LEGO Sells Out

So my special lady bought me the best present ever over the weekend! However, as much as I think it's pretty much the best thing ever cast in plastic, it's kind of sad too since it heralds the end of an era, at least in my mind.

But first, what I got: the LEGO Indiana Jones Motorcycle Chase playset. This thing is amazing: Indy and his dad in their stolen motorcycle, a Nazi on a motorcycle, and a border guard booth with the flimsiest gate ever. Just the fact that it comes with a Sean Connery LEGO guy alone makes it worth any price, but this whole set is pretty amazing.But when I was looking at the assembly instructions, I noticed something that made me a little bit sad. The instructions didn't have any alternate assembly suggestions! I know, I know, here he goes in nostalgia mode again, but seriously.

For those of you older than eight years: back in the day, LEGO sets were all about doing whatever. If you got a castle, you built the castle like the instructions said and it was great, but then eventually you took it apart, the pieces got mixed with all your other LEGOs and you could make another castle or a mansion or a post-apocalyptic wasteland (or was that just me?) and that's what made LEGOs great. There were infinite possibilities.

I've noticed that over the last few years, LEGO has made a habit of making officially licensed toys based on a number of properties including Harry Potter, Spiderman, Batman, Star Wars, and others. This in itself I don't really have a problem with, but is it really necessary? When I was a kid, I would play "Star Wars" with my LEGOs all the time. I had a Blacktron guy and he was Darth Vader and you know what? I used my imagination for the rest. Sure the pieces I used for lightsabers weren't exactly made for that purpose, but seriously who cares. It got me through my childhood without me having to join the Crips or the Bloods, and when I was done playing "Star Wars LEGOs" I could make something else. It's called imagination. Remember?

But honestly, with (for example) these Indiana Jones sets, why would you want to make something else with them? They're pretty awesome as designed. But if you want to make something else anyways, good luck because the pieces are pretty much designed for a single use. I will say in their defense, though, that the sidecar isn't just a molded piece, it is brick-built, so it's not like the set is just 100% molded pieces. It's just not nearly as versatile as sets that I recall from my youth. And the fact that this is a "small set" is no excuse, my parents were cheap and used to get my some seriously tiny sets sometimes, and you could still make like ten different things with even a 50 piece set. But if you want to rebuild that border kiosk into an ice cream shop run by Henry Jones Sr., well, it had better have the same dimensions, because that's about all you can do.

That being the case, I'm not sure LEGO is the best thing to use for this sort of officially licensed stuff. If you're looking to make awesome single-purposed kids toys, I would think Playmobil would be the way to go, but I guess they missed the boat on the whole billion-dollar licensing idea. A Henry Jones Sr. klicky sounds pretty awesome, too, but really you can't ask for much more than this amazing LEGO version.I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I'm a bit disappointed in the direction LEGO has taken on a corporate level to slightly undermine the imagination abilities of today's youth, but I can't fault them for producing a great set from one of the best action sequences ever put to film.