Lego went through a period in the 80s and 90s where they moved away from 
mostly generic bricks to less flexible stuff.  I recall seeing the 
sailing ship where the whole body of the ship was one huge piece. 
Likewise the castle was built of huge monolithic pieces.  I felt that 
Lego had betrayed the very quality of what made their toy great, but it 
seems that they too realized this and have returned to emphasizing 
generic bricks.

Although I'm not really a fan of licensed sets, I've always enjoyed 
buying the Star Wars sets for my kids.  The sets are very faithful 
reproductions of the various spaceships, etc, but they are composed of 
very generic pieces and retain the key element of flexibility.   The 
kids usually build the model once, and then spend all their time 
creating their own spaceships, etc.

When I was little I also had the train set with the blue tracks and the 
small red wheels without tires.  The tracks and wheels were grooved 
perpendicular to the direction of movement so the train's wheels 
wouldn't slip.  You used 2x8 white flat pieces as the crossties.

Later on I recall the Moon Landing kit with the original "maxifigs" (for 
lack of a better name), which were about 2" tall.  While those figurines 
where nicely designed (especially the arms), the minifigs which came 
around after I was no longer buying or receiving Lego (at least for 
myself) were a much better scale for Lego action.

On 2010-01-26 04:07, Ive wrote:
> On 25.01.2010 11:06, scott wrote:
>> Great render - I remember those old wheels and tyres too, they had a
>> metal axle that you pressed into a special 2x4 brick didn't they?
>
> Exactly. At the time I played with them the wheels where always red and
> the 'axle'-brick always white. The black wheels did come a view years
> later so I'm a bit cheating.
>
>> I preferred the technic wheels and axles that you actually connect to
>> stuff :-)
>
> Those had not been invented when I was playing with them ;)
>
>
>> PS is that a dog peeing against a tree in the background?!
>
> Well, I guess he does ;)
> And this is one of the things I always liked about Lego and especially
> about the old ones with the very limited amount of brick shapes. There
> is a quite high level of abstraction involved but still you could build
> everything and it is even recognizable.
>
> -Ive

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