Lego celebrates an amazing 50 years today. With 7 Lego sets being sold every second. If we use $15 as the average cost of a Lego set, then this works out to about $105 per second. To put this in context and show you how amazing it is, that’s just slightly slower than the rate at which a fat ass Australian Rail Corp executive would make money from bribes and commissions
Lego has changed a lot. In the good old days Lego sets had a lot less specialized pieces. You had to use your imagination along with the bricks to build something. You could build a car, house, boat, spaceship with one good reasonably sized set. But now, the child's imagination has been sucked out of their heads by big media companies and fed back to the now brain dead kids in the form of vinyl wrapped video game and DVDs. I curse the day Steven Spielberg created Jurassic Park. This was the movie that paved the way for the whole hearted raping of our imagination. The only thing that's left to the imagination now is the grand parents having sex..... er maybe not. I'm sure that on a sticky shelf, in some run down DVD parlour, in some rat infested back-alley there is a movie titled "grandpa goes anal on grandma."
Lego has had no choice but to evolve to keep pace with this change in children's thinking - or lack of. Lego now comes with a story or is associated with some franchise. Bionicle, Star wars, Batman, Emmanuelle etc. The list goes on and on, like an impotent man on viagra i.e. Hugh Hefner. Sad as it may seem this is the only way to capture the imagination now. The imagination that was lost in the glossy packaging of mass digital media.
It's really sad that Lego has to give kids the bricks and then tell them in exact detail what to make with the bricks. Gone are the days where the Lego sets had lots of pictures of things you could make on the boxes with a very few directions- giving you ideas instead of instructions. Toys like Lego should enhance and challenge our imagination not replace it. However, we should also actively challenge our imagination. So let’s start today with a small exercise.
Before I go. I have to bring up the point of multiculturalism, and Lego's assiduous avoidance of it. When are we going to see black criminals, Asian prostitutes, skanky sheilas, homosexual hairdressers and child abusers in the Lego Man lineup? Sorry, I mean Lego person lineup. On second thought, let's leave out child abusers because I think there are Lego Priests.
The imagination test.
To test how creative you are, see if you can imagine what the union of the couples listed below will result in. The further away you are from the listed answers, the more imaginative you are.
1. Katie Homes and Tom Cruise
2. Batman and Barbie
3. T-Rex and a Whale
4. 50 Cent and Paris Hilton
5. Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton
Here are the answers. So how imaginative were you?
1. L. Ron. Hubbard's love child - Suri Cruise.
2. Pink batmobile with two soft airbags, a cute tail and dents on all the corners of the fenders.
3. A whole bunch of Japanese whalers ending up as Sushi for once instead of the whales.
4. Paris Hilton with a new appreciation for the phrase "Pain in the ass."
5. Bill Clinton having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. Because Hillary has a dick and Bill is not a homosexual.
The testament in the language of Lego.