Category: Toys

Fang Rock

December 8, 2022

I’ve been on a crafting bender recently, digging into my supply of unopened kits. Last weekend, it was time for this:

I got this guy several months back, and since I’d always said “I wish LEGO made a lighthouse” I’m happy they’ve made such a nice one.

Assembly was easy and fun, and it goes together literally from the ground up. The rocky base hides a combination power-supply and motor, which both powers and turns the lamp.

Oh and this is surely the simplest LEGO assembly step ever:

There’s loads of little details in this model that aren’t immediately obvious, such as a secret cave in the base that hides a pirates treasure chest (and the switch for the power), detachable walls/roof for play purposes or that the interior of the house is fully furnished complete with glowing wood stove:

As a child I would have loved playing with this set!

For the lamp LEGO created a fresnel lens element, which focuses the light from an led. It works very well, and in a darkened room the lightdoes produces a bright and somewhat directed beam.

All told it took me about five hours to build and as with many other recent LEGO kits I continue to be impressed by their skill at creating convincing – and in this case working! – models of real life structures. To have done it at minifigure scale is all the more impressive.

This joins the Medieval Blacksmith as one of my favourite LEGO sets of all time. I don’t think I’ll be disassembling this one any time soon 🙂

LEGO Atari VCS

November 23, 2022

It’s ‘craft week’ this week (kls and I are using the days off to do a lot of craft kits we have), and I decided it was a good time to build this:

It’s the LEGO Atari Video Computer System, or VCS (later renamed the 2600). This kit looks like a remarkable reproduction of the original console only in LEGO, and has a few play features as well.

An immediate nice touch is the retro-style manual. There were about 20 of bags of pieces inside the giant box but as with all LEGO kits these days the bags were all numbered and assembly was easy and a lot of fun. All told it took me about 6-7 hours over two days.

It’s very big! I haven’t checked but it feels about life-sized and once finished it’s much heavier than the NES I made a couple of years ago. It also looks wonderful:

The switches all move, and the two on the right have rubber bands attached to they bounce back up like on the original 2600! This version however has a surprise: you can slide the cover forwards to reveal a nostalgic diorama:

Here’s some detail:

Look at the little me playing 2600 back in 1982 🙂

The controller feels life sized and it astonishingly accurate. The stick even moves (and due to rubber bumpers returns to the vertical position):

And of course the cartridges can be slotted in and out of the console or stored in the little caddy that is part of the set:

And lastly the set includes three small dioramas based on the three included games. These are cute but I would have loved this set even without them:

Overall this is an amazing kit. It looks great, it was great fun to build, and it hit all the nostalgia buttons. The only possible negative is that it’s quite large and I’m not sure where to put it!

With an NES and now a 2600 reproduced in LEGO do you think they’ve got more planned? If I were to make a prediction, I’d guess a first generation Apple Macintosh may be in the cards for a LEGO kit one day…?

Gumball Machines

November 10, 2022

As a child, no trip to a grocery store was complete without a coin spent on a gumball machine, usually near the exit. The same was true for visits to the mall or cinema or any other place where the machines could be found.

There were two types of machines: those that vended lollies, and those that gave toys. Usually the lollies – almost always gum – only cost 5 or 10 cents. Toys cost more – up to 50 cents! – and we’re usually either ‘super balls’ or a motley collection of plastic trash.

As far as the lollies were concerned, I always preferred the standard gumball, and would often spend the coin mum or dad have me on one. Sometimes a machine would sell a (child’s) handful of tiny gum pieces, and since these seemed to be better value for money I could never resist them. As I grew older the gumballs became more exotic – some even had fizzy crystals inside – and I occasionally bought them all the way up until I left Oz.

As mentioned the toys were usually dreadful: cheap tchotchkes from China that would have cost the machine owner considerably less than 20c apiece! But as a kid I hardly cared, and one type of toy in particular I loved: the tiny rubber car. These were about an inch long, molded from hard unpainted rubber, and usually quite detailed for their size. If ever I saw a machine that sold these I always had to get one, and as a young boy I had a small, prized collection of them. Coming home from grocery shopping was always more fun with a tiny rubber car in my pocket!

Recently I’ve been paying attention to the gumball machines in our local shops, and all the photos in this blog were taken these past weeks. There are fewer machines than there used to be – Covid killed many it seems – but they’re remarkably similar to the ones I recall from my youth. The stock of machines is remarkably similar to what I remember from my youth, and still contains mostly gumballs, super balls and disposable ‘toys’.

The above was the closest I could find to the rubber cars of my youth. These are about the same size, seem to be made of similar material (or perhaps a flexible plastic) but as you can see are painted now, which gives them an extra dash of sophistication. At $0.75, I couldn’t resist buying one…

I reckon I would have loved this tiny rocket as a kid. It’s probably the ‘worst’ in the machine, but it’s also the one that my young imagination could have easily thought of as an alien spaceship. For me, that would have been enough 🙂

Robot Claw