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Please, please do more of these types of videos. Its so interesting as a history nerd to see where Lego was during the context of the 20th century. An interesting topic to cover would definitely be the history of the Lego Bootleg. Try to find why they happen, what were the earliest bootlegs, what were some Lego equivalents in former Communist nations like the Soviet Union, Lego's legal action, and Lepin. And I mean knock-offs, not competitors like MacFarlane or Mega Constructs, since they're owned by a much larger company that, although may obtain a license, are otherwise distinct from Lego. The bootlegs I refer to are those that infringe on Lego's Minifigure trademark.
The funniest part of this to me is that Mega Construx (formerly Mega Blox) actually used these marbled bricks as an additional marketing ploy for their Halo sets as "exclusive camouflage bricks"
I used to work for Courtaulds at the time and there was an official project to develop marble effect bricks by dispersing coloured short chopped fibres in white plastic. My involvement was to characterise the properties of standard bricks and I was presented with large box of Lego bricks to test. Most of the bricks never got used and I kept them. Courtaulds also made the cellulose acetate in Derby UK that Lego bricks were made of before they switched to ABS.
As the adage says: “You give a poor man a fish, and you feed, him for a day. You teach him to have fish, you give him… you give him.. i dont know man…”
The best thing lego could do to kill the market for marbled bricks would be to simply sell them in small packs for a reasonable price. That would immediately wipe out their insane collector value.
@naverilllang Not to mention how wasteful it is! I feel like they would be such a great tool for people who are artist, or make jewelry with upcycled toys and, of course, for Lego builders(Is this what they're called?) It would be so cool because they could even sell mystery packs of them and it would be like a gacha,for Legos.
@@xdani_thethinkingneko I agree with you about 90% of that, but gacha games are just gambling for children and thats straight up evil. It encourages addictive personality disorders at a young age. I’m not joking when I say brain scans of 15-20 year old Genshin players actually match with those of long term gambling addicts who have been in Vegas for 30 years. Look it up if you don’t believe me.
The only reason I can see why LEGO wouldn't want marbled bricks in their sets is because it could make some sets look very inconsistent if someone got really unlucky with the patterns on their bricks.
This is why I think that blind bags might be a good way to sell them. Makes it clear from the get-go for the buyer that the colors you get are a random luck of the draw, and prevents people from cherry-picking the 'good' ones and leaving the uglier ones to be eventually thrown out as waste (which I'm certain would happen once they lost their inherent value as a rare collector's item). I feel like they should be sorted by size though, so that they're easier to plan into builds ahead of time.
@@luviana_ Agreed! That way it won't be disappointing if you get a few not-so-great ones here or there since there'll be a bunch more good ones to balance it out.
I was a lego pirate fan as a kid in the 80s... if I had got some marbled up mixed bricks one that held up a structure of oh say the skull eye schooner..😂 what woukd my parents do then with no internet.. complain to Kmart workers?? That set was 100% accurate and im 40 years old still own it and its original box and manual.... i buy used lego lots today if its non lego/toys from 80s+ i toss them in container. Jacks, marbles, cards, bootleg legos. Linkin logs, pogs!! You name it.. got no use for defect legos.
The marbled bricks are a historical unauthorized mistake. Lego should realize its a good marketing tool, getting more people interested in Lego leading to possible lego sales.
They are worthless. You can't build anything with them because the marbling will never line up. If you build a wall it will look like pixels stacked up
@@nigeladams8321 There are several competing manufacturers that work to the same physical dimensions and connection specs as Lego for their bricks and other pieces for significantly less cost per set. Chances are pretty high that if the demand was high enough that they could and would produce marbled bricks.
I like how companies like Lego will sit on top of gold mines for things like this and go "nope, I don't think I will". People would probably love to get marbled bricks but it looks like it will never happen officially.
The problem is the inconsistency. Its impossible to create a constant pattern across thousands of sets. They want to avoid getting recalls or complaints from people getting an unfortunate pattern
You'd think that a company that's always going on and on about going green would embrace this. They're a biproduct of switching from one color to another, right? They can't melt them back down to make another color, at least not without using more dye. Why not find some use for them in their sets? They could also sell them in big bags at a lower price point. Jelly Belly does this with the beans that don't come out quite right, they call them Belly Flops.
You know what this could be an entire lego line called error bricks and all it IS just the same premise as how the Jelly Belly corporation gathers up all of the defect jelly bellies and then rebrands them as something else
I love the look of marble bricks, Lego really needs to realize that other people love them too. Lego sees them as mistakes, we see them as happy little accidents. Also, I find it so weird that lego often buries their old molds. They could just be kept in a vault or storage room. That way, you could reuse the old models when needed.
Apparently, those molds are very sensitive to the elements and need to be stored in special climate controlled warehouses, or else they become unusable. This is very expensive, which is why Lego gets rid of old molds that haven't been used in many years, so they can use the storage space for other molds.
From what the video said, i was more under the impression that they did that with the molds once they weren't usable anymore, ie they were too damaged or worn
It looks to me that Lego doesn't like the fact they are counterfeit and were made behind their back, not that they have anything against the bricks themselves. The fact they made an April Fools joke about the bricks shows they don't mind them. They just don't like that some rogue employees of a supplier profited off of their stolen property.
I think these bricks were the inevitable outcome of R&D at Borg Warner. See the patterns on the short end of the bricks shown at 8:45. The marbling helps you see where the mold sprue connects and how the plastic flows into the mold. If you're testing many formulations of ABS in order to get this specific process right, this is probably the way to go as a solid color won't give you as much information. So, IMO, a lot of these marbled bricks are just R&D waste (that was thrifted into the hands of kids), rather than a deliberate rogue brick-making operation (although it became that in the end).
simpler answer... I work in plastics, this happens during a color change. During a color change the machine keeps running to purge out the old color. Until the new color is fully in everything marbled is scrapped.
I live in a town literally a couple of miles away from Grangemouth, these bricks are floating around at car bootsales in Scotland because workers would take the reject products and give them to their kids to play with.
On a similar note, the mystery flavored dumdum suckers are a result of the same thing. When they change flavors on the production line, a certain amount of the batch mixes between the flavors, and they know which section of the candy is the mixed flavor. Those get separated out and wrapped as the mystery flavor.
my question for you now is, does this happen in the soda industry too? Fanta is too fond of "mystery flavors" and hyping them up, i've always wondered if that's just some chemical cocktail, but now your explanation got me intrigued
@@miaugato93 Probably not, at least not for the same reason as the suckers. With suckers, they cook a batch of the candy, roll it into a large log, then it's placed in a machine that continues to roll it into a long, thin tube. The sticks get inserted and a machine cuts and shapes the suckers. When you change batches, you still have some of the previous batch in the roller machine, and the flavors mix there. They know from experience what section of candy will be the mixed flavors, so use the mystery flavor wrappers for those. Soda could use a similar process, but due to being a liquid you'd pretty much have an entire batch of mixed flavor. What's more likely is like the various Mt Dew flavors, where it's basically market research. If one is popular enough to be profitable, they keep it permanently. If not, then they just retire it. I'm also not that familiar with Fanta flavors, but if they have a literal mystery flavor, where no 2 bottles taste the exact same for a given manufacturing date it's more likely to be like the suckers.
LEGO should embrace these bricks and release special polybags of specific color combinations as either LEGO store exclusives or gifts with purchase. Imagine every month or two you could go into a LEGO store and get a little bag of beautiful marbled bricks along with your Star Wars or City set.
This is like the mystery flavor from Dum Dum. They sell the suckers produced when changing flavors as mystery. It could be wholly the first or second flavor, or it could be some mix of the 2. They have marketed what might have went to waste.
also, the molds that are the most sensitive (in the sense that they are sought after), like the 2x4 bricks are handled with extra care, preferably not leaving the factory location in Billund
That's mostly mythology nowadays I feel, companies like Cobi make even better bricks than Lego. And just like Lego manufacturs in china today, Chinese manufacturers have gotten good at making their own bricks as well which in many cases are as good as Lego bricks.
They always did, that wasn't a recent change. In fact they don't even need to do it anymore because they no longer have factories all over the world now that their main production is centralized to one complex. You seem to have misunderstood the explanation, they used to bury the old molds in the new factories as they were expanded and replaced. Their current factory has already replaced all the old ones with centralized distribution.
These rare special bricks has a strong sniff of BUYER BEWARE, would easily attract fraud sellers. And I do like how Mega Blocks adapted the marble effect to an advantage that LEGO see as a error
It's odd to me that Lego, though willing to demonstrate that they know people WANT marbled bricks, hasn't actually officially sold them even in some limited capacity
I lived in Maddiston, a couple miles away from Grangemouth. My best mate when I was a kid had a massive bucket of these. Core memory unlocked when I seen this picture.
You could probably ruin his week if you call him up and inform him that bucket he had as a kid (that he likely doesn't have anymore) would be worth thousands of dollars now. I know the pain. In 1999 I pulled a 1st edition Shadowless Charizard fresh out of a pack in a card shop, traded it to a friend for 3 holo's. That card is worth like 300K now=\
I grew up in Edinburgh, just a short distance away from Grangemouth, and it really wasn’t that unusual when I was a kid to find various of these bricks in kids’ lego collections (especially when they had inherited older bricks from their parents). I remember one guy had about 20 or 30 different types. Crazy to think how much they are worth now - they just seemed like cool curiosities back then. When I was a teenager, one of our school trips was to visit Grangemouth (which is a massive oil refinery, with lots of associated industries on site), and we saw where all the ABS pellets were produced. I never made the link so kind of cool to know the connection.
This is exactly how the Mystery ?? Dum-Dum suckers are made. They are the blended in-between spot between flavor switch-overs in the pipes at the sucker factory. Except instead of throwing the mash-up mixtures away, they brilliantly labeled them “Mystery” and now have ZERO waste. Genius!!!
Similarly Jelly Belly sells their oddly shaped jelly beans that don’t make the cut for the regular packages in bags of seconds. We have a local chocolate shop that does the same.
@@WackoMcGooseWhite Mystery Airheads happen during a flavor change, they cut out the coloring (is why they are white) while changing the flavor. Now I want some White Mystery Airheads.
I can conform you are 100% accurate on how this happens. I was a supervisor in a Tootsietoy factory where we used injection molding machine to manufacture plastic cars and trucks. Every color change you would get the mixed swirling. We would usually purge the barrels of the extruder to try and get the former color out usually.
If Lego doesn't want these bricks in sets, one thing they could do is just turn any and all of the ones they find into keychains and sell them for quadruple the price.
Destroying the inevitable marbled bricks is a waste of plastic and it goes against the claims that they are trying to become more environmentally friendly.
Especially when they could just re-sell them, particularly if they decide to, instead of cleaning between colors, just run the new color through and bag the remnants.
Lego will never be an environmentally friendly hobby so long as they use plastic for their toys. Heck even their rubber use to create toy tires is extreme.
Yup, iirc Lego is technically the largest tire manufacturer in the world because of how many they produce, granted they are small and for a toy, they are still tires
@@Bionickpunk LEGO is the most environmentally friendly use of plastic, perhaps the only environmentally friendly use of plastic, because LEGO is never intended to be thrown away. Half the point is that a box of LEGO can be passed down from generation to generation and all the pieces will work with modern LEGO as well. You have to be an idiot to throw away LEGO instead of donating it or passing it down, so unlike most plastic toys, LEGO rarely ends up in a landfill or dumped in nature (outside of that one time a container ship full of LEGO sank). I still have a ton of LEGO from the 70s and 80s that my parents gave me, and all the pieces are perfectly usable. We'll eventually see a day when kids are playing with 100 year-old LEGO passed down from their great grandparents. It's the polar opposite of planned obsolescence/consumerism/throw-away culture, and likely the longest-usably-lasting toy of all time. LEGO is the one time where using plastic is okay IMO, it's the perfect material for the official toy of longevity. Yes, get rid of all plastic in packaging, appliances, consumer electronics, vehicles, cutlery, cups, etc, anything made to be thrown away is bad when made of plastic. But if one product and company should be allowed to use plastic responsibly, it's LEGO. A toy that lasts forever and can be anything you want it to be? How is that not the one thing worth using plastic for?
@@Thinginator Look at you defending big corpo. 🤑 Plastic toys get damages, Lego is no exception, they make ton of waste during production that will ever be sold. They constantly make more and more toys, increasing the plastic in the world, and you are naive to think that most of it will be safe and secure in someones collection.
I have a yellow/blue marbled brick that must have slipped through QC in the '80s, nowhere near as dramatic as these though, there's just a little blue swirl near the mold mark.
Same here. Mine is a rather large fuselage piece that was new for 1995 and was supposed to be yellow for the Aquanauts Explorer Sub set whose color theme was yellow and black with hints of blue and all their transparent windows, canopies, cockpits were deep blue. It mostly is yellow but like yours has a blue swirl from the mold mark that runs off into a wild spreading fading green along one side underneath it rising upwards. Turns out that year they only molded those uniquely introduced pieces in yellow, black and blue. Yellow and black for the Aquanauts and Blue and black for their rivals the Aquasharks. My guess is that they had two molds running at once, one doing only black and the other alternating from yellow to blue so it must've occurred when they switched out the colors and hadn't cleaned the injector tips. Now that I know just a regular 2x4 marbled brick is worth upwards of 700$ then mine that is 6-7 times larger being a piece using way more plastic must be worth easily in the thousands. I wouldn't part with it for anything less than 2K to be honest and I have no problem sitting on it. I have a rare Forest Raiders Tree base-prison set from 1996 that is going for 3,600$ and I'm still looking at it cause it just keeps going up, It was 3,200$ in January lol. I have the 8th largest personal collection in Quebec with over 50,000 pieces and sets spanning from 1988 to 2015, most of which are 1994-2001. Any takers? If there's a set from those eras you're looking for chances are I most likely have it.
I wonder how much the silver brick from one of their anniversary brick boxes when I was a kid is worth. It's nothing like these or misprints, but they never did anything like tgat again for subsequent anniversary milestones.
As a Moldmaker, this was a fun video. The molding press has a long barrel that melts the plastic on its way to the mold. These bricks are from a color change before the barrel is fully purged of previous color. They look awesome tho!
I used to work in a plastic extrusion place. This is from switching the line from one color to another. Sometimes, the presses will run for an hour before the new color will come out true.
"Lego has some serious control what comes out of their factories" HAHAHAHAH The mexico factory does whatever they want. You want "prototype" transparent star wars figs? Sure why not? You want the exclusive UCS Minifigure in the hundreds? Please be my guest! You fancy 2000 pieces of a rare retired lego piece? Welcome at us!
@@TheRealRusDaddyhonestly I don’t really care if someone is breaking copyright laws as long as it’s against a bigger company and they’ve already made more than their fair share off of it
Im a supervisor at a plastic injection molding company and i run a pouching machine. Part of any changeover in color is purging the mold by melting the plastic in the sprue until it drains out, then running the parts until they are a consistent color and scrap any that are discolored. Sometimes colorant can linger and mix in mid run, worse in older machines. We mold in PE and mostly PP.
I worked in a plastic parts factory, and they made football helmets. I got to take home one of the switchover helmets that was marbled white and blue. It was pretty sick.
Even without their scarcity, I bet Lego could make a very easy profit of selling sets with a bunch of these bricks they look so cool, it's such a wasted opportunity
They still wouldn't like it because it's not a consistent product. The business model is based off of a highly malleable product (it's easy to be successful when you can make whatever you want), the way people enjoy Legos is that they're so perfectly uniform that they inspire creativity (it's easy to build with a simple object that can only connect to itself in one particular way).
What gets me about this is that special factory only bricks get sold om bricklink and lego doesn't seem to care, I literally have trans orange visors for mars mission mocs. Those pieces dont exist
I'm guessing Lego specifically doesn't want the bricks to be marbled, because this technique creates uneven material which breaks more easily, and with load bearing bricks (each supporting up to 432Kg), it might become a problem. This sits well with how they're fine with marbled animals.
A friend of mine used to work at Borg Warner in Parkersburg WV. They made test molds and were supposed to destroy them after. They didn’t. They took them home. He let me have one of them. It’s a beautiful green and white marble color. I love it. I keep it on display.
@HotspotsSoutheast As a collector, I would love to have more information about these. We know a few bricks that probably originated there, but I think that over time they might have had more different moulds and that means there could be more different bricks to find... Can you please tell me: 1) Does the brick have the LEGO logo on the studs, or other markings? 2) Are there letters and/or numbers inside the brick?
LEGO: "What do we do with all those thousands of "error" beautiful marbled bricks, we create every day?" A: Give them away for free? B: Sell them as special editions? "No! Destroy them and waste energy and create even more plastic waste for our planet, because we're LEGO!"
Injection molding facilities that large aren't creating extra plastic waste when they destroy "bad" pieces. They grind them up, and throw it into the mix being used for black pieces. Once the black dye is added, all of the "waste" plastic that was put through the grinder is treated the same as new bulk plastic going into the presses
Years ago, I ran a warehouse for a plastic factory. We would also store the scrap for regrinding. Some of the regrind had these marbleized items and we would take them home. The best ones were when they went to/from the cobalt blue in/from another color. Blue/red, or blue/black looked real cool. A lot of the employees would try to take the items home with them, but the company tried to stop it. Some BS about the customer seeing these "mistakes" and coming after them for it. I had a real nice blue/red colander and a blue/black waste basket for my office. This was well before online and ebay, all of the marbleized "mistakes" would have sold fast on any site.
They should have given them a mould that said “test” instead of “lego” so they could do these color experiments to their hearts’ content without risking the brand. Then if they later decide they actually like the colors they can use it in actual products.
If I got my hands on one of those old molds I would not become a competitor, I would probably just make funny looking marbled pricks and mini figures because funny :)
This is also how Dum-Dums and Airheads get their "mystery" flavor. When changing flavors in the machine just don't use any food dye and sell the strange tasting colorless candies as "mystery."
I love Mega's marbled and metallic bricks. From my experience, there is also little colour puke in the sets. Bought a Halo Pelican that was solid metallic green for the most part.
These remind me of something my mom made when I was a kid called "scribble cookies": She'd take all the ends of my crayons, peel off the wrappers, put them in cupcake wrappers, and baked them in the oven until all the wax melted together. When they cooled off you'd have really cool rainbow crayons!
In 1977 (late 20th century, by the way) my father worked at Aladdin Industries. They injection molded caps for vacuum bottles). One day, they changed color from brown to red. During the 'mixing" phase they let the plastic "plop out" on the floor. What resulted looked like a giant dog poo, laced with red as if it was blood. My Dad brought it home as a joke. My window at work was across from a bank. One day I sat it down right in front of the main door. Then I went back and cracked up at the antics of customers as the saw it at the last second and tried not to step in it. Especially fun was when they stopped and stared in disbelief and wonder. Eventually, a janitor went out with a shovel and disposed of it. The janitor never realized that it wasn't real dog poo! What a day at work. 😂
I work with injection molding machines, we used to make clothes hangers and would sometimes take the multicolored error hangers if we needed any (company ran by my dad, so we were allowd to do it)
It is so weird that they didn't just sell them for maybe like $0.50 less or something because it doesn't really matter if they are all the same color anyway. I don't use that type of hanger anymore but when I did I used all different colors because it had no impact on anything at all lol
As an American, I love multicolored marbled clay objects and plastics. Such as the multi colored extruded fake wood tile floors in some fast food places. An artist's eye loves such things, its almost like Rembrandt browns versus chocolate fudge color. There is a depth and a special interest. The whole idea of recycling plastic into multi-colored objects is also fascinating. I know children like primary colors, but I think everyone also likes variegated colors. And if that makes recycling easier, all the better.
Once, long ago, as a kid, I got a couple marbled bricks, like these, from a few old lego sets, and I put them in a box somewhere, completely forgetting about them. One was white with an ugly red mix and black spots. The other was yellow with some other color in a couple corners. I remember how outstandingly gross they were, at the time, and I had no clue that they were rare ; I guess that I assumed Lego improved and quit making these defects.
6:37 I had to chuckle when "the incredible quality control lego is famous for" was mentioned. You'd think with all that quality control they would be able to ship sets where there's no difference in colour in bricks that should be the same colour, or wouldn't have clearly visible molding points on many bricks used on highly visible parts of a set... Lego had great quality control many years ago, but today, not so much.
Reminds me of minting errors in coins. Doubled lettering and images (known as double dies) can make even a penny worth up to a quarter million dollars.
I tried to tell my workmate the one sided coin he had would be worth a lot. He got rid of it in a shop. Would not give it to me either for some reason.
If Lego really cared that much, they would have sent Teams to Grainville to find every rogue brick and they'd buy every brick put up for auction to keep them out of customer's hands.
I know quite a few candy/cookie companies that sell 'bad' products (ex. Improperly shaped candy corn, giant stuck together balls of hard candy, etc) as souvenirs for visiting factories. Lego has a missed opportunity on selling bags of 'bad' bricks for that purpose
I swear I remember a piece like this among the LEGOs i used to play with back when i lived with my dad and stepmom in Oklahoma. I thought it looked cool, but never considered it might be defective and unintended. And now i'm not even on speaking terms with that side of the family so RIP ever getting to look for it.
You have to wonder if there's any bootleg brands that took further advantage of marbled bricks. I know Mega Blox did this often with some of their sets. I do wish there was at least one company out there intentionally selling made to order marbled lego-compatible bricks for MOCs. Just imagine using em in like gigantic mansion mocs, or aquarium mocs.
I had a ton of Lego as a kid born in 1972 and buying and playing until I moved out of my parent's home in 1991. I had a marbled brick, have zero idea how or when it came into my collection (I was in the US). I loved it because it was different, but no idea it would have value. I also had a malformed block similar to what was shown towards the end of the video. The whole tub was sold at a garage sale summer of 1991. Fun stuff. Thanks for sharing!
I myself have 3 marbled bricks like that. 1 a mix of blue an yellow that has such nice green marbling, 1 red and black, an 1 that has red, black, and a touch of yellow in it. Theyre so pretty!
That April fools joke was too far. The company now deserves hate from the fans. That's like if I made a movie and someone from my studio made a sequel without my permission and distributed it and I stopped it once I found out. Sure fans would treat them as collectibles and would want me to just say it's the sequel. But it wasn't, and I make it clear im not associated with that bootleg story. Later down the line I get the brilliant idea to announce that I will make an official sequel to my movie, making everyone excited, but then saying it was an April Fool's joke. Who is going to want to support me over the bootlegger?
as someone who worked in injection molding, seeing such an indepth analysis on what is a really common thing is quite fascinating. when there were color changeovers, we got this marbling and would just have to grind the rejects down as waste until the next color came through, but it is interesting that these slipped through. im sure when i was half asleep at work, i let a lot of stuff like this go to the shops as well 😅
Randomly stumbled upon this video and I am not kidding, i remember seeing a bunch of those in a lego box at my aunts place. She ran a home for troubled kids and got loads of lego donated. There must be at least 30-50 pieces, since i vividly remember building a house using just those bricks. I wonder if she still has them.
This is one of my favorite video topics that I’ve ever worked on. An extensive amount of time went into researching, scripting, and editing this mini-documentary. If you enjoy, please support this video with a Like and consider Subscribing!
woah!
Please, please do more of these types of videos. Its so interesting as a history nerd to see where Lego was during the context of the 20th century.
An interesting topic to cover would definitely be the history of the Lego Bootleg. Try to find why they happen, what were the earliest bootlegs, what were some Lego equivalents in former Communist nations like the Soviet Union, Lego's legal action, and Lepin.
And I mean knock-offs, not competitors like MacFarlane or Mega Constructs, since they're owned by a much larger company that, although may obtain a license, are otherwise distinct from Lego. The bootlegs I refer to are those that infringe on Lego's Minifigure trademark.
EXCELLENT WORK. SPITBRIX LEGO BIRCK CONTROVERSY,
The funniest part of this to me is that Mega Construx (formerly Mega Blox) actually used these marbled bricks as an additional marketing ploy for their Halo sets as "exclusive camouflage bricks"
I used to work for Courtaulds at the time and there was an official project to develop marble effect bricks by dispersing coloured short chopped fibres in white plastic. My involvement was to characterise the properties of standard bricks and I was presented with large box of Lego bricks to test. Most of the bricks never got used and I kept them. Courtaulds also made the cellulose acetate in Derby UK that Lego bricks were made of before they switched to ABS.
Those red and yellow marbled bricks would be SO GOOD for lava
blue/white looks amazing for aquariums and classic space. black/white is perfect for including a marble pattern into MOCs
yeah those few that were a mix of black, yellow, orange and red would make cool pieces for a volcano setting
@@JamesTDGmarble looking bricks either accurate colour would be amazing
Or the red and white bricks can be like for a pepper mint swirl bricks for a candy theme Lego set or the gray and white bricks for a stormy sky
And Lego countertops lol
Someone needs to teach LEGO the old gamedev addage, "It's not a bug, it's a feature."
They work with Mojang for Minecraft lego sets, they probably already know that.
Iphone lego: You're building it wrong! 😄
As the adage says: “You give a poor man a fish, and you feed, him for a day. You teach him to have fish, you give him… you give him.. i dont know man…”
And they can make MONEY from it, seems like they'd like that
Skill issue. Lego needs to git gud
The best thing lego could do to kill the market for marbled bricks would be to simply sell them in small packs for a reasonable price. That would immediately wipe out their insane collector value.
definitely agreed there, however lego doesn’t want the public to get access to them. Selling them for cheap would contradict there reasoning.
@@u1tranatoryt323 the point is it's silly to try to keep them from the public when they're clearly desired
@naverilllang Not to mention how wasteful it is! I feel like they would be such a great tool for people who are artist, or make jewelry with upcycled toys and, of course, for Lego builders(Is this what they're called?)
It would be so cool because they could even sell mystery packs of them and it would be like a gacha,for Legos.
has the patent for Lego not run out
@@xdani_thethinkingneko I agree with you about 90% of that, but gacha games are just gambling for children and thats straight up evil. It encourages addictive personality disorders at a young age. I’m not joking when I say brain scans of 15-20 year old Genshin players actually match with those of long term gambling addicts who have been in Vegas for 30 years. Look it up if you don’t believe me.
The only reason I can see why LEGO wouldn't want marbled bricks in their sets is because it could make some sets look very inconsistent if someone got really unlucky with the patterns on their bricks.
This is why I think that blind bags might be a good way to sell them. Makes it clear from the get-go for the buyer that the colors you get are a random luck of the draw, and prevents people from cherry-picking the 'good' ones and leaving the uglier ones to be eventually thrown out as waste (which I'm certain would happen once they lost their inherent value as a rare collector's item). I feel like they should be sorted by size though, so that they're easier to plan into builds ahead of time.
@@LowPolyPigeonShould be a big blind bag full of like 20 or 30 marbled bricks
@@luviana_ Agreed! That way it won't be disappointing if you get a few not-so-great ones here or there since there'll be a bunch more good ones to balance it out.
I was a lego pirate fan as a kid in the 80s... if I had got some marbled up mixed bricks one that held up a structure of oh say the skull eye schooner..😂 what woukd my parents do then with no internet.. complain to Kmart workers?? That set was 100% accurate and im 40 years old still own it and its original box and manual.... i buy used lego lots today if its non lego/toys from 80s+ i toss them in container. Jacks, marbles, cards, bootleg legos. Linkin logs, pogs!! You name it.. got no use for defect legos.
The marbled bricks are a historical unauthorized mistake.
Lego should realize its a good marketing tool, getting more people interested in Lego leading to possible lego sales.
Honestly , as somebody who is a creative , I would buy them just to make little jewelry pieces out of them. They'd be cute!
Of course if they were authorized they wouldn’t be a mistake.
Worth $ because they are a mistake and rare. Simple
They are worthless. You can't build anything with them because the marbling will never line up. If you build a wall it will look like pixels stacked up
@@RyanShae-b8t But they were not mistakes.
"Mid to late 1900s"
Just have to go out of your way to make us feel ancient.
Hit me like a ton of bricks.
@@DingusMingus-ug3iwmarbled?
@@Qwerty-zj3rk lol
@@DingusMingus-ug3iw a bag of lego bricks
late 1900's is like the stupidest way you can say that
We need to petition LEGO to acknowledge that people like these marbled bricks
It's probably because there's no quality control on them, marbling is cool, but if certain materials are mixed, then they might fall apart or crumble
@@SuperSuperSporkindeed
Mega has been doing marbled bricks for decades now. They are so cool!
You do? Okay 100€ a piece, buddy. They're 500$ on the resale market but making them on purpose is cheap and easy, but you will pay.
We need lego to acknowledge that people have opinions
Man, I am not into lego that much anymore, but if Lego decided to release a marbled set of nothing but marbled legos, I would buy them in a heartbeat.
Id take out the mortgage necessary
@@nigeladams8321
There are several competing manufacturers that work to the same physical dimensions and connection specs as Lego for their bricks and other pieces for significantly less cost per set.
Chances are pretty high that if the demand was high enough that they could and would produce marbled bricks.
@@mnomadvfx They aren't gonna be the same quality though.
@@0neDoomedSpaceMarine I've tried many brands extensively and alot of them definitely meet the Lego quality standard.
I like how companies like Lego will sit on top of gold mines for things like this and go "nope, I don't think I will". People would probably love to get marbled bricks but it looks like it will never happen officially.
The problem is the inconsistency. Its impossible to create a constant pattern across thousands of sets. They want to avoid getting recalls or complaints from people getting an unfortunate pattern
@@ThePointlessBox_ yeah, the quality control would be a nightmare
That's a feature, not a bug. Marbled bricks are beloved precisely because they are all unique. @@asterlyons8564
You'd think that a company that's always going on and on about going green would embrace this. They're a biproduct of switching from one color to another, right? They can't melt them back down to make another color, at least not without using more dye. Why not find some use for them in their sets? They could also sell them in big bags at a lower price point. Jelly Belly does this with the beans that don't come out quite right, they call them Belly Flops.
You know what this could be an entire lego line called error bricks and all it IS just the same premise as how the Jelly Belly corporation gathers up all of the defect jelly bellies and then rebrands them as something else
Yeah, been to their Fairfield Plant, Belly Flops!
I've always wondered how big the pile would be if I could collect together every misshapen piece of candy I've ever found.
This kind of solution requires a though process that alot of corporate drones have had ironed out of them
Man snacking on Belly Flops were my fuckin childhood man
There is also Dum Dum's mystery flavor. It is the run when switching flavors. It could be 1 or the other, but it could also be mixed.
I love the look of marble bricks, Lego really needs to realize that other people love them too. Lego sees them as mistakes, we see them as happy little accidents.
Also, I find it so weird that lego often buries their old molds. They could just be kept in a vault or storage room. That way, you could reuse the old models when needed.
Apparently, those molds are very sensitive to the elements and need to be stored in special climate controlled warehouses, or else they become unusable. This is very expensive, which is why Lego gets rid of old molds that haven't been used in many years, so they can use the storage space for other molds.
From what the video said, i was more under the impression that they did that with the molds once they weren't usable anymore, ie they were too damaged or worn
I saw this comment and imagined a parent calling their kid their "happy little accident" 💀
Injection molds wear out after a while and they can't be reused. The tolerances are incredibly tight.
It looks to me that Lego doesn't like the fact they are counterfeit and were made behind their back, not that they have anything against the bricks themselves. The fact they made an April Fools joke about the bricks shows they don't mind them. They just don't like that some rogue employees of a supplier profited off of their stolen property.
Lego should make marbled brick separators
They should make METAL ones with a hole through the end for people to put on a keyring
@@Superabound2 I've had that exact thought for a while!
@@Superabound2 Metal ones would be nice, but you can't exactly injection mold them...
Metal ones are a bad idea, they'd be hard and much less ductile than plastic, which is a perfect recipe for scratching bricks really badly.
@@JamesTDGi mean you kinda can
I think these bricks were the inevitable outcome of R&D at Borg Warner. See the patterns on the short end of the bricks shown at 8:45. The marbling helps you see where the mold sprue connects and how the plastic flows into the mold. If you're testing many formulations of ABS in order to get this specific process right, this is probably the way to go as a solid color won't give you as much information. So, IMO, a lot of these marbled bricks are just R&D waste (that was thrifted into the hands of kids), rather than a deliberate rogue brick-making operation (although it became that in the end).
simpler answer... I work in plastics, this happens during a color change. During a color change the machine keeps running to purge out the old color. Until the new color is fully in everything marbled is scrapped.
I live in a town literally a couple of miles away from Grangemouth, these bricks are floating around at car bootsales in Scotland because workers would take the reject products and give them to their kids to play with.
On a similar note, the mystery flavored dumdum suckers are a result of the same thing. When they change flavors on the production line, a certain amount of the batch mixes between the flavors, and they know which section of the candy is the mixed flavor. Those get separated out and wrapped as the mystery flavor.
Thanks!
my question for you now is, does this happen in the soda industry too? Fanta is too fond of "mystery flavors" and hyping them up, i've always wondered if that's just some chemical cocktail, but now your explanation got me intrigued
@@miaugato93 Probably not, at least not for the same reason as the suckers. With suckers, they cook a batch of the candy, roll it into a large log, then it's placed in a machine that continues to roll it into a long, thin tube. The sticks get inserted and a machine cuts and shapes the suckers. When you change batches, you still have some of the previous batch in the roller machine, and the flavors mix there. They know from experience what section of candy will be the mixed flavors, so use the mystery flavor wrappers for those.
Soda could use a similar process, but due to being a liquid you'd pretty much have an entire batch of mixed flavor. What's more likely is like the various Mt Dew flavors, where it's basically market research. If one is popular enough to be profitable, they keep it permanently. If not, then they just retire it. I'm also not that familiar with Fanta flavors, but if they have a literal mystery flavor, where no 2 bottles taste the exact same for a given manufacturing date it's more likely to be like the suckers.
Yep it’s called a continuous manufacturing process. It means there is no like stop and shut down and major clean between batches.
Is this where mystery meat comes from?
LEGO should embrace these bricks and release special polybags of specific color combinations as either LEGO store exclusives or gifts with purchase. Imagine every month or two you could go into a LEGO store and get a little bag of beautiful marbled bricks along with your Star Wars or City set.
This is like the mystery flavor from Dum Dum.
They sell the suckers produced when changing flavors as mystery. It could be wholly the first or second flavor, or it could be some mix of the 2.
They have marketed what might have went to waste.
When you mentioned that company had a brick mold, I think that’s the reason why they now bury molds
Quick, let's all grave rob the LEGO cemetery!
_LEGO City theme music plays_
also, the molds that are the most sensitive (in the sense that they are sought after), like the 2x4 bricks are handled with extra care, preferably not leaving the factory location in Billund
@@Chicky_Lumps Build the excavator!
_Make the LEGO factory strucuturely unsafe by destroying their foundation!_
HEY!
That's mostly mythology nowadays I feel, companies like Cobi make even better bricks than Lego.
And just like Lego manufacturs in china today, Chinese manufacturers have gotten good at making their own bricks as well which in many cases are as good as Lego bricks.
They always did, that wasn't a recent change. In fact they don't even need to do it anymore because they no longer have factories all over the world now that their main production is centralized to one complex.
You seem to have misunderstood the explanation, they used to bury the old molds in the new factories as they were expanded and replaced. Their current factory has already replaced all the old ones with centralized distribution.
These rare special bricks has a strong sniff of BUYER BEWARE, would easily attract fraud sellers. And I do like how Mega Blocks adapted the marble effect to an advantage that LEGO see as a error
It's odd to me that Lego, though willing to demonstrate that they know people WANT marbled bricks, hasn't actually officially sold them even in some limited capacity
we only want them because they are rare :)
@@simills6535bro i want one of them cuz they look so cool
I lived in Maddiston, a couple miles away from Grangemouth. My best mate when I was a kid had a massive bucket of these. Core memory unlocked when I seen this picture.
You could probably ruin his week if you call him up and inform him that bucket he had as a kid (that he likely doesn't have anymore) would be worth thousands of dollars now. I know the pain. In 1999 I pulled a 1st edition Shadowless Charizard fresh out of a pack in a card shop, traded it to a friend for 3 holo's. That card is worth like 300K now=\
@@SubjectDelta20that is brutal.
@@SubjectDelta20 I once bought a pizza for 10,000 Bitcoin.
(That's a lie but someone else actually did back when they were effectively worthless)
@@SubjectDelta20 sure ya did
@@SubjectDelta20 Wwoooowwww you got skinned on that trade, man
These need to be made official. They would be perfect for the see like Ninjago and Dreamzzz!
*sets
Would go really good in dreamzzz
I grew up in Edinburgh, just a short distance away from Grangemouth, and it really wasn’t that unusual when I was a kid to find various of these bricks in kids’ lego collections (especially when they had inherited older bricks from their parents). I remember one guy had about 20 or 30 different types. Crazy to think how much they are worth now - they just seemed like cool curiosities back then.
When I was a teenager, one of our school trips was to visit Grangemouth (which is a massive oil refinery, with lots of associated industries on site), and we saw where all the ABS pellets were produced. I never made the link so kind of cool to know the connection.
This is exactly how the Mystery ?? Dum-Dum suckers are made. They are the blended in-between spot between flavor switch-overs in the pipes at the sucker factory. Except instead of throwing the mash-up mixtures away, they brilliantly labeled them “Mystery” and now have ZERO waste. Genius!!!
Similarly Jelly Belly sells their oddly shaped jelly beans that don’t make the cut for the regular packages in bags of seconds. We have a local chocolate shop that does the same.
Is that also how Mystery Air-Heads happen? Or is that an actual specific flavor they just chose not to name?
@ great question! I don’t know that one.
@@WackoMcGooseWhite Mystery Airheads happen during a flavor change, they cut out the coloring (is why they are white) while changing the flavor.
Now I want some White Mystery Airheads.
I can conform you are 100% accurate on how this happens. I was a supervisor in a Tootsietoy factory where we used injection molding machine to manufacture plastic cars and trucks. Every color change you would get the mixed swirling. We would usually purge the barrels of the extruder to try and get the former color out usually.
ok
Lego my ego
If Lego doesn't want these bricks in sets, one thing they could do is just turn any and all of the ones they find into keychains and sell them for quadruple the price.
Lol. Great idea
That makes so much sense. They could also make sets with 5 to 10 of the “mistake” bricks.
@@FormulaFinn Putting them into Creator sets would make sense, especially those assorted color sets
Regular person: Ooh pretty bricks
Lego employee: *vietnam war flashbacks*
War.
@@moonlightdawn7249 thank you
lol. Happy Tree Friends reference.
@@Damien.Dno?????
@@Damien.Dy’know the vietnam war was a real thing right?
LEGO: "You can build whatever you can imagine, whatever you want, it's all up to you."
Kid uses marbled brick.
LEGO: "That's not allowed."
the april fools joke is downright diabolical
Destroying the inevitable marbled bricks is a waste of plastic and it goes against the claims that they are trying to become more environmentally friendly.
Especially when they could just re-sell them, particularly if they decide to, instead of cleaning between colors, just run the new color through and bag the remnants.
Lego will never be an environmentally friendly hobby so long as they use plastic for their toys. Heck even their rubber use to create toy tires is extreme.
Yup, iirc Lego is technically the largest tire manufacturer in the world because of how many they produce, granted they are small and for a toy, they are still tires
@@Bionickpunk LEGO is the most environmentally friendly use of plastic, perhaps the only environmentally friendly use of plastic, because LEGO is never intended to be thrown away. Half the point is that a box of LEGO can be passed down from generation to generation and all the pieces will work with modern LEGO as well. You have to be an idiot to throw away LEGO instead of donating it or passing it down, so unlike most plastic toys, LEGO rarely ends up in a landfill or dumped in nature (outside of that one time a container ship full of LEGO sank).
I still have a ton of LEGO from the 70s and 80s that my parents gave me, and all the pieces are perfectly usable. We'll eventually see a day when kids are playing with 100 year-old LEGO passed down from their great grandparents. It's the polar opposite of planned obsolescence/consumerism/throw-away culture, and likely the longest-usably-lasting toy of all time. LEGO is the one time where using plastic is okay IMO, it's the perfect material for the official toy of longevity.
Yes, get rid of all plastic in packaging, appliances, consumer electronics, vehicles, cutlery, cups, etc, anything made to be thrown away is bad when made of plastic. But if one product and company should be allowed to use plastic responsibly, it's LEGO. A toy that lasts forever and can be anything you want it to be? How is that not the one thing worth using plastic for?
@@Thinginator Look at you defending big corpo. 🤑 Plastic toys get damages, Lego is no exception, they make ton of waste during production that will ever be sold. They constantly make more and more toys, increasing the plastic in the world, and you are naive to think that most of it will be safe and secure in someones collection.
I have a yellow/blue marbled brick that must have slipped through QC in the '80s, nowhere near as dramatic as these though, there's just a little blue swirl near the mold mark.
Still a cool misprint
Assuming you don't want it you might be able to get a quick $30-$50 for it
Same here. Mine is a rather large fuselage piece that was new for 1995 and was supposed to be yellow for the Aquanauts Explorer Sub set whose color theme was yellow and black with hints of blue and all their transparent windows, canopies, cockpits were deep blue. It mostly is yellow but like yours has a blue swirl from the mold mark that runs off into a wild spreading fading green along one side underneath it rising upwards. Turns out that year they only molded those uniquely introduced pieces in yellow, black and blue. Yellow and black for the Aquanauts and Blue and black for their rivals the Aquasharks. My guess is that they had two molds running at once, one doing only black and the other alternating from yellow to blue so it must've occurred when they switched out the colors and hadn't cleaned the injector tips. Now that I know just a regular 2x4 marbled brick is worth upwards of 700$ then mine that is 6-7 times larger being a piece using way more plastic must be worth easily in the thousands. I wouldn't part with it for anything less than 2K to be honest and I have no problem sitting on it. I have a rare Forest Raiders Tree base-prison set from 1996 that is going for 3,600$ and I'm still looking at it cause it just keeps going up, It was 3,200$ in January lol. I have the 8th largest personal collection in Quebec with over 50,000 pieces and sets spanning from 1988 to 2015, most of which are 1994-2001. Any takers? If there's a set from those eras you're looking for chances are I most likely have it.
I wonder how much the silver brick from one of their anniversary brick boxes when I was a kid is worth. It's nothing like these or misprints, but they never did anything like tgat again for subsequent anniversary milestones.
Changing out the material is also where mystery flavored candy comes from. You can usually guess what two flavors were being swapped.
Oh that makes sense, I never thought about that lol that's really cool
Maybe lego can learn something here from this lmao
Well that's fascinating.
That’s so smart!
Mystery airheads are always the best flavor tho 🤤🤤🤤 makes them extra fruity
As a Moldmaker, this was a fun video. The molding press has a long barrel that melts the plastic on its way to the mold. These bricks are from a color change before the barrel is fully purged of previous color. They look awesome tho!
I used to work in a plastic extrusion place. This is from switching the line from one color to another. Sometimes, the presses will run for an hour before the new color will come out true.
Holy guacamole there's one of these at my grandparents house! I thought it was from some weird 80s set my parents had.
Time to find it!
Time to get some of Grandmas cooking
Keep us posted!
@@ajnazatahm Turns out it was just a Mega Bloks
Did you find it ?
"Lego has some serious control what comes out of their factories" HAHAHAHAH
The mexico factory does whatever they want. You want "prototype" transparent star wars figs? Sure why not? You want the exclusive UCS Minifigure in the hundreds? Please be my guest! You fancy 2000 pieces of a rare retired lego piece? Welcome at us!
Very based
Mexico and china love to ignore copyright laws and everyone else gets to benefit from mexico doing it
So if i went to the mexico factory and paid the right people i could get marbled lego bricks?
@@TheRealRusDaddy yes but mostly Josè benefits from his US/EU sales...
@@TheRealRusDaddyhonestly I don’t really care if someone is breaking copyright laws as long as it’s against a bigger company and they’ve already made more than their fair share off of it
They should sell them as a 100 pack set or something
Or as bonus pieces like the golden ninja in Ninjago
Im a supervisor at a plastic injection molding company and i run a pouching machine. Part of any changeover in color is purging the mold by melting the plastic in the sprue until it drains out, then running the parts until they are a consistent color and scrap any that are discolored. Sometimes colorant can linger and mix in mid run, worse in older machines. We mold in PE and mostly PP.
I worked in a plastic parts factory, and they made football helmets. I got to take home one of the switchover helmets that was marbled white and blue. It was pretty sick.
Even without their scarcity, I bet Lego could make a very easy profit of selling sets with a bunch of these bricks
they look so cool, it's such a wasted opportunity
watch 10:29
@@kezif that was a april fools joke
They should bring these back as marbled meat slabs. They could put them in a "butcher shop" set for Lego City
Never let bro cook again 😂
Can't wait for the LEGO City slaughterhouse set (ages 16+). 😂
Lego waygu!
You are kidding with this one arent you
They still wouldn't like it because it's not a consistent product. The business model is based off of a highly malleable product (it's easy to be successful when you can make whatever you want), the way people enjoy Legos is that they're so perfectly uniform that they inspire creativity (it's easy to build with a simple object that can only connect to itself in one particular way).
What gets me about this is that special factory only bricks get sold om bricklink and lego doesn't seem to care, I literally have trans orange visors for mars mission mocs. Those pieces dont exist
I'm guessing Lego specifically doesn't want the bricks to be marbled, because this technique creates uneven material which breaks more easily, and with load bearing bricks (each supporting up to 432Kg), it might become a problem. This sits well with how they're fine with marbled animals.
Lego needs to learn 'if official won't do it, ill do it myself!' Pretty sure you can get good knockoffs in plastic or resin by now
A friend of mine used to work at Borg Warner in Parkersburg WV. They made test molds and were supposed to destroy them after. They didn’t. They took them home. He let me have one of them. It’s a beautiful green and white marble color. I love it. I keep it on display.
Technically Lego owns that and can rip it right out of your hands. Delete your comment dummy
@HotspotsSoutheast As a collector, I would love to have more information about these. We know a few bricks that probably originated there, but I think that over time they might have had more different moulds and that means there could be more different bricks to find... Can you please tell me: 1) Does the brick have the LEGO logo on the studs, or other markings? 2) Are there letters and/or numbers inside the brick?
LEGO: "What do we do with all those thousands of "error" beautiful marbled bricks, we create every day?"
A: Give them away for free?
B: Sell them as special editions?
"No! Destroy them and waste energy and create even more plastic waste for our planet, because we're LEGO!"
The video pretty clearly states that these bricks were experiments made by rebellious employee in the 70s, not common defective bricks made every day.
Injection molding facilities that large aren't creating extra plastic waste when they destroy "bad" pieces.
They grind them up, and throw it into the mix being used for black pieces. Once the black dye is added, all of the "waste" plastic that was put through the grinder is treated the same as new bulk plastic going into the presses
@@Man_Emperor_of_Mankindthey aren't going to do that for off-colour bricks as that would ruin the next batch
@@ThePlayerOfGameshe meant black bricks
@@ThePlayerOfGamesReread the comment
Scottish here! Its crazy that local news is this well known in the global Lego community
"Scottish here"
Aren't you Scottish everywhere?
@@Whurlpuulplease stfu unless you meant this comment in a playful way
Years ago, I ran a warehouse for a plastic factory. We would also store the scrap for regrinding. Some of the regrind had these marbleized items and we would take them home. The best ones were when they went to/from the cobalt blue in/from another color. Blue/red, or blue/black looked real cool. A lot of the employees would try to take the items home with them, but the company tried to stop it. Some BS about the customer seeing these "mistakes" and coming after them for it. I had a real nice blue/red colander and a blue/black waste basket for my office. This was well before online and ebay, all of the marbleized "mistakes" would have sold fast on any site.
They should have given them a mould that said “test” instead of “lego” so they could do these color experiments to their hearts’ content without risking the brand. Then if they later decide they actually like the colors they can use it in actual products.
LEGO did that on later moulds.
Those marbled patterns can make really nice camouflage
I was thinking that too!
If I got my hands on one of those old molds I would not become a competitor, I would probably just make funny looking marbled pricks and mini figures because funny :)
Bricks my bad*
Honestly, same. I would rather just offer up an ideal source for made to order marbled bricks.
@@JamesTDGMaking made to order bricks sounds like competing against Lego...
Marbled pricks certainly would be funny looking. Not sure how you would do that with a Lego mold, but it sounds like it would be painful. 😂
@@Kelly_Jane Not really competition if they refuse to sell it themselves :>
I literally live 5 minutes away from Grangemouth and I somehow didn’t know about these bricks. This is the kind of stuff they should teach in schools.
Why would anyone teach in schools how someone stole a mold from a private company?
Yeah I live about 20-30 minutes away from there depending on traffic
@@Anty_Praza in this case I think it would be fair to include it in the curriculum as local history.
if i was you i would go there and look for these bricks lol
Now you know, scream it from the roof tops!
This is also how Dum-Dums and Airheads get their "mystery" flavor. When changing flavors in the machine just don't use any food dye and sell the strange tasting colorless candies as "mystery."
I got excited when I saw the Borg set at 6:57 because I never knew LEGO did Star Trek minifigs... They don't, they're one-of-a-kind customs :(
Mega blocks:I am already four parallel universes ahead of you
For them non-marbled bricks are rare lol
I love Mega's marbled and metallic bricks. From my experience, there is also little colour puke in the sets. Bought a Halo Pelican that was solid metallic green for the most part.
@@planetenwanderer5329 I will say they are pretty cool looking ngl
i just got their big buildable energy sword on Ebay and the marbeling with trasnblue plastic makes thjem look so cool.
@@AbyssEyes02facts
These remind me of something my mom made when I was a kid called "scribble cookies": She'd take all the ends of my crayons, peel off the wrappers, put them in cupcake wrappers, and baked them in the oven until all the wax melted together. When they cooled off you'd have really cool rainbow crayons!
You can buy your own crayon melter nowadays thankfully
these bricks look so cool! the fact that people have multiple marbled bricks
In 1977 (late 20th century, by the way) my father worked at Aladdin Industries. They injection molded caps for vacuum bottles). One day, they changed color from brown to red. During the 'mixing" phase they let the plastic "plop out" on the floor. What resulted looked like a giant dog poo, laced with red as if it was blood. My Dad brought it home as a joke. My window at work was across from a bank. One day I sat it down right in front of the main door. Then I went back and cracked up at the antics of customers as the saw it at the last second and tried not to step in it. Especially fun was when they stopped and stared in disbelief and wonder. Eventually, a janitor went out with a shovel and disposed of it. The janitor never realized that it wasn't real dog poo! What a day at work. 😂
After I read the title my first thought was: "I don't give a single brick about what Lego wants..."
I work with injection molding machines, we used to make clothes hangers and would sometimes take the multicolored error hangers if we needed any (company ran by my dad, so we were allowd to do it)
It is so weird that they didn't just sell them for maybe like $0.50 less or something because it doesn't really matter if they are all the same color anyway. I don't use that type of hanger anymore but when I did I used all different colors because it had no impact on anything at all lol
As an American, I love multicolored marbled clay objects and plastics. Such as the multi colored extruded fake wood tile floors in some fast food places. An artist's eye loves such things, its almost like Rembrandt browns versus chocolate fudge color. There is a depth and a special interest. The whole idea of recycling plastic into multi-colored objects is also fascinating. I know children like primary colors, but I think everyone also likes variegated colors. And if that makes recycling easier, all the better.
they could make some realistically looking flame or water bricks with this tho
“precise colors”, “incredible quality control”…good one
I work in a plastics factory. These are color swirls, its a defect. And would never be passed through inspection.
A good handful of these bricks were once mine; some of them are my actual photos (the flame bricks were mine and the underside of 5 bricks is my pic)
Did you sell or trade them? If so how much did you make? :)
honestly the orange and black are really cool, like hot coals, and the orange and yellow is like a molten color
Once, long ago, as a kid, I got a couple marbled bricks, like these, from a few old lego sets, and I put them in a box somewhere, completely forgetting about them. One was white with an ugly red mix and black spots. The other was yellow with some other color in a couple corners. I remember how outstandingly gross they were, at the time, and I had no clue that they were rare ; I guess that I assumed Lego improved and quit making these defects.
5:40 Not only do they make some great turbos and decent transmissions but they make the stuff for Legos ? Thats cool :D
Accident: created a beautiful block many many people would pay good money to own a set of.
Lego: And I took that personally
Marble bricks are so cool, especially when used right, like the Halo Mega Plasma Sword set, or their dirt pieces
But they're so beautiful... Such a shame to have to toss them. 😔
IF Lego intentionally made their own marbled bricks , it would kill off the illegal trade of the knockoff bricks .
3:56 Those flame bricks are incredible!!
6:37 I had to chuckle when "the incredible quality control lego is famous for" was mentioned. You'd think with all that quality control they would be able to ship sets where there's no difference in colour in bricks that should be the same colour, or wouldn't have clearly visible molding points on many bricks used on highly visible parts of a set...
Lego had great quality control many years ago, but today, not so much.
Ive noticed megablocks does this marbling intentionally when i got some lf their pokemon sets
They do it A LOT. Their Halo line has almost exclusively marbled bricks, it’s really cool. Just look at their big energy sword set!
Reminds me of minting errors in coins. Doubled lettering and images (known as double dies) can make even a penny worth up to a quarter million dollars.
I tried to tell my workmate the one sided coin he had would be worth a lot. He got rid of it in a shop. Would not give it to me either for some reason.
What a shame, those leggo bricks are awesome.
If Lego really cared that much, they would have sent Teams to Grainville to find every rogue brick and they'd buy every brick put up for auction to keep them out of customer's hands.
I know quite a few candy/cookie companies that sell 'bad' products (ex. Improperly shaped candy corn, giant stuck together balls of hard candy, etc) as souvenirs for visiting factories.
Lego has a missed opportunity on selling bags of 'bad' bricks for that purpose
I'm from Scotland and I never knew this
im from america and never knew this.
I am from Brahma loka and I never knew this.
Oh I didn't know that those existed
I have 2 rockpanel pieces in marble colors. Found it in some bulk lot I bought. Can't find any set it belongs to.
I have some marbled light gray to dark green from 2006 era Castle sets. Part 47847pb003
Skip to 2:20 to find out why
I swear I remember a piece like this among the LEGOs i used to play with back when i lived with my dad and stepmom in Oklahoma. I thought it looked cool, but never considered it might be defective and unintended. And now i'm not even on speaking terms with that side of the family so RIP ever getting to look for it.
You have to wonder if there's any bootleg brands that took further advantage of marbled bricks. I know Mega Blox did this often with some of their sets. I do wish there was at least one company out there intentionally selling made to order marbled lego-compatible bricks for MOCs. Just imagine using em in like gigantic mansion mocs, or aquarium mocs.
been a long time fan, keep the grind up my friend! you the goat :)
These bricks are beautiful! IDC what they say
I had a ton of Lego as a kid born in 1972 and buying and playing until I moved out of my parent's home in 1991. I had a marbled brick, have zero idea how or when it came into my collection (I was in the US). I loved it because it was different, but no idea it would have value. I also had a malformed block similar to what was shown towards the end of the video. The whole tub was sold at a garage sale summer of 1991. Fun stuff. Thanks for sharing!
I had a co-worker who had a relative that worked at the 7-UP plant. He made a couple cases of GREEN 7-UP for St. Patrick’s Day. It was awesome
Those look so cool
YESSSS MY COUNTRY GETS A MENTION IN A SPITBRIX VIDEO!!!!!! HELLO FROM WALES!!!!!! 🏴
It would be really cool if they could make a multicolored brick look like the Welsh Flag 🏴
@Abdega YES!!!! THAT WOULD BE SO COOL!!!!!
There are also Welsh test bricks out there...
Those bricks look cool
I myself have 3 marbled bricks like that. 1 a mix of blue an yellow that has such nice green marbling, 1 red and black, an 1 that has red, black, and a touch of yellow in it. Theyre so pretty!
I might have enough if it is under 500 dollars, but then I would have spent my entire bank account for a multi colored Lego brick
they should make these into little polybags of marble bricks for people to buy
That April fools joke was too far. The company now deserves hate from the fans. That's like if I made a movie and someone from my studio made a sequel without my permission and distributed it and I stopped it once I found out. Sure fans would treat them as collectibles and would want me to just say it's the sequel. But it wasn't, and I make it clear im not associated with that bootleg story. Later down the line I get the brilliant idea to announce that I will make an official sequel to my movie, making everyone excited, but then saying it was an April Fool's joke.
Who is going to want to support me over the bootlegger?
That april fools joke was not made by LEGO. It was made by LEGO 2x4 brick collectors (yes, that is a real thing...).
come on... its kinda funny. the hardcore collectors should be able to take a joke
"Mid to late 1900's" Oof that made me feel unconscionably old.
Fr, dude literally had to do OUT OF HIS WAY TO SAY THAT
as someone who worked in injection molding, seeing such an indepth analysis on what is a really common thing is quite fascinating. when there were color changeovers, we got this marbling and would just have to grind the rejects down as waste until the next color came through, but it is interesting that these slipped through. im sure when i was half asleep at work, i let a lot of stuff like this go to the shops as well 😅
Randomly stumbled upon this video and I am not kidding, i remember seeing a bunch of those in a lego box at my aunts place. She ran a home for troubled kids and got loads of lego donated. There must be at least 30-50 pieces, since i vividly remember building a house using just those bricks. I wonder if she still has them.