On LEGO Cars and Standards

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.

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

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