette (it's a far cry from what it was back in, say, 1992).

Each new trend in LEGO has had a reaction from fans (there's almost nothing that goes by unnoticed), and most of the time, it's pretty variable depending on who's doing the talking. Things like Power Functions, Fleshy-colored minifigs, Pick-A-Brick, etc, mostly get a pretty varied reaction. Other things like the end of 9v trains, the VIP program, get pretty consistent reaction. So the reaction really depends on which of the kazillion changes you happen to be talking about.

I think they decided the new colors were more vibrant and appealed more to the targeted audience.

Yep! Again, market research. LEGO tested the new colors with kids, and the old colors with kids, and the new colors won hands-down. LEGO simply neglected to consider the fact that the hobby community is focused on continuity of the LEGO system. LEGO didn't consider AFOLs as even being really affected much at all by the change (or didn't care about our reaction), so they went ahead and changed the colors because they felt that it made an improvement in the product. ... And they were pretty much correct-- the new colors ARE probably better than the old ones-- but the disconnect it made for AFOLs was immensely strong compared to the small benefit of color improvement.

DaveE

[1980-Something-Space-Guy]

Thanks for your answers! I lived with the old colors. Personally, I don't mind the color change, except for the fact that while combining old and new pieces you often get color discrepancies, as you have mentioned.

[22kane]

Great topic! This has been a very interesting read. I remember walking through a toy store in my dark ages and I noticed the lack of Lego sets. When I was a kid the toy stores were jam packed with different sets so this was strange. Most of the sets were the soccer or football themed sets so this was around 2006 I guess. I was shocked that this was what Lego had become. Interactive Lego sets, much like board games or that old metal vibrating football game we had as children, this was the direction they went? It was actually quite depressing. Some of the bigger retailers around that time didn't carry a lot of different sets.

[Alywin]

Whatever happened, thank Heavens they got out of Town Jr. and World City... That was a major disappointment. My dark age covered most of that time, so not too many sets I wanted that I had to find

As a LEGO Town theme fan, I would say actually World City is the turning point saving the Town theme, starting to put the Town them on track from the stupid Town Junior. In my humble opinion, while World City might not be the best seller during its life in 2005 to 2006, World City pathed many new styles and ideas which are clearly differentiated from Classic Town and Town Junior and form the foundation for the current City and the revivial of Town theme.

I personally appreciate World City sets quite a lot.