Lego collaboration with Daft Punk | Hacker News Reader

Lego collaboration with Daft Punk

lego.com

83 pointspieterr61 comments

I'm so juiced to buy this. I went to Alive 2007 at Coney Island, which was a surprisingly intimate venue for the show (if this is your thing, go watch it if you haven't - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmR4zLcORNc), and it remains one of the more remarkable musical experiences I've had. One, it was pre-phone saturation, so the crowd was engaged and the experience was novel. Two, it was astoundingly unique at the time; the production values and concept were just so far forward. For those of you who are younger, it's a little hard to explain, but for me there is "before Alive" and "after Alive" in terms of larger scale electronic music performances. It's sort of like seeing the beginning of a new evolutionary tree. Then of course it becomes really interesting that Random Access Memories really was a fundamental rejection of the beast they'd helped generate. I thought it was super interesting that Bangalter did Ally Pally with Fred Again recently... he seems, along with a newer generation of DJs (Barry Can't Swim is another), to have gotten the message... took a while.

Edit: when I say the experience was novel, I mean I had only heard the faintest of news that I was going to this amazing show. I had no prior visual information on what to expect -

I have listened to Alive 2007 more than any other live album. I am unbelievably jealous.

I want to see the Sphere in Vegas, but so far there hasn’t been an act that interest me. Frankly, all I need are two actors in robot costumes to press play on Alive 2007.

Saw Alive 2007 in Tokyo at Summer Sonic. It was epic. So glad the album lets me relive the performance.

Saw Alive 2007 in Vegas at a music festival. Easily one of the most special shows I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot!

Thanks for sharing the video, but I haven't seen one that does justice to the actual live experience.

None do, tears in the rain!

If I had a time machine, one of the places I'd go back and visit is Lollapalooza 2007 to see the pyramid. That show changed how EDM shows would be staged and presented for the future.

It falls so short of the potential. Anyone can sell a Daft Punk branded lunchbox.

Lego could have chosen a BOOST reboot and incorporated Daft Punk samples, they could have chosen a working 808, they could have a Vidiyo set, and instead it's just a model that sits quietly and gathers dust.

For me, part of being a Daft Punk fan was digging into the creativity behind their music. I think it's why they worked so hard to build an entire song around Giorgio Moroder and the potential to do anything with music. Did they do that just to fill a track or was it an intentional passing of the torch to the audience? I would like to believe it was the latter.

A Lego set collab with Daft Punk that does not challenge the 'player' to create something new (and especially to create music) is just an awful waste.

Such an HN response. This is a page announcing a partnership and that a fam created idea for a themed set has been accepted.

The set is not anywhere near finalized, and they don’t make any claims close to that. The original fan made set uses a very creative spinning light, and I’m sure that will be built on.

> DAFT PUNK™

I quite like Daft Punk but that ™ makes them uncool very quickly. Immediately makes me assume it's just a brand name now, run by an agency, music work outsourced to freelance ghost composers, and so on. Like Philips TVs and "Jamie Oliver" cookware.

> it's just a brand name now

What else can it be since they parted ways?

A nice memory.

I suppose one could say something similar about LEGO™.

Yeah but LEGO is a corporation. Daft Punk is two artists.

The members of Daft Punk formed a UK corporation called Daft Life Limited back in 1997.

> Daft Punk is two artists.

Were two artists. That’s what makes this weird. It’s DaftAI(tm) or other such junk more likely.

I actually asked about this on HN a long, long time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20704840 My takeaway from the feedback there was that IP lawyers just aren't the sharpest tools in the shed.

Nice! I’d been wondering about this for a while too and reading the thread I come to the same conclusion as you. If Apple can survive without splashing those symbols all over then surely LEGO can as well.

In a final act of defiance, Salazar Slytherin™ constructed The Chamber of Secrets™. A huge Basilisk was bewitched to honor his 'true heir' and bring ruthless destruction upon all Muggle™-born.

When i built the lego hogwarts set i had to read through stuffs like this. I know. Lego is a big corporation. Harry potter is too. normaly i can ignore that i am just feeding money to geedy Corporate. But i could not this time

Part of their schtick is wearing those costumes right? So you don't even know who's performing. The only song of theirs that I know is a collab with a different singer and has a guitar part from Niles Rodgers, so while they probably do have some impact on the music, it's not clear to me how one would be able to tell this hasn't always been the case.

I think big organizations, by necessity, operate in a very compartmentalized way. Almost nobody is viewing the whole. Designers care about aesthetics. Lawyers care about risk. Developers care about shipping. IT Security cares about vulnerability. I really think this is unavoidable at scale. There's just no incentive for any of these groups to care about the other groups. Which is why you need a buck stops with me BDFL Steve Jobs like a-hole that looks at "DAFT PUNK™" and says, "absolutely not."

Remember Daft Punk!? They're back! In Lego form.

https://comb.io/gqMDSC

I member those

RAM Drumless Edition, the Fortnite stunt, now this... It's sad to see Daft Punk™ trying to get every last dime out of that brand name, even after splitting up. They used to reinvest a lot of their early profits into new music, videos, etc., but now it just seems like a sad cash grab. Hope they got some good real estate on the French Riviera out of it at least, it leaves a bad taste on their whole catalogue to me.

Surprised to see this take. Even musicians want money and the decision to do pop electronica, which is what daft punk is, was calculated. You wouldn’t have heard about them nor would they be a global hit by some mysterious force of good vibes. To go even more blunt than that, RAM itself was a cash grab album. It sounded like phoning it in and selling out. But I was never a big fan of the band to begin with. Cheesy all around.

Daft Punk's music itself is mostly composed of samples from other tracks which are not credited. They don't even play instruments really, they play samplers. And their music is quite mid, I really never understood their popularity.

Samples or not, playing instruments or not, it's the arrangement of noise that is the skill. I hope they use Ai.

I don't deny musicians their share of wealth, but most musicians who do get wealthy off their art, do so through a mix of releasing music and touring (mostly the latter these days). I just wish DP had toured a little more to get that sweet dough rather than selling LEGO figures years after disbanding but maybe that's just me being sour for being too young to be able to have seen them live.

And I wouldn't call RAM a cash grab album, their goal was to make an album with great musicians they looked up to, and I think they succeeded. You don't make a cash grab album being famous already and collaborating with industry veterans like Nile Rodgers and Giorgio Moroder.

I thought the Fortnite video was pretty cool actually. Wish it would’ve been a new song though

RAM Drumless really does damage their legacy, truly one of the most offensive records I’ve ever had the displeasure of listening to

What Lego Lost When It Grew Up

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/10/lego-adult-marke...

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50188468)

I think lego is reaching levels of absurdity that I didn't know were possible. I get that you have to target another demographic with prices like these, but I'd love to hear why. Does no kid play with lego anymore? Are these prices justified or are they now a luxury type of brand for collectors? What is the deal with lego these days?

You seem to be missing some critical context, which is that this set is coming from a site where fans can just propose new sets and if they get enough votes LEGO will consider making an official version. So yes, this is largely a set for adults and the price is set as such.

For people who never wanted to show their faces, they seem really interested into selling their image.

It's totally the opposite of the "techno" movement, some may say that Daft Punk was only into this movement at their beginning and the recent albums were just pop music for radio.

Once upon a time kids had train sets, however, other toys such as LEGO came along and train sets fell out of fashion. However, in time, the boomers that did have train sets retired and some of them built the train sets that their nine year old former selves could only dream of. The toy for kids became a hobby for retirees.

I wonder if LEGO is going to follow the same fate, to no longer be of interest to Roblox and Minecraft obsessed kids, to develop an increasingly elderly customer base, ending up with just retirees.

Daft Punk became a household name in the late 1990s, placing their core audience as Gen X, which is reasonably elderly, and well on the way for the kids to retirees pipeline. Expect LEGO to be grand-pa only in a couple of decades.

What remains of the train set business makes a token effort to appeal to kids, all of it is priced out of their league and not marketed to them in ways of yesteryear. Instead it is all about limited edition, very expensive and highly accurate models that get sold to a diminishing customer base, necessitating ever higher prices and further consolidation in the industry.

Imaginably, LEGO in twenty years time will be like this, making nothing but a token effort to sell to kids yet making money with expensive and even more elaborate reissues of models such as this one.

Hopefully this won't be the future of LEGO, however, they do need this adult market given how kids don't play with toys now they have tablets.

Only because it's so expensive. You can buy a tablet cheaper than many of the larger lego kits.

The (electrified) lego train set was a solid product and didn't cost anywhere near what star wars lego does. Same for technics.

I recently got nostalgic and checked Amazon for some Technic Lego sets to tinker with as an adult.

I feel bad saying it after growing up with Lego, but I ended up going with two collections of assorted pieces by some knock-off brands. The Lego sets are much more expensive and almost all of them have obnoxious branding tie-ins. Some of the Technic sets looked kind of dumbed down compared to what I remember as a kid, too.

The generic parts have been fine so far. Other than off colors and no embossed "Lego" logo, I can't really tell the difference. There are no instructions or pre-decided models to build, but making stuff up was always the best part.

> they do need this adult market given how kids don't play with toys now they have tablets

adults are on their tablets too, tho pretty much shell out for nostalgia

i'm a little miffed mindstorms and the 'smart/connected' lego stuff didnt take off

i could imagine it would be a real cool bridge between generations if they could see a lego light turn on and off in their parents' builds when you e.g. hit a switch in minecraft or did a redstone circuit

> ...placing their core audience as Gen X, which is reasonably elderly...

Wikipedia says that Gen X was born 1965 to 1980. They are therefore aged 61 to 46. Not one of them has hit early retirement age in the US.

I don't understand. What does FIRE have to do with "elderly"? "Early retirement age" has a specific meaning in law in the US, being 62.

Yes that's true, but if someone were to infer that there are therefore no retired GenXers, they would be wrong.

I don’t think Lego is going anywhere. My boys (4 and 7) play with Lego at least an hour a day and so do a lot of their friends. The toy pipeline for them has been Magnatiles to Duplo to Lego. Their favorite thing to watch on YouTube are silly Lego stop motion videos.

But they also don’t really know about tablet games yet.

MY kids are now teenagers and stopped playing with lego years ago, but even when they were ALL about the lego it was a very different approach. They have a lot more than I ever did, and it was collect-assemble-display for the most part, compared to my childhood remix approach. I guess when you have a shark that's essentially two-pieces snapped together, or branded minifigs it dramatically cuts down on flexibility & imagination...

I'll guess your boys don't have a phone each yet.

Keep them away from screens as much as possible as long as possible and they will be mentally healthier throughout life.

(Of course, it's not possible to keep them in isolation forever and I wouldn't even suggest it. But good on you for keeping it that way so far.)

Lego already have a range of very big expensive sets that are presumably aimed at grown ups. For example this £500 Eiffel Tower set with 10,001 pieces: https://www.lego.com/en-gb/product/eiffel-tower-10307

I wonder if LEGO is going to follow the same fate, to no longer be of interest to Roblox and Minecraft obsessed kids, to develop an increasingly elderly customer base, ending up with just retirees.

I don't think this is true at all. Our daughter played a lot with Duplo and then Lego from ~2-12. Overall, she must have collected thousands of Euros of Lego from birthday, Christmas, and Sinterklaas presents. When friends were over, they usually wanted to play with Lego.

Us older people who remember the days of Lego without franchises and a focus on your own creativity/imagination might be grumpy about modern Lego (though they have been good at making adult Lego sets as well). But Lego is still wildly successful because they found ways to connect with younger generations and the franchise-based Minecraft/DC Comics/Star Wars/Harry Potter/etc. Lego is exactly one of the ways they have managed to do this, along with Lego for specific focus groups (e.g. Lego Friends).

I'm pretty sure this has already happened to LEGO. That's why it is so expensive now, they want their nostalgic core audience to go back and buy more with money. And they don't really sell random 2x4 brick assortments, they sell nice looking models with all sorts of specially shaped bricks that are hard to reuse for any other purpose.

FWIW, there are knock-off brands on Amazon selling collections of assorted Technic pieces for quite a bit cheaper than Lego. The colors are off, but the quality is pretty good.

This is a subtly ageist view. The adults buying these LEGO now are likely the same kids who grew up with them. It is good for a company to adapt to their customers as they go through phases in life. This gives old generations and new generations a common ground to bond over, instead of segregating them into separate circles. Also, kids today might not be as interested in LEGO. Know your audience.

Believe it or not, the very kids who loved train sets are the ones who ended up killing the hobby. They grew up, got money, and companies started making the expensive dream sets they could now afford, increasingly catering to adult collectors instead of the next generation. When parents compare expensive, adult-oriented train sets with affordable toys like LEGO, it's hardly surprising which they buy for their kids.

And that's the crucial point, it's not necessarily that companies are focusing on adults because kids have lost interest. Kids may be losing interest because companies have focused on adults. LEGO could fall into the same trap.

I'm seeing Daft Punk in the Simpsons, now Lego. Is is a prelude to something ?

They could have at least designed the final set before announcing it.

I thought Daft Punk punked, and now, they are no longer a thing?

Ah yes, a perfect follow-up to the collaboration they did with Tommy Cash a while ago: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DT3cAHGklld/

Sad to see Daft Punk smear their legacy with a thick coat of dog shit lately, but I guess money is money after all, and this new low won't be the lowest for very long.

Multi-platinum global superstar pop music duo does a thing for money. More at 11.

should not be on HN

Anything is infinitely more cute and beautiful when its LEGO :))))))))

Reply on news.ycombinator.com