PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Hello...kitty

I bet you thought I was going to talk about those nanoblocks again, huh. I got a couple of the Hello Kitty sets when I went to TRU looking for nanoblock sets. Hello Kitty is from MEGA BLOKS, the company all rabid LEGO fans hate. I don't hate 'em, not for selling a similar product, but I am disappointed in their quality. Over the years I've bought several sets from MB. I used to buy their sets for the cheap bricks, especially when they were on clearance, back when I didn't have that much real LEGO. I've since got enough LEGO to weed those clones out of my building stock. I gave them away to some kids I know. Sad for those kids, huh.

 

I kept a few accessories from the MB sets that might come in handy some day. I'd occasionally buy a set of interest to see how they work. With many of the MEGA BLOKS sets there's a repeated cycle of buying, disappointment, and giving away. That reminds me I still have a MEGA BLOKS Spiderman set out in the garage. I wonder what kid's been bad enough to deserve that? It wasn't a very good set. I find a lot of the MB figures look deformed and creepy. Not so the Hello Kitty figures though. I thought they looked pretty cute. I brought the sets to the TwinLUG meeting and they were met with mixed feelings. Roy wouldn't touch them and Max took a pic and called them awesome on his Flickr page. I would agree but I'm a pushover for cute things. Look at that little sailboat. Cute or what?

 

You should be able to tell which set is which from the titles. 10812 Sailor and set 10816 Picnic. I thought the Hello Kitty figures were pretty nice. They can't do much, the body is one solid piece, the hands are short and can't grip much of anything. At least the head goes around. I picked up a couple of the cheapest. The Sailor set is 4 bucks and you certainly don't get too much, it's only got 7 pieces. But I like the figure and I thought the sailboat was great. The sticker is already applied to the 1x6x5 wall panel. The other set is 8 bucks and it's not much better with only 15 pieces. They are nicer pieces. It was those few accessories that pushed me over the brink of purchase. I'm such a sap.

I kind of like the base plate with the rounded edges on two sides. It has vignette appeal. I think the recessed area to the left is for connecting another plate to this one. If you had four? There is a second set in the same format with a swing set and a different costume (see below). There's a nice umbrella but the flowers are one single piece. There's a nice glass and plate. Sadly the figure can't really hold onto them very well. It was the cupcakes that sold me. You get two of them. I like the table with it's wavy edge though it doesn't stay attached to it's legs very well. I'm not sure what I am going to do with the sets but I'll keep them around for a while. Here's a picture that made me laugh while I was poking around google images. I couldn't find a link to where it came from on the message board page it was posted to. Made me laugh though.

 

There are a whole bunch more sets but I doubt that I would buy anymore of them. All the larger boxed sets have houses and buildings in them. It's very much a small doll house to play Hello Kitty with and I don't need that. I just wanted those cupcakes. They rock. Here's a pic of the large house set, the other $8 set, which has a nice swing, and another of the $4 sets. Not much interested in getting those sets for the most part. They just  aren't worth the money spent. The pic on the bottom right came from A Modular Life, a blog about LEGO and stuff from a gal in Singapore. She did a post on the MEGA BLOKS Smurf sets too. They are pretty smurfy and I'm not too interested in those. Smurfs and I have a history. I'd say let's bury the hatchet but that's a sore spot. Better just forget about it. Aren't those kitties cute.

 

 

nanoblocks - This little piggy

 

After building the Nueschwanstein Castle I went out and bought some more nanoblock sets. I got this pig. I think he looks great. He could be Freddy the pig and you know how much I like that porcine. Animals aren't something that I build on my own so observing the process of how they go together is good, right. Maybe I'll build some of my own animals. No matter, I have this cool pig. He can collect dust in my living room for a while. He doesn't take up much room, he's only about three inches long. That won't hold much dust, huh.

  
This set has over 100 pieces, at least that's what the package hints at. It got a lot of larger pieces, 2x8 bricks and lots of 2x4 bricks. It's held together quite well. I've taken it to two LUG meetings and it hasn't fallen apart yet. One ear came off but it was in the box. There are quite a few extra parts left over then you finish building the set. The animals all come in a plastic envelope that has a ziplock built in. The instructions we a bit easier to read than the ones for the castle.

  

Giant panda in the house. I know, he's not that big, he's just about 3 inches long. I thought this one looked pretty good though he looks pretty grumpy. Maybe that's me reading something into those eyes. All the bagged animals are 8 bucks at TRU. The panda has over 150 pieces and there were a lot left over when the set was finished. Maybe they figure people keep dropping the pieces. I know I dropped a few while building these sets. I managed to find them all but I have a bare hardwood floor and a powerful flashlight.

I took these to the TwinLUG meeting last month and people were interested enough to chat about them for a while, at least until business took over. Two or three people expressed an interest in getting some of the sets. There is certainly a noveltly value in the size of the pieces. I can barely pick up the smallest ones.

   

I thought this dog was the best.  He's got a great face. I thought it just said dog to me. I hope the guy or gal that designed him stood there and had one of those moments you get when something comes together just perfectly and you get that little shiver.

The package says he's a terrier and that there are over 110 parts inside. Once he's built, there are a lot of good parts left over. I could see buying multiples of some of the smaller sets for the colors. Especially that pink. The dog's got a dish with food. The dish falls apart pretty easily, it only connects with two studs, one on each side. Some of the building methods used in the sets seem odd to me. They stack a lot and often don't tie things together very well. Some of the pieces are held on rather tenuously.

So, part of me wants to part these sets out and start building a stock, and another part of me wants to keep them as little decorations. Might be best to do nothing, at least for a while. I've got to get past the projects I got going right now.

Because of the first post about nanoblocks I got a nice email from Larry Killgallon, the president of Ohio Arts, commenting on what I wrote. Nice, huh. Ohio Arts is distributing the line in the USA. Larry says they are having fun marketing the sets and that they are selling well. That's good news, hopefully there will an opportunity to expand the line. In Japan there are bulk brick packs in various color themes. There are much larger, more complex, sets with 2-3000 piece counts, including a large version of Neuschwanstein Castle with 5800 pieces. We exchanged a couple of emails and Larry promised to send some sets. Wow! That was real nice, huh. I'll tell you what came in the mail tomorrow. The time has slipped away and it's past bedtime.

City Gone Mad

 

I have come to believe it was about 1985 that I started to seriously buy some LEGO. The Basic Brick set 350 had come that year and I got 8 of them for about 12 bucks each. That gave me a nice start on some bulk. I started small, mostly just noodling around. It's the stuff you wouldn't take pictures of, and there wasn't anywhere to put stuff like that. I did take a a roll of 35 millimeter film and printed those pics. This is them, scanned, slightly cropped, with the brightness, color and contrast tweeked a bit.

 

I started making buildings first, then it grew into a statement about uncontrolled building. In the world of those small plastic buildings the right to the air space above buildings gets sold and they build in it. The buildings don't have much detail, especially compared to the Micropolis type building, but that wasn't the point. I certainly didn't have much gray back in those days. It just wasn't as common as it is currently.

 

It's kind of hard to see everything. The pics just aren't well enough lit and it's a pretty big lump of plastic. It was about 2 feet deep, 30 plus inches wide and more than 2 feet tall. The smallest buildings are supposed to be 3-5 story buildings, then bigger ones are built over them, finally the giant upside down U-shaped building gets tossed up. You can see more pics at Flickr.

nanoblock

 

I saw over at The Living Brick that Ohio Art is distributing nanoblock in the USA. Ohio Art is the company that makes Etch-A-Sketch. That's a toy I grew bored with fast. Bet there are a lot of them sitting unused.  nanoblock is a Japanese brick that I am sort of interested in. I've been hearing about them for a while but I haven't bought any yet. It seemed expensive buying them from importers. Amazon has partners listing the sets and they are pretty pricey. They have 30 sets at Amazon and TOYSRUS has 18. The sets are much better priced at TOYSRUS, like the one above being 15 bucks at TOYSRUS and 30 bucks on Amazon. That set above is a model of the Sagrada Familia. It's a famous unfinished building in Barcelona by an architect called Antonio Gaudi. He's one of a kind and his work is varied as it is wonderous. Me like.

 

There's a Himeji Castle over at Amazon. It's got 2253 pieces and costs nearly $200. Not going to get that. I did like some of the animals, especially that pig. Those animals sets were only $7.99 on TRU's website and double that on Amazon. That Easter Island set is $15 for 550 pieces. It's kind of silly but fun. The models are pretty blocky and some of the buildings lack a lot of detail but they are tiny. That pig is supposed to be 1.5x3x1.5 inches. Looks like to me that Ohio Art is testing the waters with the cheaper sets before hitting town with the big big sets. Makes sense. I should try one and when I do I'll report back.

  

 

BEST-LOCK Garden Party

I was checking out Toy R Us, hoping for a LEGO clearance or sale, but alas the store only had it's normally overpriced sets for sale. TRU marks up LEGO over the MSRP, anywhere from $1-5 a set, so I won't buy those. It's cheaper to go anywhere else mostly and since I'm are lucky enough to have the first LEGO store in the country just minutes away it makes sense to shop there. The selection is better and there is that Loyalty card that gets you some cash back. Since I wasn't buying LEGO and I had lunchtime to kill I looked over the other competing brick products and noticed this BEST-LOCK set.

As you can see the box is very pink and looks like a 2 x 2 brick, albeit with rounded corners, and there are times when I think I would like a brick with rounded corners. I got curious when I looked at the pictures on the front of the package. The studs looked different than I expected the BEST-LOCK pieces to look like. More like LEGO studs. I had bought some BEST-LOCK ships back several years ago, they were on clearance at Target after Christmas, and the studs did not work with LEGO bricks. You could put a BL brick on top of a LEGO brick but they would not attach. You could not put a LEGO brick on top of a BL brick, it won't even seat. I eventally gave up on the ship sets and tried to sell them in a garage sale last year but no one wanted them. Maybe this year I could reduce the price, or just stuff them into someone's car when they aren't looking.

   

Since I was curious about this new BL set I picked one up. It was only $6.99 and there are 105 pieces. Not that I would mix them with my LEGO. I'm not such a purest that I wouldn't consider using a piece here or there but most likely not. The quality isn't there. I was most curious about the plant life in the set, especially those sunflowers. I was thinking the other day on how to make a sunflower out of LEGO. BL has a printed sunflower head with a green stock or pole. The leaves have a loop that slides down the pole to make a complete plant. I liked the idea but they aren't compatible with LEGO poles, the hole is too small. I was looking at the picture on the front of the box and wondering how they attached the leaves to the pumpkin field. The instruction sheet shows they didn't attach them to anything. The leaves are just laying on the ground as it were. Still, imagination, it fills in the blanks.  

   

I like how the instruction sheet is all layed out in a square. There's a small plant that has 5 stalks. It's very close to the LEGO plant which only has three stalks. I like the sticker sheet. That cow is great. I couldn't understand why there was a sticker of a cow, or a dog, etc, until I looked closer at the box. You use the 2 x 8 white bricks and after stacking them you stick the sticker of a cow  on them and you have a kind of blocky cow. Again with the imagination. There's a cup of something that looks like beer in a stien. You stick that sticker on the side of a 1 x 1 brick. Now you can get your minifigs drunk. And those gals don't look too good. What kind of skin color is that? They do give you a horse, and it's fairly nice. Mine came dirty with some black marks on the hind quarters. I also liked the fence parts. There is a brown fence and a white fence. The white fence is very much like the LEGO version except they add details to the balusters. The LEGO ones are just straight poles. The brown fences look pretty good and they clip together. Quality aside not a bad little set. That cow still makes me smile. I'll store this away as a sample of the other brands that try to compete with LEGO. None comes close. Mostly I gave away all the off brand stuff to some kids. They can toss it out once they outlive it's usefullness.  

More Planetoids and Mega Space

About the time I bought that other Planetoids set that I was talking about, Toy'r'us had two more sets on clearance. I just can't resist a chance to waste some money, so I bought those two.

 

The one on the right is the Repzyllian Battleship and the one on the left is the Cyborian Cruiser. Both are made with domes. In both colors. As you can see they are rather unattractive. As Joel used to say on Mystery Science Theater 3000, "when you have lemons, make lemonade". Unfortunately, these are more like turds and no one wants to drink turdade. Like the other City set I tried making something out of these sets. I couldn't make anything very interesting. I used one of the green domes for an equipment hut by a communications tower. They have a vague quonset hut feel, though less round. I think I have some pictures of it somewhere. I didn't get very far with that project. It was about the time that I moved my bedroom downstairs and the toys upstairs. Then I built the LEGO worktable, a 3 by 6 foot sheet of 3/4 inch plywood set on 4 shelf units, there wasn't much room in that bedroom what with all the boxes piles around the walls. That was nearly 8 years ago and there's more stuff in here now. Some is going away. Like these three playsets. I found some unsuspecting kid to palm them off on.

There you can see the Battleship. What a piece of crap. The red markings on the dome in various places are stickers. They are ugly. The domes open so you can play in the space. There's a closeup  of one of the domes open. That's some sort of vehicle sitting there. I found that photo on ebay. Someone was trying to sell a set. Now that picture does do the green color justice. Still, kids like those bugged out colors. I hope. I don't want to get these back. On the right you can see other ways to use the bricks. They seem especially good for making houses without walls. And you know that's where we're all gonna live in the future. After the apocolypse, it'll be harder to get building materials than it was after Katrinia. Just kiddin'! We'll all be dead.

   

If you can bear it, throw your eyes upward, and take in the Cyborian Cruiser again. I know it's hard. Here's a couple of pictures of the inside. The white floor plates come out. The last is the little space ship that goes along with the set. 1010 pieces between the two of them. The two sets share the same 7 figures that the City set has. In the next ten years Mega Bloks would improve their figures quite a bit. They made some nice figures for the Dragons sets. They have improved their basic bricks but they still do not have the subtlety that LEGO has. The Danes have a plethora of small pieces, and an anal retentive laser like attention to detail. Mega Bloks look like they were designed in Russia during the cold war, by someone who was no Raymond Loewy. Occasionally Russia would shine in their print material. Some of their stamps are pretty darn good. But the really cool stuff dries up by the cold war. Here's some shots from a 1994 Mega Bloks set called Galaxy Space Station.

   

You can see it's even more of an open design than the Planetoids sets. There's a little landing pad and a walkway and something that doesn't look like living quarters. Where do those guys sleep? I like the look of that kid in the third picture. Gleefully blasting aliens through his little surrogate. Or just feeling him up. I don't know. This set has a huge base plate with studs that you can build up from and a little bunch of hills. "Hey! Look! I'm on the moon". Here's a couple of shots of that base.

   

I actually like that big slab of gray plastic. It's hard and unyielding. And smooth. Real smooth. You could kill a man with that. The little guys that man the station are kind of cute. I have some of the characters from the extreme sports series and they are similar. When Mega Bloks did the Dragons sets they started making the figures a lot differently. They changed again for the Pirates Of The Carribean and Spider-Man sets. I bought one Spider-Man set but probably will give that away too. I am keeping some of the Dragons set stuff. I like their dragons and will keep one each of those. I might build a big castle before I get rid of the rest of the stuff that I don't want to keep but that's less likely as the year goes along.

Planetoids LX-009 City

That's the front of a Mega Bloks building set from 1997 that really sets the building hobby back 25 years. Mega Bloks were made by Ritvik back then, they later called themselves Mega Bloks, then Mega Brands. Some family in Montreal started the company, which is now publicly held, and currently run by two of the founder's sons. I picked up three of the Planetoids series on clearance. This one is called LX-009 City. It's a huge box 28 inches wide, 17 high and nearly 5 inches thick. And it's friggin' ugly. It's got a thousand pieces. I never counted 'em. Just looking at them was more than enough. That icky green color is really something, isn't it,  especially mixed with the purple. My picture just doesn't do the colors justice.

And this playset doesn't do a city justice. Three ugly buildings and a road that goes nowhere, just round and round, doesn't even make a crappy neighborhood. It sort of looks like a road race but there aren't any controls, and there's only one stupid lookin' car. It fits in the single slot that goes round and round the track. Here's a better picture of the layout. The second shows the car. That light coming out of the purple shape on top is really a light. It's just an oddly shaped penlight. I bet if you turned on the light on the car and ran it around the track in the dark it would be exciting. If you were a dog. And the car was covered in bacon grease. The kid below looks like he's having some fun, huh. He's gettin' paid, why wouldn't he be happy. The third picture is an over head shot of the 10 feet of Sky Track. You can see it loop round and round the three structures.

 

The universe is populated by ugly robots and aliens. There's one human guy. They have cutesy names too. There's a better shot of two of the buildings.

 

I call those large green pieces domes. I don't know what Ritvik calls them. They are wonderfully unattractive. I can't even imagine what the designer was thinking. I'm imagining he or she was thinking how versitile it would be. "You can make anything out of it." Anything ugly. Who would want that green for anything. Here's a couple of pictures of the dome and one of the car motor works. You build the body onto that red brick with wheels. I'll show you some more sets with that dome in them. As you can see it comes in green and dark blue.

I never even bothered to build the set. Some parts are still in their plastic bags. No one would really want these, so I'll find a home for them with some unsuspecting kids who think they are getting something. Toughen them up for the real world. Yeah, kid, LEGO imitators just aren't as good. Mega Bloks sets are better in 2007 but they still are not as good as a LEGO set.

Fill 'er Up, Pooh

   

Back in 1988 I got this building set from Sears. Winnie the Pooh's Gas Station. I know, it makes nearly no sense. I don't remember any cars in the Hundred Acre Woods, but, many of the Disney characters have worked in gas stations, so maybe, this is the case. Clutchin' at straws here, Walt. What up with that! It might be a bad cartoon where Winnie and Tigger run a gas station. It could happen. A fat guy and a goof running a gas station. Sound familiar? That's Disney Magic!  As a matter of fact. It's a Disney Magic toy. I'm just guessing it's some sort of whacky alternate dimension, or some shit. It was a set sold exclusively by Sears. Common enough practice still. Target had an exclusive Harry Potter Lego set in 2005 that had extra figures in it. Missed that I did.

   

This set was made by Tandem, who were a second rate brick company that tried to compete with LEGO. They failed, which is probably why I couldn't find anything about them on the net. I did find a lady who was selling an 800 piece bucket on ebay. It was up to 99 cents and 6 bucks for shipping. No one much wants them. I bought a bunch of sets and gave most of them away to other people's kids. The bricks aren't anywhere near as good as LEGO. In many ways. Their people figures are very LEGO-like, except for the head, big weird heads. Creepy.

   

The side panel of the box has a long paragraph that promotes the toy and it ends with: And since these bricks are compatible, they can build many other things. I liked that, but I am having a hard time getting those two thoughts to join together in my head. Of course you have to think of something to build before the bricks can be formed into your vision. And they are not as compatible as they would have you believe. The studs that do the connecting of the bricks, top to bottom, have weaker clutching power when used with a different brand, but work better with their own brand. The worst, like Best Lock, barely work with themselves. I have ten thousand pieces out in my garage, banished from the attic, in shame. Still the imitators usually are much cheaper than LEGO and that offers low income havin' folk a chance to build. I've always thought someone could sell a building set with pieces of metal and cardboard. So you can build a slum. You get pieces of balsa wood. No piece the same as another. They give you paint, many colors, but never enough to paint any one structure the same color. You get the idea.

   

During the recent sorting of the toys I found the Winnie the Pooh and Tigger figures. I couldn't remember what they were from. Last week I found the box and most of the bricks from the set. They weren't lost so much as neglected and ignored. I think I built the model on the front of the box. I usually do. At some point I had taken all the pieces and stacked them up by type and somehow or another I had arranged them on the large plates into a sort of city scape. I was into building buildings in those days. Karen liked it, I had no other use for the bricks. so I left it. It stayed like that on a shelf for ages. Then it got packed away in a box. Now I'm debating. Keep, no keep.