LEGOS anyone?

[71 dB]

I tend to find a lot of the newer stuff garish or gimmicky but I have not followed it closely.

Yeah, "garish or gimmicky" is a good way to describe many modern Lego sets.

On the other hand, that Silja line ship above looks more like 1971 than 1981, it seems deliberately "classic/retro" which is o.k., of course but I think I'd have found it a bit too stylized as a 9 year old.

Well, it is not a "Legoland" set, but a promotional set. I believe the use of basic bricks is the point. That said, I found it cool as a 10 years old boy...

[steve ridgway]

Lego seems very expensive now for a tailored kit that only seems to make one thing . My brother and I had a lot of fun in the 70s making cars which we'd smash together repeatedly with maximum force, the loser being the one whose wheels came off first .

[Jo498]

Well, it is not a "Legoland" set, but a promotional set. I believe the use of basic bricks is the point.

I guess so. It's very "classic" design and it's probably on purpose that it could have been appeared 10 or 15 years earlier in the same way. Of course a bit of this is just nostalgia and as a boy I was actually not much into technology (I was far more interested in history, exploration, geography) but I find the "techno-optimism" of 1960s-80s toys fascinating in hindsight.

Sure, there were already all kinds of environmental concerns and they were taught to children certainly at my time (it was usually concrete and specific like hunting elephants for ivory or pollution of particular rivers). But not only were all kinds of cars, ships, planes, machines, factories core toys, Lego used Shell or other logos officially, and info and factoids about technology were everywhere.
I recall both historic cars and ships as well as the Space shuttle on the back of cornflakes boxes and in Germany we had the double anniversary celebration in 1985 and everything was about railway (150 years since the first one in Germany) and cars (100 years).

[Kalevala]

Boy, I'm feeling like a grandma here.  I think that a relative had a set when I was growing up?

And yes, I could see how sets that have specific designs would grow boring over time.  Can you use most of the legos to build other things?

K