Lego depicting war is so depressing...
(well, except for Lego Star Wars of course, somehow that seems to pass both the corporate and my personal "no way toys!" filters)
(well, except for Lego Star Wars of course, somehow that seems to pass both the corporate and my personal "no way toys!" filters)
As a preventative, this was not entirely effective - we war-mad kids still had red bombers intercepted by white fighter aircraft over a battlefield of blue armoured vehicles, we didn't care!
The real military stuff comes from clones/competitors, not from Lego.
They weren't averse to reusing pieces to make guns (the early Star Wars sets used megaphones for that) and they have revolvers, etc: https://www.bricklink.com/catalogList.asp?catType=P&catStrin... has all Minifig, Weapon that are made by LEGO.
For my part, I remember (in addition to the SW kits) cavalry vs indians kits, full with sabers, rifles and pistol, which we often used with modern-day kits.
Until you watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WmLmPYvrMA
Seriously, were they holding a phone in their hand while moving minis around?
I made this when I was 14. Yeah, camera stability was a major problem for me in pretty much all my videos, and this one is especially bad.
I'm trying to remember exactly what I did over half my lifetime ago... This was made with a point and shoot camera. I think the 2nd shot was indeed me holding the camera with my hand. I don't think there's any actual character movement there though, so that shot didn't involve me moving the characters. I had the actual Episode 3 up and was going through it frame by frame trying to replicate the scene with the same camera angles and possibly camera movement. I think simply setting the camera on the table wouldn't have given me the angles I wanted. There was no tripod short enough to get the camera as low to the table as necessary. I would need cutouts in the set's floor for the camera, requiring multiple sets or a set that can be broken into different pieces. That was too complicated for me and I'm not even sure if I had a tripod at that time.
For the 1st shot, it looks like the camera is sitting on top of something (maybe a book) because its elevation seems constant. Its angle though is quite erratic, so I think I was tilting it down with my hand because simply setting it flat on the book wasn't giving the necessary downward angle.
For the last shot, I think the camera was sitting level on the table. This shot is the most stable, but is still pretty shaky. The camera had a shutter button that required a fair amount of force to press. Every time I pressed it there was a large chance that it would move the camera. Also it was a crowded set. Sticking my hands in there to move the characters often resulted in me bumping the camera.
For the 3rd shot, possibly the camera was also sitting on something.
Another problem is I think the camera was on autofocus, auto exposure, and auto whitebalance. So between each picture these settings could change, which also contributed to inconsistencies between frames. I don't even think that camera had the option of manual focus.
As I got better at stop motion, I started using a Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 USB webcam attached to my laptop. That allowed me to trigger a frame by pressing a key on my keyboard, which wouldn't shake the camera. I also then enabled manual focus, exposure, and whitebalance, and could use onion skinning. The camera also had hinges allowing the height and vertical angle to be adjusted easily. I focused more on keeping the camera steady, by building a LEGO cage around it, and trying to avoid bumping it while moving the characters.
I didn't have a cell phone at the time. I think I got my first phone a year and a half after this video. It was a feature phone and I think its picture quality was a lot worse than this point and shoot's quality or that of the QuickCam. I never thought about using it for stop motion; that would have been worse than this.
I’ll take a peer-reviewed cohort study before I believe that “Lego has been consistent in promoting aggressiveness”.
City kits always had police and my cousin mostly owned Castles/Knights. There were pirates and pirate ships with cannons that can shoot bricks (we loved those) Pirates seem to be mostly gone and replaced by Ninjago but police stuck around. No surprise, kids love police stories.
On the civilian side of Lego City, a large collection of civilian space exploration has been added. Space definitely has been demilitarized.
I'm from the region that is home to playmobil and we have a joke here that by count of items identifiable as "handgun" we have the world's largest guns manufacturer at our doorsteps, given the number of pirate and wild west kits sold each year.
I remember as a kid finding one of the then-old "shooty" cannons and it was the most prized one I had.
They've said that a main reason is there's a direct visible story with those, and their main customers are boys (not as much with LEGO Friends which is their first girl-oriented and successful line) and boys want conflict/story. "Save the people from a fire" or "catch the robber" - even a hospital falls a bit short there.
The old joke is LEGO City has fifty five thousand police stations, almost as many fire stations, one gas station, and one house.
The current hospital: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/hospital-60330 goes up against (at my count) two police stations, two fire stations, and some various "smaller" police/fire sets.
To be fair, LEGO has always had houses available, but they often fell under LEGO Classic or LEGO Creator (and now LEGO Friends).
Over time this has changed. There is an entire page on Wikipedia dedicated to chronicling this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_Lego
Because classic space had rayguns, and the pirate ships had working cannons.
But yearning for a 12 year period in the middle of the last century and talking about it as if deviating from it is a recent sign of the company losing its way, is a little odd IMHO.
It's literally written in the article that the person you are responding to linked. I'd recommend reading it.
I’m observing my kid picking up lego and assembling my old sets and they take that the same way without prompting.
Using bricklink as proof that the number of weapons increased is hilarious. Many kits used and still use regular bricks in places where they can clearly be read as weapons. (1) Lego definitely has a trend to make more specialized pieces now, so it’s not surprising at all that more specialized weapons show up.
(1) The cannonballs are listed as “Brick Round, 1x1 open stud”, because that’s what they originally are.
https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=3062...
The first minifigure is from 1978, the first weapon is from the same year.
There is demand for all sorts of things the society in general considers harmful.
If one chooses to offer it anyway, be prepared for the criticism.
Part of the problem is that dedicated toy stores are almost dead, so if Walmart or Target's shelf of LEGO doesn't have it, it basically doesn't exist.
When I was a kid I had a ton of castle sets. They were pretty much "neutral". Various factions doing their thing, some a bit more shady sure, but you could set up whichever story and alliance you wanted. In early 2000 it turned into humans vs ugly trolls. I felt like so much was taken away from kids by doing that.