Why Lego won
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ม.ค. 2023
- The competition looked identical. So how did Lego pull it off?
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He mentions that the replica isn't exact - that's why I shied away from really strong specific claims on my model's performance vs. LEGO. But I think you can totally see the difference and get a feel for Kiddicraft bricks.
My favorite book by Sarah Herman. It gets into a bunch of modern LEGO stuff I didn't read, but the early chronology was helpful. (affiliate link)
amzn.to/3RiFbPM
Overview of LEGO patent scandals and stuff like that. I didn't get into the Kiddicraft lawsuit - seemed like a bit of a nothingburger to me, based on the size of the reward. But I'm not a lawyer, so read up for yourself if you disagree.
www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/bu...
Brick by Brick - book covers the same ground, gets into business-book-land, but sometimes that's fine.
amzn.to/3Y2yu6r
There are obviously millions of LEGO websites filled with arcana, but this one on LEGO evolution was great:
www.inverso.pt/legos/Textos/b...
Definitive info on Kiddicraft: www.brightontoymuseum.co.uk/i...)
The fact my Lego, from when I was a kid, still fit and work with my kids new Lego sets, is a testament to the engineering.
They’ve never cheaped out on the resins either, which is a huge difference against clones of Lego’s innovations like Mega Blox. The density and lack of flex of the resin is a big part of making the design actually work
Duplo is amazing and compatible. The new colors are just great too.
@@99721 Duplo is made by Lego.
Just want add a brick made in 1960s work with ones made today.
@@namannik Duplo is also compatible with Lego
Their consistent manufacturing tolerances over decades is what sets LEGO apart from basically everyone. You can use bricks from the 80s that still click in place with bricks from 2023. It's insane. Their moulding process and moulds are some of their highest guarded secrets for that reason. Not just that, but their customer service is NEXT LEVEL. If you ever have a missing piece in your set (which is also incredibly unlikely) they will ship a new piece out to you for free straight away.
Lego bricks from the 1950s click together with bricks from today. That consistency makes a big difference. Those old 1950s bricks are not nearly as good, especially now, the plastic is tired. But they still work.
@@bluetoes591 I'd love a video that talks about the insane engineering and quality of those bricks, and how everything works together as an engineered tolerance system.
They ship missing pieces for free...??
@@FlinnGaidin Yes, and in my thirty-five-plus years of playing with Lego, I've never had an issue with that or any other part of their customer service.
When I was a kid my bionicle fell and the sword broke, I contacted lego and got a new one sent to me free of charge, that's how you get me to still buy lego 25 years later.
If you want an example of timelessness of Lego sets... We just got our old 12V train set working again, the 1979 train now runs from a 1990s Lego train station to the 2017 Lego Frozen castle, passing by the 2020 Lego Friends waterslide park. Not going to lie, I was emotional when it all clicked together (sorry).
They did many Trains, you still use the middle 12V rails, AA battery is still compatible you meant ?
Why they did stopped selling 12V sets ?
@@lucasRem-ku6eb Yes we have a mix of blue and gray 12V middle rails, powered by a transformer. The old one got lost, so I bought a new one on bricklink. No idea why they switched to a new train system in the nineties, but with all the advancements in battery technology since then I cannot imagine going back to a transfo system.
@@dejanzie Thanks, i was trying to get more 12 Volt middle rails, but they stopped selling them. I love the 12V sets !
@@lucasRem-ku6eb you can buy cone/replica 12volt rail and accessories.
@@mcmadness110 i know, many offer second hand LEGO here
As a kid stepping on Legos was a pain like no other. Now that I'm an adult taking care of my niece and nephews, stepping on legos got more painful when stepped on. Idk how but they improved the pain. I didn't know you CAN improve pain.
Well, as an adult you likely weight 4x or so more than when you were a child. Since gravity and the lego bricks remained constant, you essentially multiplied the force, and thus the pressure, by a similar amount.
@@ggwp638BC
Tl:dr Pootis is fat in the ass.
You have clearly never stepped on a D4
Might be newer factories making even more precise edges compared to back them when you had them. Better quality + new
@@luaspy yeah, some are sharp for some reason
It's the tubes, definitely the tubes.
I occasionally used cheap, tube free bricks when I was a kid and they sucked.
Also, I'm not an adult Lego lover but my daughter is not making it easy for me to avoid becoming one. As a kid I was really into Legos and did a lot of world building. They were so dear to me that when my siblings were mad at me instead of punching me, they destroyed my builds. Truly evil stuff.
i have witnessed this dynamic already many times...
I remember finding two bricks with no tubes and the side slots in my nursery/preschool Lego Box and was really confused. Because indeed it said Lego, but was also demonstrably different.
I wonder how those bricks ended up in there 4-5 decades later.
And yeah, they only very loosely gripped, not even enough to resist gravity. It would keep it stable on a table if building something like a house, but any more dynamic structure and they weren’t suitable.
Of course they probably had a looser grip than they did when new! But the design with the tubes doesn’t seem to suffer from aging in the same way.
I remember in the early 2000's I had bricks with diagonal lines. It seems like a great idea but the quality of the bricks was so far below lego's that they were unusable
One time me and a friend got into a fight and destroyed each other’s lego builds
@@kaitlyn__L We had a big bix with tubeless Legos, a gift from a younger coworker of my father. They suck even in the sixties, absolutely useless for building, so we used them as street markings and our minifigures (the 3x2 bricks).
I still have handful of them for nostalgic reasons, but these bricks were the ones we threw away.
The thing about LEGO that really impresses me is how a lot of seemingly unrelated parts and connections fit together perfectly. Like how the flat pieces (plates) fit vertically between the pegs, and how the wheel axle stud pieces fit inside those tubes. A lot of little details are made to be the same size by design, and they all manage to work together.
This is why I loved legos when I was little... My parents didn't have money to buy big kits but in the end I had a full bag of lots of smaller kits that let me be creative and build my own ideas and try to recreate the big kits that I saw in catalogs and couldn't have
Flat pieces between the studs is an “illegal” move, they are slightly too big and will ruin the piece due to too much stress
@@Aikano9 The flat piece without studs is not illegal, as it's slightly thinner.
@@davishall I’m pretty sure only a few select flat pieces are “legal” to do this with, like the shield.
Another reason Legos are trash. Legal placement of blocks? How about they go eat shit and die. Ill put the blocks I own because I overpaid for them however the fuck I deem necessary.
The importance of Lego's engineering quality is absolutely critical. Not just the tubes in the middle, but just how tight their manufacturing tolerances were and are. They are some of the best plastic manufacturing engineers in the world.
That’s simply not the truth you are blinded
It gets to the point where they dont warp from age as competitors do, and if you get really big offbrand baseplates, a few hundred studs long, but it a few years old, you’ll begin to have trouble lining up at larger scales, really cool stuff if you ask me
That may have been true 30 years ago but nowadays Lego is known for their mediocre brick quality.
LEGO and 'affordable' can't go together outside of the sentence: "LEGO is absolutely, without a doubt, NOT affordable"
It depends on what you’re comparing it to.
You can buy Lego Classic Large Creative Brick Box 10698 for 60 dollar MSRP that is 790 bricks, a so called “bulk box”. I have trouble finding a toy that has more possibility for play for less than that.
They're available in sets for pretty much any budget. On the LEGO website, there are over 600 sets available under $25. No, we can't get the Titanic or an F1 car for $50. It's the cost of high-precision injection molded plastic!
yeah they dropped that from their core like uglybaby
So lemme get this straight, you think a toy that's been in production longer than the majority of the human race has even been *alive* is hard to come by?
I know people love having shit to cry about but this is ridiculous
I grew up so poor I lived in a car from time to time, and LEGO were *never* hard to come by, you could swing to literally any yard sale on the block and pick up a ridiculous amount for like a tenner, even in stores, they would stock mini sets you could pick up for like 5 bucks.
I ate ketchup and mustard sandwiches and *still* had the cash to burn to pick up a LEGO set here and there.
@@benkromphardt1916 The thing is: There is a number of companies out there, selling compatible bricks with more consistent clamping force and higher colour accuracy for less than lego.
And lego is suing them based on borderline-legal copyright claims day in day out.
And instead of improving their products, they literally cheap out older sets by using cheaper and less parts and sell them for the same price as edition.
And now guess where your lego money goes.
There's this short animated film by Lego called "The Lego Story" that tells the story of the company and the brick. It's really good, I highly recommend those who haven't seen it to watch it, even you Phil. :D
It's ok though if you already have done so, Phil. 👍
That shit is good, watched it twice
@@sirgio5349 where can i find this?? :)
@@maxmeister5425 in the official channel!
@@sirgio5349 same but I have a feeling phil watched it and based his video on this..... I will trust him for now though.
All I can say is that as a kid, I remember liking Legos for both what they said you could do, and what I knew you could do. So even if I didn’t end up liking the toy I made on the box, the more pieces I had, the more things I could make with them. So every box was a win no matter what was inside. I always wanted a box of Legos along with everything else I might get, because I could always use more.
TRUEE
The way I always played was as follows: first, I assemble the set as written in the manual. Then, I carelessly lose the manual somewhere. Then, some time later, I accidentally drop my build, causing it to be destroyed. At that moment, since I don't know how to rebuild the set, I begin thinking about how to use the pieces in other ways, and that's when my most creative and personal moments happen. The spaceships I built were *my* spaceships.
this is why I think it is a shame that Lego just doesn't seem to care for selling these pure Lego brick boxes anymore. Now the best way to get a bunch of standard 2x2 and 2x4 lego bricks seems to be buying a lego Minecraft set, since all they do nowdays is making sets with various IPs. Which are (sometimes) cool, but I just wish they'd ALSO sell boxes of basic lego parts.
Then again you can get boatloads of lego bricks by buying them used (since they don't really go bad from laying in a cellar for 20 years), or just buying bricks from Bluebrixx or other companies. I still love the product, the idea of lego bricks. But the company has gone down a questionable past in recent years.
@@TheExecutorr They still sell boxes of basic bricks, they are just under the theme Lego Classic.
@@JohnSmith-nk9xq Hey everybody, we found the guy who knows how to say things! I also say gif with a hard g! Super Duper!
Seriously, as a kid I said Legos, auto correct knows what Legos means, and so do you. But definitely if it makes you happy, F your L. It’s certainly the most important thing to be upset about.
Something to add, Hilary Page, the founder and chief designer at Kiddicraft died in 1957, before a lot of the technical improvements in plastic production Lego have benefitted from, and Lego kept clear of countries where Kiddicraft did business until after his death. According to his widow he never found out that Lego had copied his work and it seems his successor at the company had no interest in developing or protecting the rights to the design. The original Kiddicraft brick line died with its creator.
I have a degree in precision machining. In my first year, we where tasked to find lego bricks at home (the standard 2x8), preferably as old as possible. We then did tests on connection strength and dimensional accuracy on bricks from the 70's up to today, and they are so, so insanely consistent that it's almost scary. Injection molding is hard to get precise, and Lego has absolutely mastered the art of making precise and consistent bricks, and that's what makes Lego so good.
I think an other important thing was the introduction of the minifigure. It's iconic, good looking and today the main thing that separates them from other brick manufacturers.
Totally agree, at least a mention. There have to be very few people in the western world, regardless of their age or gender that don't recognize a mini figure. They are so iconic that many lego collectors aren't even really lego collectors but mini figure collectors.
The minifigure and its relative lack of change is been a big deal. As a kid you could tell by feel an imitation, it didnt weigh the same, it felt too brittle, and was of dubious compatibility with the blocks (even if it came from them)
The versatility of megablocks was always a big deal, and the advanced movement was always something i liked as a kid, but the variations in quality, detail, and how badly they tended to clash with the sets they came with was always a bit rough.
When I was a kid playing with legos, and I imagine this is true for a lot of people, the buildings and stuff were just a background for me to make stories and do stuff with the minifigures. If they didn't exist I probably wouldn't've been interested in lego at all.
@@Robb1977 Have you seen "LEGO Friends"? They have these weird like, more anatomically correct minifigures that just feel off to me. I mean, I never was really their target demographic, but the classic minifigure shape just feels so consistent with the blocky nature of other LEGO stuff
it's also cool how the minifigures still fit into the system. you can connect pieces to most parts of them and have it make sense
A couple months ago, LEGO did a promotion at LEGO stores where you could build a celebratory red LEGO brick for their 90th anniversary. The only thing was, it had that slot in the side. When I asked why, none of the employees knew, so I had to go home and research.
oh that's cool! i had no idea
I work in one of the biggest Lego stores and to this day I didn't know why that slot was
@Phil Edwards if you haven't already, look up the TH-cam channel, Brictator.
Was it a Lego Bank 👀 🪙
Love the Mad Men vibe. Also, I see that Lego quickly gave up on 'rule' no. 2: Affordability. At least in the UK, Lego has always been a premium, expensive product, from my childhood to now.
Well yes and no. The Lego kits which seems to be what Lego have been really focused on in the last 10 years are super expensive and I think actually run totally counter to the Lego principle. The base boxes assorted bricks (which I realise is not actually assorted at all) are not that expensive at all and present excellent value especially when you consider their longevity.
@@ruan13o I see your point. You can pick up those boxes in UK supermarkets around Christmas time and they aren't as expensive as I thought they were.
I was thinking of the Lego 'sets' I got as a child, always based around a theme even if it was just 'Lego City'. The sets were definitely more expensive than the tubs of basic bricks/pieces.
That was back in the 90s. I still buy Lego today and I still think it's a premium product with a matching price tag.
My son now plays with the Lego my mother gave me. If that isn't good value for money I don't know what is.
It partially depends on which lines you buy. The licensed sets tend to be pricey, but the Classic and Creator 3-in-1 lines are still good value for the money. The 3-in-1 sets in particular offer really enjoyable building experiences.
One counter argument is that while you can buy cheap knockoffs for a better price (and I do, especially for some sets), at least with Lego I know the quality will remain for a long time. I could potentially pass them down generation to generation if I wanted and they will continue to work. The knockoffs, maybe, but it's not a strong confidence. The price to longevity is affordable I would argue. I put the Brio line of wooden train toys into the same category, a long term investment of quality.
I can't stress enough how Lego influenced my creativity, adaptability and the understanding that even the smallest of parts can play a big role in your creation.
I learned so much about engineering and maths from LEGO’s technic sets when I was a kid.
The engineering is important because we now have lego bricks from a few generations being handed down to the next generation, if the original design was stuck with then the individual pieces would be worn out & not passed down.
Let me me if if have any product
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Pulled out the duplo at my parents' house and spent hours playing with my 3 year old niece. The plastic hadn't degraded. Easy to wash. We need more mats :)
The duplo 1x1 with the large rounded stud on top make excellent tops. When I was keeping a bunch of toddlers entertained by launching a bunch of them all over the floor and they tried to get them as they spiral around. They also make great battling tops.
Working in a kindergarden where we have both regular lego and dublo, i realized that they even fit together - Mind blown. Been wanting to try and make something larger with a mix of blocks ever since
The old Duplo at my parents home stick together on the corner. The new ones I bought for my children don't. They don't even stick together if a 4x4 is put on top of another 4x4. No Legomis not the best in it's on category.
@@EgholmViking They had QUATRO bricks for a while which were 4 times the size. You could connect a LEGO brick to a DUPLO brick to a QUATRO brick. Didn't stick around for long unfortunately
Tubes are not the only thing that improves the grip and stability, the small ridges that extend from them and connect to the sides also make it so that the sides stay rigid and don't flex or bend even with a lot of force applied to them.
I love the fact that when your son is old enough to understand he'll see this video and be thrilled that his dad made it because of him
Lego was the Minecraft of its time. The bricks were not just limited to create the set you bought, and could be combined with any other in countless ways that really let your imagination go free. Combined with their sturdiness, it meant that you could keep getting more and more while the old ones still worked just as well.
Apt comparison. Even more so, given that Minecraft, too, copied and improved upon a previous game (Infiniminer).
I used to explain Minecraft as LEGO in a computer game, now we are explaining LEGO as Minecraft in the real world 🤣
Man do i feel old...
bruh minecraft is a gaaame
hell yes! That was the best part. I always built the set, but then inevitably ended up using it to make tons of totally different creations.
I had a friend whose mom would _glue his lego sets together._ It felt so wrong and weird. You're defeating the ENTIRE POINT OF LEGO, LADY!
@@JamesOKlippel you missed the entire point.
Marketing made it survive in the short term, the ingineering made it stand the test of time. As of today a whole community catalogued the whole lego catalogue from the start to today. Pieces all working together make them appealing and sought after years after the sets they were in have long been discontinued and the pieces gone out of production
Don't forget the most important factor, the artificial scarcity created by IP laws
@@ejajafrozarb I don't think there's scarcity for Lego. Unless you meant things like "batman set" that got discontinued after couple years, then it's just the usual product roll-out.
@@cypherusuh by artificial scarcity I meant patent and copyright laws
@@ejajafrozarb you know patent laws exist so that people can profit off of coming up with a good idea, right? like if there weren't patent laws, there would be a lot less incentive to try and out-engineer the competition, because as soon as you do, the competition could just reverse engineer your product, and all that money you spent on R&D went essentially to waste.
@@coopj70 I didn't say if IP laws are good or bad, I said that they are the main reason for their success
My son got a lot of Lego for Christmas, including a Chinese knock-off "Minecraft" Lego. I helped him build them all. Wow was that experience educational. The physical quality is day and night. How many times have you seen Lego pieces get that white "stretch mark" just by interlocking two normal bricks? And the instructions... wow. Lego puts so much effort into instructions that people don't really notice. And I built some of my kits from 30 years ago too, and the instructions were still good, but they've gotten amazing since then. Lego is one of those toys where you're paying extra for incredible quality in lots of "hidden" places.
old brown ,blue and dark red pieces are very brittle and i have a lot with stretch marks but i agree , the knockoffs are bad . Even if lego are abusing with prices now , lots of sets are 10-15$ higher than what they should be even with inflation
Mould King and Cada regularly surpass LEGO when it comes to brick quality. LEGO is very, very good, but even better at marketing quality towards the customer
Todays so called "knock offs", often have the superior brick quality. LEGO fanboys are still stuck in 2010 when there used to be a huge quality gap between Lego and their competitors. More than a decade later, these quality differences diminished and now Lego is the one falling behind in terms of quality. While their prices are beyond insanity, the sets are worse designwise than ever before. You don't get anything but sh__t for your money nowadays. If you have kids and a working brain, really look out for the competitiors on the market. They have better sets. Lego is like the iPhone of the brick world. Used to be one of the first, used to be the leader in terms of quality for a premium price, used to be the best that money could get you. But nowadays things are different and the only thing that Lego still has, is an absurdly high pricetag. A pricetag that isn't justified by "iNfLaTiOn" or anything.
This is the opposite of my experience, having casually gotten back into lego as I now have kids. Some off-brands are better than others, but they're all pretty poor. The Chinese stuff is absolutely atrocious, and the instructions are even worse.@@CanComp
@@laurielkami1100 firstly they arent knock offs. secondly brands like cobi are actually superior to lego
This felt like it could be on History Channel, like actual cable programming. Incredible production. Amazing work. Thanks for the video.
3:41 Wait is that how they got the name for Clutch Powers for the movie Lego: The Adventures of Clutch Powers? Because Lego bricks have amazing clutch power? WOW I never would have guessed that, or know that at all!
yea! i saw this when i was googling for more clutch power stats!
We had a version of Lego called Toro in New Zealand, because of import restrictions we couldn't get Lego, so made our own. When Lego finally arrived...they fitted together. My mother worked at the company that made Toro blocks, so we had plenty when we were kids.
yeah ,we had some Torro, they were a softer plastic, and not quite as 'crisp' as the genuine Lego.
I got "Tyco" growing up because it was cheaper. The size of the Tyco bricks was just a little too large to be compatible. (We had some limited Lego from a garage sale.)
Heh... This video brought Torro to mind for me also.
I just Googled it...the article I looked at had an image of the same type of bucket full of Torro that we have.
@@jamesphillips2285 i only try garage sales for some lego for my kids cause it's so expensive, but even then they can easely ask a couple of euros for even small bag of lego's if the set is still complete ;).
Considering Lego makes its bricks in various countries, the fact that NZ had to make its own version is interesting. And, if Lego then displaced Toro, also quite sad.
6:05 so much for "affordable"
I grew up with Lego and I'm super glad I did. Seeing those rules of play bit made me realise just how amazing those little bricks are... Though they have kind of disregarded the 'affordable' rule...
Now I'm just sad that they didn't stay affordable lol. Great video!
yeah sets have like doubled in price since i was younger lol...
Yes and no. I mean, I'm 40yo and when I was young LEGO set were really expensive maybe not expensive as today but 150$ (or more) in 1995 for a set was common.
@@amaroaverna923 that 150$ is like a mid to high end gaming mouse today.. back then expensive, nowdays still expensive. i've like thousand dollars gaming rig but i still think twice about buying lego- nah, more like think thrice, in terms of value to performance, i could buy a frickin decent monitor instead of buying a box of lego.
Try Bricklink, and the secondary market!
If you’re really serious, get involved in a LUG and find out what they have going on (which can include ways to find discounts)..
ordinary city LEGO (for children) is still affordable.
They just realized that there was a huge market for high quality expensive models for adults. Models that is made for display, and not for playing.
It is basically two different produces for two different groups.
LEGO Rule Of Play #2: Affordable.
This rule has not been applied very well. LEGO sets have always been somewhat expensive and they have gone up in price every year since my childhood. This is why the competing/ripoff building blocks exist, and this is why people keep buying them instead of LEGO. More pieces for less money = more play.
The competing bricks have been getting a lot better too, especially since the patents expired and it is now fully legal. Meanwhile, I hear a lot of complaints about the Lego quality going down.
LEGO seems to have shifted its strategy - they make licensed LEGO sets for popular franchises, Star Wars, Harry Potter, D&D, etc.
But people are already 3D printing their own custom pieces. LEGO is going to have a tough future, I think.
@@pwnmeisterage I don't see them having a unique selling point in the long run. Cobi is already doing licensing deals and other manufacturers are sure to do the same.
Great video Phil! Fun fact, Clutch Power is the name of the lead character in a Lego animated movie from 2010! Only now, 13 years on, do I know why the character had that name.
yeah apparently it's an internal metric and everything!
Clutch powers is also a character that shows up in ninjago! Whether or not it's the exact same character I'm not fully sure.
@@pelicanpickle it is
As soon as he said "clutch power", i internally went "OOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH". I've seen that movie several times and never knew where the name came from
I worked in heat treatment plant for steel and it had bought 2 special furnaces for heat treating steel. The same furnaces as Lego uses for hardening the moulds in which lego blocks are made. The engineer from this furnace manufacturer told me that 1 ) the temperature difference requested by Lego almost exceeded the possibilities of the furnace . 2) the precision on which the moulds were made exceeded 0.001mm . The reason for that precision was to assure that no matter when the lego blocks were made ...they always klicked nicely into each other. So 0.01 mm was considered a no go..... Half of 0.001 mm was considered ok.
Its more then 20 years ago ..but I cant imagine letting quality loosening up a bit at Lego.
Wow
.001 mm is a micron. Bacteria are 1-3 microns in size.
Blood cells 7 micron
Very interesting, hard to imagine such tight tolerances. Certainly if you've seen my woodworking lol
Your mad men bit put a great big smile on my face Phil 😊. Keep up your amazing work. I signed up for your Patreon too! Can’t wait to see what you do next ❤
thanks!!
bit????
@@charliecerrillos A but, a gag, a put on, sketch, whatever you call it. Like, “Hey nice bit on such and such last night…”
@@KomradZX1989 lol, I'm just calling back to when I applauded Phil's commitment to the jackrabbit bit, quality content as always 👍
@@charliecerrillos haha that went right over my head 🤪. Yup Phil is a YT gem. Love all his stuff. He makes it look effortless but I know a lot of work goes into what he makes both here and Vox too. 10/10 ❤️
I think another key factor to Lego's ongoing success is their partnerships with big IPs like Star Wars, Harry Potter, various superheros, etc. Thanks for another interesting (and fun) video Phil, I really do appreciate your time and effort in putting these together for us. Cheers o7
That's kinda the story of the later part of the company history, how they survived and then prospered in the 2000's. In the early 2000's it seriously looked like they would go out of business which seems kinda crazy now.
@@GordonWrigley yeah, it’s weird I can still remember when all the new lines (like Technic and Bionicle) came out, and then the movie tie-ins a little later, and it was all so strange and novel.
Interesting to think younger people probably just see it as an integral part of How Lego Is.
@@kaitlyn__L I grew op with Bionicle. Inseparable part of my childhood. I was enchanted by it!
Although those IPs bring great business and new costumers to Lego, I feel they are ultimately destroying the companies philosophy and their original aim. Nobody is buying LEGOs to create their own builds anymore, it's always just build whatever the box says. But doesn't help all these new sets are constantly coming out with pieces that are really only usable for the set itself and become completely useless for MOCs. Lego is becoming less and less about creativity and originality and is becoming more like companies that just ride the coattails of whatever is currently popular and will bring business. When I was little, I would always avoid the sets that had bright contrasting colours and big printed bricks because I knew they would become useless bricks if I ever wanted to disassemble the sets. So many sets from the 90s and early 2000s inspired me to want to build my own MOCs. You just don't get that same feeling with newer Legos anymore. Sorry for the rant lol
@@natwass1356 i dont agree. Sure you can build the licensed sets. But that doesnt mean that people only follow the instructions. If people decide to exclusively follow the instructions, those people were never gonna make custom builds in the first place. Also, building licensed sets is fun for the lego group builders. It's a challenge for them and they have the most fun that way. Many of them have said this.
Lego seems to be aiming at adults a lot in recent years. With the new lego ideas campaign being evidence of this. Kids can still have fun with the licensed sets, and adults too. Then the super fans can build unique things on lego ideas. which is all about custom building btw
I remember those warped blocks. My grandparents had that (mostly) brown set laying around, including windows, doors, rounded tiles great for building silo form buildings. But it was bad. The hollow blocks were indeed warped. Totally forgot about this. I think it's something they once bought in the 60's or 70's for their own kids.
When I was a kid we had to primarily use Brix Blox, which were a lot cheaper. We did occasionally get small packs of Legos, usually single vehicle sets, which we treasured because they stuck together so well. But despite their deficiencies, we did get a lot of play value from the Brix Blox.
I remember playing with some bricks named "Montini" which were of a softer plastic and which held together quite well. I think I still have a model I made of "Fireball XL5" (very crudely similar) in storage somewhere.
Crazy. I found exactly two of those really early blocks in my preschool’s giant tub of Lego and was really confused by it. It was indeed pretty rubbish. It must’ve been at least 45 years old at the time!
I just finished rebuilding my Lego Space Shuttle set from 1990. It took a few years to dig all the pieces from the piles of bricks my son and I have gathered over the years.
Is it 1682 with the crane and launch tower by chance?? I've been working on rebuilding that one myself! :) My five year old decided to grab up a bunch of pieces, and more have been lost to time; so I"m ordering parts online.
@@playgroundchooser I had the 6339.
"Affordable" 😆
I love LEGOS, but man it feels like a pricy hobby these days. Thank you for the video, it was informative and enjoyable.
@@Tyborzor you buy mould king and get 15 times the amount for the same price xD. (and pls dont @ me about the "quality" of lego, we all know how it compared with the orient express ;) )
@@Tyborz If you are too old for playing with Lego and primarily enjoy the building, the competition offers waaaay better sets
Even different versions of LEGO such as duplo or technic fit with regular bricks which is pretty neat.
I'm 57, and I still have Lego bricks from when I was very young. New bricks still work with my old ones. They don't break without extreme effort. It's a high-quality, endlessly flexible toy. They got it right... :)
It also raises the question: why didn't the narrator have legos in his youth?
Broken wheels. Classic
Over priced today
The same here. Lego is my favourite toy and every now and then I take them out to play with them/it. However, I don't like the new style where you buy a kit full of special parts that build 1 think. I preferred when you only had a few shapes and you had to use your imagination to build a house and then you could make a plane with the same parts, or a boat, whatever. What was important was your imagination, now it's all done for you.
@@gtaPlayer47 Is there another creative toy that lasts forever at that price point? Given the longevity, and backward compatibility, I'd say they're an excellent investment...
6:40 so the “HEY!” in Lego commercials goes way way back
Looks like they broke rule #2 😅
I imagine the marketing was just as important as their re-engineering. Too often today, you hear stories of salespeople overselling their products to their clients, that which fellow engineers can't meet their demands.
At least for LEGO, both their marketing and engineering teams were in sync. That enabled their success for decades. Parents/kids were promised an utopia where all they require was their imagination to build incredible masterpieces. Their absolute reliability is what keeps these people coming back for more.
The "re-engineering" was absolutely necessary. I am so old that I have had a set of Kiddicraft, it was ok then, but compared to Lego it was crap!
In school i got to visit their headquarters and moulding building in Billund (i live in Denmark) and it was amazing! There is obviously LEGO bricks everywhere that you can just build with but getting a tour of the moulding building was incredibly interesting. They have their history displayed in a lot of places like their different releases to old molds but the only place they have the current molds are like in the middle of the building where the bricks are actually made and if you light a match in that room it will close itself off and the oxygen will be removed.
Thay do not allow any device capable of taking photos into the moulding building at all so the only way for me to show people that i have been there is a LEGO brick with writing that says "moulding building" on one side and "i was here" on the other, mine is blue 😄
An interesting insight into Lego! Had no idea they weren't the first. Also, the fact that youtubers like you are producing such slick production, great storytelling, and better than broadcast content is really such a treat. Well done.
nice of you - thanks!
They weren't the first, but they developed the idea to such an extent that it surpassed the original.
Good artists copy, but great artists steal
Nope an early type was penny bricks
if you're up for a really interesting watch. Check out the history of lego, the amount of literal fires they had to overcome is interesting.
@@titan133760 This is one reason I'm not a fan of patents. It causes the market/ society to stagnate and crawl forwards instead of forcing companies too actually compete with one another by actual economic factors. Like higher quality, cheaper, etc. It's not giving the consumer the opportunity to decide what they want more (outside of just not buying it) or find better if the company says "you get what you get and you don't throw a fit"
The most important thing that Lego did was to make it so that any given set works with every other set. There has never been--to my knowledge--a Lego piece that doesn't fit outside of a single set.
When I was young, we played with Idema bricks. Similar to Lego, but smaller and harder. They stayed very well together, but were rather hard to disassemble one you wanted to make something different. We had also a different set, made of soft plastic and larger, but I do not remember the name. They were designed to be used with the studs pointing down.
The fact legos from the 1980s that my uncle gave me to add to mine still work with modern Lego sets is honestly just incredible.
Wow!! I had exactly 1 janky kiddicraft block in my 1980s lego tub, and it killed me how it wouldn't quite connect with my lego. I didn't know till now what it was.
First video that I've watched on your channel. Subscribed. Great content and editing! 02:45, is the part that bugged me cuz of the blurriness but it didn't even matter cuz the video is so good! Going to watch a big part of your past videos now. Thanks!
thanks and sorry about that! agreed! i dropped my lens a couple weeks ago and was dragging myself into replacing it. but i have now! so that should be fixed.
As a danish person, Leg Godt(LeGo) doesn’t just mean play well, it means play good, and it was also used as part of the general motto of the lego corporation a motto that remains to this day. This motto is quite simple:
“The best is never too good”
As a danish bilingual person I must disappoint you by saying: you can't say "play good", because "good" is an adjective, not an adverb. "well" is the adverb that has the same meaning. So you can say: "Lego is really good, it works well", but if you say: "Lego is really well, it works good", it sounds like you're drunk.
So when translating, "god" = "good", and "godt" = "well"
You have to respect the enginerring that goes into making these small plastic pieces with that kind precision and at that productionscale its pretty crazy that they managed to do that all those years ago
Lego also took the leap into video games in the 90s and now they basically have their own genre of games now. Lego Racers was one of the first video games I ever played and I still have it on the N64.
Also, if you really want to see Legos pushed to their engineering limits, I highly recommend Brick Experiment Channel. Some of the coolest things I’ve ever seen done with legos are on that channel
AHHH! I knew your edits and sound effects are very VOX like!! omgod love love love
I've had the pleasure of getting out all my 80s and early 90s legos for my kid to play with. I found PDFs of all the old set instructions. Everything aside from pirate ship sails survived quite nicely.
06:00 sadly I think Lego has forgotten #2 on their list. Lego sets that are anything more than expansions cost $50, or $100 if you want a building, if not more. Part of the problem I believe, from looking at the website, is that Lego doesn't appear to come up with as many original themes anymore. They have only 2 that I could see, Monkie Kid and Ninjago. Everything else appeared to be franchise related (Starwars, Harry Potter, Jurassic World, etc) or stuff more angled to adults who want to build something large (which, by the way, if you want anything major, expect to spend $500-$1000 for). Back when I was a kid, they had pirates, the old west, ninjas, the aquanauts, there was the explorer set which over time went from Egypt to the jungle, to dinosaur island. I also remember there being a space insectoid invasion, time travelers, and the rock raiders. Heck, that's just what I remember from the late 90s/early 00s.
they got the botanicle sets, the icons one (some of them r original); creator (my fav); dots,... But its true that most sets r liscenced and they r fucking expensive
@@phanngockhanhchi2971 :( this makes me sad. I am sad
@@magmat0585 i am not sad with my creators. I sure love them. But if u want, i can send u a hug.
it's a testament to their quality, lego pieces stand up to a lot of abuse, and birth rates in the developed world are plummeting, this means more and more old lego sets for fewer and fewer children, thus eliminating the need for new cheap and simple sets to be made.
the company still needs to turn a profit though, so shifting their business model to making new more complex sets (or based on new licenses) that are difficult to recreate with the bin full of pieces your dad got from his dad forty years ago was a measure they had to take.
@@windhelmguard5295 It’s not that deep they’re just a bad company
I love how I just bought a Lego set for himself yesterday and then this video comes out. Lego is my most favorite toy and I'm slowly getting back into it.
i didn't expect to be drawn in, but it is pretty satisfying...
I love the fact you brought in the famous scene from Mad Men. That scene is my most favorite from the series. Very impactful. Great job.
One subscriber over here! Incredible work telling the story, editing, researching... thanks!
There was a huge sale on Legos, they were lined up for blocks.
The intro setup, your speaking cadence, and the musical accoutrement gave this 9 minute video all of the earnestness and severity of a classic History Channel documentary (not the modern one with aliens and conspiracies everywhere) and you kept my attention so complete during it that I cannot help but be in awe. Well done across the board!
Agreed! Eight minutes flew by in what felt like three.
As a kid I had both types of bricks (of course I didn't have original Kiddicraft brick, but some soviet/post-soviet knock-offs, but the shape was identical as you shown) and from experience of using both I can say following things:
- Lego indeed held way much better than kiddicraft - the latter depending on which 2 bricks you were trying to combine could even not been able to be joined at all; on the other hand kiddicraft were much easier to separate
- kiddicrraft were much easier to break, esecially due to that gap on the sides - you could just snap half of the brick if you stepped on the brick that was laying on the side (that might be combination of shape but also next point); lego on the other hand - good luck
- brick were made from different kinds of plastic (although it might been just my knock-offs that were) - lego ABS is softer and less durable, after years having many scratches and rough surface; kiddicrafts had hard, silky surface and stayed that way after years of play (though they were more brittle as mentioned before)
In the end I was playing with lego much more, but that in part could be result not of their design, but because I had much more of them and they had some variety so I could build more complex structures.
Back in the eighties I had some Pebe bricks - they were the East Germany-produced bricks similar to Lego (Lego was simply not available in the Eastern Europe unless you had USD to spare which was very unlikely for most normal people). And the quality difference was huuuuge. While Lego usually grips well enough to build something but can be relatively easy disassembled with sufficient (although not extreme) force, the Pebe blocks would either not stay together due to looseness or you'd need to push the blocks hard together because they were too tight. Then you couldn't separate them afterwards. So the quality gap was huge. Not to mention that at that time you could do so many "realistic" things with Lego whereas Pebe offered just square-ish blocks and some "axle and wheels" pieces and that was pretty much it.
That really is a fantastic vision statement from Christiansen. I would say that Lego won because of their *inspired* engineering.
good distinction!
Lego just threw out rule number two entirely: affordability. Look at sets from the 2000s and look at sets today. Todays set do cost a fortune, so i am going away from lego to mould king or other brands, where prices are reasonable even for sizeable miniatures. Lego went nuts with their prices, doubling and tripling it just out of a temperfit, as it seems to me, disregarding the people, which really saved lego from getting bankrupt. Its sad, that lego fell down in the hole of greed, but here we are.
I have a few dozen adult-targeted sets from Lego competitors and I can recommend not buying Lego anymore. It all comes from the same Chinese factories anyway (unless you buy e.g. Cobi, which produces in Poland).
What are those competitors?
@@soqquadro7672 cada, cobi, bluebrixx, mould king, just to tell a few that i encountered. Megablocks too ...
@@soqquadro7672 Pantasy, Cobi, CaDa, Mould King. Just to tell you a few. None of these produce fake Lego Sets (replicas). And they often are specialized in different topics, so they do not have that full cataloge of sets.
@@Sebastian-hg3xc not true. Lego is made in several countries in their own factories and China is not a main supplier. Also Lego’s industrial strength is their superior plastic molding - which until now is unsurpassed. That’s why their molding methods and machinery are kept completely secret.
I like how quickly they got rid of the *affordable* rule
It's the first time on your channel! Subscribed for sure, you are a great storyteller!
Well done with the Mad Men integration! Seriously, that was some impressive green screen and editing work 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
It gives it more "clutch power". My god, that's why they named him Clutch Powers. Took me 13 years to realize this, smh.
When I as little, i alsywa looked at it super hard while putting them together trying to figure out how they linked together, and also figured out that the tubes helped so much to make them click together so hard
Off-topic: I've never seen someone this young actually pull off that mustache. Truly, it looks great. Well done.
you know the way to my heart
The number 2 rule now seems kinda strange to think about. I think in the year 2030 we'll start to see 200-piece sets reach the 100€ mark.
The new Andor Lego set 75338 contains 2 small vehicles and 3 minifigures for example. And that retails for 100€ with just over 600 pieces, the opposite of affordable.
my guy, the price is only going to go up
I wouldn't be surprised if 50% of the cost was licensing fees. The mouse wants his cut and god damn he gonna get it
@@ZoeyZwee to quote another successful toy company: "they're undermonetized"
Are you that wasn't a reseller of some kind? It retails for 70 usd directly off the website
Do yourself a favor and stop buying Lego. Just purchase lego compatible bricks from other companies. They are produced in the same Chinese factories anyway and you often pay not even half the price per brick.
Lego does not innovate anymore. Their quality as good as their competitors, often even lower. The only reason they can still sell their products is their brand name, big movie licences, and their very frequent immoral legal actions against their competition.
They're no longer affordable. If you look at what they're selling on their own site or Amazon (or in stores like Target), sets on average are about $80 USD for just a small set. If you look at the Chinese New Year dining set, for instance, no bigger than their sets from the 90s, they charge $400 for it.
That's not true at all. I was recently at target to buy a Lego set as a gift, and there were many options in the $15-$40 range, including branded star wars, Minecraft, and Harry Potter sets. They also have much more expensive sets, but I think their average price relative to inflation is much lower now than it was when I was a kid. My parents bought me a 900-piece Lego pirate ship in the '80s that retailed for the equivalent of 260 USD in 2023. I just bought a 600-piece TIE fighter for $40, which would have been less than $20 in 1989.
Now, these are random data points and the comparison may be heavily time-frame-dependent, but I strongly suspect it's indicative of an overall trend.
@@almitydave Please post a link. I'm looking for sets with more than 40 pieces under $60. It would be much appreciated.
@@almitydave Sure, some Targets may have sales. I'm not sure why you're bringing up the 80s. I live next to a Target and didn't see any of the $15-$40 range you're talking about, unless you're talking about the softpacks or miniboxes (as opposed to sets). If you just type "lego" into Amazon, the vast majority of results are $50 and up, and all of the "special/themed" sets (not softpacks or miniboxes) are in the hundreds. Looking at the Target website, it says the item is only $40 when purchased online, leading me to believe you looked it up and didn't bother reading the entire page before making up a story. Additionally, the same price is shown to be a current online discount on Amazon where they explicitly state it's a temporary discount, also showing the normal price of $45.99. Additionally, you're using the Texas Sharp Shooter Fallacy, Personal Incredulity, and the Argument From Ignorance Fallacies in your reasoning in additional to a whole slew of personal experience based fallacies and statistical fallacies. I'm going with the overall majority of kits available and what their median is based on hard math and with the sources available.
@@Anon0nline lmaooooo I love the hard left turn your msg took there at the end!! 👏🏼 off to look up the Texas Sharp Shooter Fallacy now
not only is the Chinese New Year dining set you mention a retired product that amazon only sells through scalpers, but it is a huge amount of plastic compared to the average "big" 90s set, due to being made of so many small pieces. most modern lego sets are priced reasonably and cheaply
“Affordable” got completely thrown out the window many years ago. The same size Lego sets I got for $5 as a kid are $15-20 now.
I think the importance of the fact that Lego changed the proportions of the brick/studs is being overlooked here. I really wish I at least knew more about the person who did it, because there's some magic in those proportions.
I used to design curricula for companies using Lego Power Functions to teach mechanical engineering to gifted kids. Fairly complex mechanisms - motorcycles, robotic arms, bipedal walkers, submarines, etc. I was always blown away, not only by the wide variety of motion components (gears, belts, chains, etc) available, ALL in proportions dictated by that original 2x4 brick many decades ago, but also by the ways they all interacted. No matter what kind of design corner I painted myself into at 3am on an overextended project, there was always a perfect piece that would lock in exactly where I needed it, and do exactly what I need it to do. It was almost like all these current Lego pieces were taken into consideration when the original brick proportions were worked out. Don't jump on me; I said "Almost". :P
You matched the mad men photography on yourself so well that, for a few seconds there, I thought you were an actual character present in that scene, that I had forgot.
there’s always something to inspire even the greats, and lego’s founder, Ole Kirk, found his muse and decided to make a product that would shape and unite generations of people. I have loved playing with and building lego since I was about 5 years old, and I know for sure that I will pass down this hobby to my kids. the happiness of buying a new set, the excitement of seeing it built, it’s a great experience. impressive that a piece of plastic no bigger than your thumb could bring so much joy
Hey, man. You did such significant research, thank you for that! I've been playing with Legos since... ever, and I appreciate knowing where they came from and why they're so famous.
If you're into STEM or especially in Engineering. You'll see how impressive LEGO are at manufacturing their stuff with precise tolerance
phil, that mad men bit is very good!
What kind of parent doesn't give their kids LEGO's, and how did Phil turn out to be so creative/thoughtful growing up without them?
Tinkertoys perhaps?
@@Bacopa68 - I didn't think about Tinkertoys... or Erector Sets, and Lincoln Logs. To be fair though, to me, nothing compared to LEGO's.
I love legos. But on the timestamp @ 5:55, The word affordable is sadly not applicable in today's world. Lego's have come a long way when it comes to price.
Love watching videos about information that will probably not be useful to me yet incredibly eager to learn about.
If you're interested in learning more about Lego's history I highly recommend the "The LEGO Story - How it all started" animation, it's really entertaining and a pretty interesting story.
Having interlocking bricks was not a new idea from Kiddicraft either. From my great-grandfather, I inherited a box of Anker bricks. They were made out of clay at the end of the 19th century, and they already had nubs at the upper side and slight indentions at the underside which fit together, causing the bricks to lock into place and giving your constrution more stability. What they didn't do, giving their material, was to click together. They were just secured against sliding.
Another OUTSTANDING video. Love your format, humor, and researched info.
Back in the 1960’s, a little toy company from Kyoto, Japan produced a competing line of construction blocks similar to Lego’s called “N&B Block.” N&B blocks were advertised as being better than Lego blocks because their sets produced more realistic models. Lego sued them for copyright infringement and lost because of this. Unfortunately, the line was discontinued by the 1970’s, when the company changed their focus towards producing a home version of the video game “Pong” dubbed the “Color TV Game 6.”
The name of the company?
Nintendo.
Bravo for adding a cigarette smoke during that Mad Men segment (i should rewatch that series again).
Thanks to affordable plastics after WW2, we got all of this lego now! maybe in a alternate timeline they were made in bakelite or shellac but would be expensive
i'm convinced this is how they did it on the show too!
@@PhilEdwardsInc it 100% was, the projections and TVs were done in post and the smoke added afterwards. Easy to decide whether to make it a silhouette (near the projector) or a highlight (near the screen) in post too, just by changing a few brightness values.
I think one thing that's easy to overlook is the quality of the set design. Making them nice to build, with interesting stories, and nice to play with with easy instructions makes a huge difference
"Affordable" makes my wallet cry
And now, they're all about selling predetermined sets that only work in one way; so you put them together and never touch them again, and then you buy the next one and a cycle starts again..
My grandparents had the original hollow LEGOs, and they were really frustrating to build with because they would constantly either not fit together or fall apart because they didn't stick together.
Oh my, that Mad Men homage was fantastic! Took me right back to that great episode, congratulations
that really is a pretty good episode. couldn't believe it was way back in season one- i guess it really made an impression that i remembered it!
Pretty good, but you should have used a period-appropriate font like Helvetica.
Lol I'm actually about to throw a Lego party for my son today... Happy this popped up on my feed this morning. Thanks for the information, I will proudly annoy young party goers with all the trivia about this awesome toy!
Back in the 80s, we've had a kind of USSR lego. It was different: there were kind of swallow-tail thingies on the inner side of the blocks, and the pins had a little cavity in them. The plastic seem to have been quite different too. The blocks were snapping really well: so well indeed, that you had trouble disjoining them.
I remember hearing that Lego was inspired to use kiddiecraft to create the plastic brick on a documentary once. To be fair all the greatest ideas comes from old ones, just look at Disney and Lego. Many of Disney’s films are based off of fairytales and novelizations and have been heralded as some of the best animated films of all time. Lego also Was willing to expand their reach from wooden toys to plastic ones and was inspired by these British toys that used plastic for more durability. good ideas always come from improving on the old ones and making them better.
"inspired" is a nice word for "stealing and getting away with it". I have to remember it.
I imagine there was also legal pressure of some sort to push competitors out of the market. Like even if someone invented a different type of structural improvement Lego could argue in court that it's too similar to Lego's patent or central pillars.
LEGO has been working on making bricks from renewable materials for the past several years and has even switched all Lego plants to a plant-based compound. I remember reading somewhere, though, that's it's quite a struggle to find the right material because they have a laundry list of requirements, all of them in place to ensure a new brick is identical to that updated design from the late 50s.
This was an interesting watch. I never thought to do a deep dive into lego and taught me a few things.
I really enjoyed this video. The storytelling is just amazing. You have my sub!
Very cool. I'm glad this video came up on my recommended. I happen to be an AFOL who still enjoys the simple pleasures of the LEGO brick. As an adult with limited time and who's on a computer all the time, I started looking into the ability to 'play' LEGO digitally. There are limited building applications but more specifically I found that LEGO digital media had zero place for me. Video game titles released under the LEGO brand were either IP story telling games or puzzle based games. None of them offered the playability factor of LEGO bricks in real life. So I started making my own digital environment. I am no game developer so progress is slow but I ended up devising an entire digital platform extension concept that integrate the real world products, resources and marketing tools into the digital space to elevate the LEGO product and brand as a whole. I've been fortunate enough to snag a few meetings with some notable LEGO Group members to learn some insights. The '6 rules of play' was some new information for me. Although simple and concise, that helps me formulate my ongoing pitch concepts.
Fantastic video!