The Lego Space Saga Part I: Heroes and Villains

My brother-in-law enjoyed Legos as a kid. Maybe that’s a bit of an understatement. He memorized the names and box numbers of the sets he wanted. He knows all of the best sets and the pieces that are included in them. When you say “Anaheim California” he doesn’t think “Disneyland!” it’s “Lego Store!” He once took gross advantage of their “cup full of bricks” policy by building a cone shaped block that not only perfectly fit into the container, it also included as many of the rarest parts that he could find. Now that he is a responsible adult with adult responsibilities, well, he also has an adult income, and his adult, responsible wife encourages him in his obsession. Now he is free to not only buy all the brand new sets that he wants, but he can backtrack and buy all of the sets that he wanted before, and could never persuade his mother to buy.

While filling up the gaps in his Space collection, he realized that he had never really understood Lego’s intent with the story. Several factions have been introduced and it is clear that they exist in the same galaxy and are meant to interact, but he wasn’t certain as to their interfactional dynamics. Since I’m a story kind of guy, he provided me with some basic information and asked my opinion. I did a little more research myself, and this is what I came up with.

Before we proceed with this fun, in-depth analysis of Lego and their Space theme, I offer one massive caveat; I am wholly unqualified to make this presentation. I am not a toy historian, a sociologist, or even a Lego enthusiast. I am only an English undergraduate who loves to speculate. Please do not cite this blog post in your doctoral thesis on marketing trends because, as much sense as some of this may make to you, I have no idea what I am talking about. That said, please come in and enjoy.

In idyllic bygone days when attendants pumped leaded gas for you at 30 cents a gallon and you could get unpasteurized milk delivered to your door, toys were sold based on their intrinsic value. Then Star Wars came and blew toy manufacturers’ minds with how many boring toys they were able to sell, just because people liked the story behind them. The late 1980s saw a mad rush to attach a storyline to every toy, like the Care Bears, and a toy to every storyline, as exemplified by GI Joe, TMNT, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, etc. Amidst the mass marketing of dolls action figures, one toy company was being left behind. Lego needed a change in business model.

Lego has never been a company to cling to atrophying nostalgia in the face of innovation. They were among the first companies to switch from classic wooden toys to plastic, after all. However, the trend toward story based marketing presented Lego with a particularly difficult challenge. Storylines are restrictive. They tell you who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, and when and how the inevitable defeat of said bad guys at the hand of the unlikely-yet-plucky good guys occurs. There is no room for flexibility, no room for hypotheticals. The point with other toy companies was to force the kids’ parents to buy the complete set, so the kid could reenact the storyline without having to imagine anything at all. Lego, on the other hand, is all about imagination. Sure, it pretty much goes without saying that the first thing you build with a Lego set is the thing on the box. After that, you break it apart and build your own creation. Most kids don’t even keep their sets separate, they just have a big ol’ Lego box with every piece in every color and every theme just jumbled up like OCD hell. They can build anything and everything they want. The limiting factor with Lego is not the toy, it’s your own imagination. Thus, restriction is the antithesis of Lego’s ethos. How was Lego going to survive as a toy company and jump on the storyline bandwagon, yet still be Lego?

Lego already had a few different themes going on, and they had been doing the space theme since 1979. This made sense, as people around the globe of all ages had been obsessed with space since Sputnik launched in October of ’57. Given the continued real live Space Race/Cold War with the U.S.S.R., it made sense to turn the space theme into a story with good and bad guys. In 1987 Lego released the same old space theme that they had been doing for nearly ten years, with the same aesthetic, the same blue, yellow and red uniforms, and one small exception; they were renamed as “Futuron.” Additionally Lego Space offered a new faction called “Blacktron.” There was and is no story accompanying either faction, so kids can do anything they want with them. However, there are a few clues given to help us figure out who the good and bad guys are.

First, Futuron was obviously there first. Kids likely already had some of these sets, so there was inborn loyalty from the outset. Blacktron was the new, the unfamiliar, the “other,” the makings of a bad guy.

Second, Futuron bases and vehicles are made up of white bricks trimmed mostly with blue, whereas Blacktron is made of black (duh) with yellow and red accents. We tend to associate white with good and black with evil, and this shows repeatedly in storylines. Think of Darth Vader (black outfit, red lightsaber) fighting Obi-wan (white and earth tones, blue lightsaber), or the color of the cowboy hats in westerns. I could belabor this point to death, but I like you so I won’t.

Third, the visors of Futuron spacemen are transparent, but Blacktron visors are opaque. This means that you can’t see a Blacktron’s smiling face, which is important because everyone knows that bad guys only smile when they are doing something evil, and even then it isn’t with the carefree joy that all Lego people had in 1987, and mostly still have to this day. Additionally, hiding facial features dehumanizes a character, thus making him less sympathetic. Think about the Footmen in TMNT. The turtles murdered the crap out of those guys and you never blinked an eye because, I mean, it’s not like they were people, even though they were clearly 100% more human than the turtles.

Fourth, the aesthetic of Futuron buildings and vehicles is smooth, with a lot of rounded features, like the Federation ships from Star Trek and good guys everywhere. Blacktron has fins and angles, with visible hoses hanging out. You can see this sharp look in the Romulan ships, or even Reaver structure from the movie Serenity.

Fifth and finally, the names of the sets give a clue. Futuron “debuted” with the benign “Areo Module,” the “Orion II Hyperspace,” “Cosmic Laser Launcher” and “Monorail Transport System.” The only nod to military application they have is the “Stardefender 200” (emphasis mine). All the Futurons want to do is launch a few lasers and transport some stuff. They’re not above defending their stars if they have to, but they definitely aren’t going to be the ones starting anything untoward. Blacktron, however, came out with the innocuous “Battrax,” the decidedly aggressive “Invader,” and the rebellious “Renegade.” The following year they would release the “Alienator” and “Message Intercept Base” (1988), revealing an interest in espionage.

The open ended storyline in Lego Space had begun with a minimum of information; Futuron are good, Blacktron are bad. But was this enough information to get Lego into the storyline craze? Or was it too much, compromising their freewheeling, “anything can happen” mentality?

To Be Continued…

Audience

My sister-in-law recently commented on the different reactions people had to the same movie. She watched October Baby with church friends, and again with school friends, and found a disparity in focus. Her church friends thought the movie was all about a young woman’s discovery of her adoption, then survival of an abortion, and the forgiveness and healing that followed. Her school friends were more interested in the burgeoning relationship between the protagonist and the guy who is not her boyfriend in the beginning but obviously will be by the end because his eyes are the most dreamy, or something like that. I happen to know that my sister-in-law’s father (who is incidentally also the father of my wife) thought of it as a story of a daughter facing difficult revelations at the same time that she is leaving home, and how a father learns to love her through the transition of their relationship. Movie critics tend to agree with the church crowd on what October Baby is about, although many stood on the other side of the argument; they took it to be a smarmy, disingenuous attempt to undermine the pro-choice position.

Perspective is one of those things that writers do a lot of thinking about. You can completely alter a story by shifting the narrative from third to first person, and exchanging a disembodied omniscient narrator for a personal, fallible one. Likewise, present tense can be more immediate and impactful but also irritating, so past tense should be considered as well. Then we get embroiled in the world of the characters, using whiteboards or reams of notebook paper to keep track of who knows what and how each would react to which bit of information, and it’s easy to forget the most important perspective of all; that of the audience.

It’s all about the audience. We can talk about artistic integrity all day long but in the end we have to eat, and it is the audience who pays us. All art consumers bring their own worldviews, personal prejudices and kinks to the table when they read and watch and listen, and each will willfully, gleefully misinterpret the art as they see fit.

My writing audience tends to be exceptionally small, usually a single English instructor, and in my experience English instructors have been relatively easy to please. Show a working knowledge of the material, bonus points if you reveal an interest as well. Make sure your citations are done correctly and you’re good to go. I’m looking forward to the time when I can worry about what my greater audience will think, but in order to do that I need to get an audience.

One gets an audience by being published.

One gets published by submitting content.

One needs content before he can submit it.

Well folks, my clever insight about audience just got turned into another reminder of my procrastination. I’ll write, I swear, just as soon as I finish my coursework and...

Net Value

I know a guy who cuts people up for a living. Of course, he does sew them back together again when he’s done. He’s one of the best and they pay him handsomely for it, because when he’s through people can walk again, or run or just shuffle around the house but the common thread here is that their lives are substantially better after they come out from under his knife. There’s another guy I know that is into building systems, specifically those having to do with water. We just blithely breeze into shops and offices and homes assuming that they have running water, useful for drinking and washing our hands and flushing away our rancorous waste to destinations both unseemly and unknown, we care not where so long as it is not near us. This guy knows where that water comes from, how it gets to us, and where it goes when we are through with it. He knows because he designed it all. He is also compensated, not with quite so princely a sum as a surgeon, but well enough.

We value things like health and clean water, and you can tell by the way we pay the people who give them to us. In fact, you can learn a lot about people by the way they spend their money. Americans like the ability to go anywhere we want to whenever we feel like it, as evidenced by the large market for motor vehicles and the oil that fuels them. We like to push our physical limits where sleep is concerned, so there’s money to be spent on sugar and caffeine. We like to be entertained, so we pay the cable company, and we prize our relationships, so we trade our hard earned clams for internet connections, data plans, and the multifarious devices with which we navigate the web and stay in touch. How do we come up with all of this money to spend? By giving other people things that they want, of course. It only follows that if you have something they really want, they will give you more money to spend on things that you really want. Looking at it this way, it’s easy to quantify your own personal worth using dollars.

Calculating your net worth is not as simple as figuring how much you make, though. You also have to consider how much you spend, and how much you save. Take me, for instance. I bring in a governmental check through the GI Bill, but it’s frankly not enough to offset the tuition that I incur. I also do the cooking and grocery shopping, making sure we stay under budget with our food expenses, and let’s not forget child care. I am worth more for this house for the money I save as a child care provider than I could make at a job with my current credentials. However, I also have this nasty book habit that is usually taken care of at the library but sometimes… sometimes the library doesn’t stock what I need. What, then, is my net worth?

Then there’s the question of net value, which is not the same as net worth by a long shot. There are things out there that elude quantification via raw currency, things that we all have, things we can choose to trade or give away in hopes for a different kind of wealth. Time is one. Monarch, middle class or miscreant, we all have the same amount. What is part of the value of a Jimmy Johns sandwich? Is it that it tastes so much better, or is it that it arrives that much faster? Would anyone put up with a dialup connection now, in 2013? I hope to sell a book some day, but I just recently recognized that books are more of an investment than the mere dollar amount because of the time you must spend reading one. Even the fastest readers cannot consume the book faster than the two and a half hours it takes to watch the movie version. Sure, it’s not the full story, but does the full story justify the time? The movie is almost as good, and it is so much shorter, so much more efficient in communicating the gist of the story. Therefore, when I write anything, this blog post included, I have to try extra hard to make sure that you come away believing that what you just read was worth the cost, be it time or money, that I exacted from you. This is why it is so hard to get people who are not friends or family to read your work, and so difficult to get unbiased opinions from those same friends and family. When people you know decide to read your work they are not simply investing time into the piece, they are also investing their time in you, in the relationship, and when they critique it they are taking that relationship into account. Because of the relationship factor I only half believe my friends when they tell me how great my writing is; I am terrified that what they are really saying is “I think you are a nice person,” which is gratifying to me as a person, but not helpful to me as a writer. Nice people don’t sell books. Nice people don’t make people think, or light fires in their hearts; good writers do.

That being said, lavish compliments (deserved or not) inform me that I am valued. Time spent over lunch, a warm slap on the back, a brief exchange of embarrassingly terrible puns, all tell me that I am worth something to someone, and I prize these moments above any amount of paper bills. Frighteningly, this intangible relationship value can and often does work in reverse. Money is always involved, but does it measure the true cost of divorce? A life insurance claim can cover the costs of a funeral, but does it salve the loss of a son? Our relationships can build and destroy wealth faster than a casino on the Vegas Strip.

It is with much relief and just a little wistfulness that I admit; my worth as a writer is and always will be only a small part of my net value.