A LEGO car came in my box of Cheerios.
I’ve had it sitting on my desk since Friday. It came preassembled. I’ve rolled it back and forth.
It came with stickers. That seemed odd.
I’ve taken the car apart. It’s three pieces. Premolded pieces. A wheel piece in black. A body piece in yellow. A cockpit piece in red.
It feels cheap.
My tactile sense, born of thirty-odd years of handling LEGO, tells me that the plastic is all wrong. It’s cheap plastic. It’s not LEGO plastic. LEGO should feel a certain way. This doesn’t feel like LEGO. Worse, when I drop it on the counter, it doesn’t sound like LEGO. Nor does it smell like LEGO.
I think I’m going to do some… stuff to this LEGO car. I’ll dig through my LEGO box (a painted Army ammo crate, filled with LEGO bricks) and find new pieces to trick this car out — and make it look less cheap. Make it look more like LEGO should look.
Maybe I’ll dispense with the red canopy entirely. That’s the worst offender.
When it comes to LEGO, there are certain standards. The Cheerios LEGO cars? They don’t meet the standards.