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When I was a child, Lego was explicitly and deliberately pacifist in outlook. I remember reading that the colour palette was determined in part by this philosop
by tragomaskhalos 4y ago
When I was a child, Lego was explicitly and deliberately pacifist in outlook. I remember reading that the colour palette was determined in part by this philosophy - green, grey and brown were verboten, the latter colour completely absent and the first two existing only in limited plate form. Of course manufacturing cost limitations made a restricted set of colours sensible anyway.
As a preventative, this was not entirely effective - we war-mad kids still had red bombers intercepted by white fighter aircraft over a battlefield of blue armoured vehicles, we didn't care!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dxdm 4y agoWhen were you a child? In the late eightees, I happily played with Lego that had grey swords for knights in grey castles, and pirate themed stuff with brown guns, and cannons that were grey and brown. Lots of green base plates, too.
- Aeolun 4y agoNot to mention gray spaceships galore.
- mcv 4y agoI assume it was the 70s. During the 80s, Lego included more and more green, brown, and especially grey, and also more and more weapons. First swords and spears for the knights, later muskets for the Pirate theme, and then blasters for Star Wars. They still don't like modern weaponry, though. I'm not sure if they have guns for their cops and robbers. The real military stuff comes from clones/competitors, not from Lego.
- tokai 4y agoLooking through 70s lego sets there is a ton of greens and grays. Not a lot of 'violent' stuff, as it's mainly models of houses and transport vehicles. But it seems to come along with the minifigs in 78.
- bombcar 4y agoIIRC the "dark green" and "brown" were more expensive to make accurately without color variation - bright green had been around for a long while.
- tragomaskhalos 4y agoYes this was the 70s. At the tail end of my time there were indeed knights with swords and (checks on google) halberds, and the Space theme guys had little doohickeys that were presumably meant to be ray guns - at least that was how we used them. With hindsight one could see that this was the thin end of a wedge, but contemporary weapons like guns and cannons would still have been very off-message.
- bombcar 4y agoThe movie-tie ins are the closest they get to "modern weaponry in LEGO" and it's not much (mainly Star Wars) - they intentionally made the muskets and such for Pirates pretty old looking. They weren't averse to reusing pieces to make guns (the early Star Wars sets used megaphones for that) and they have revolvers, etc: https://www.bricklink.com/catalogList.asp?catType=P&catString=19 https://www.bricklink.com/catalogList.asp?catType=P&catStrin... has all Minifig, Weapon that are made by LEGO.
- tragomaskhalos 4y agoYes of course I should have qualified the colours point by excluding base plates - they were indeed predominantly green and grey. The point though is that these were to denote grass or urban road surface, you couldn't exactly build camouflaged military vehicles out of them!
- konfusinomicon 4y agostill have the green dragon sitting on my desk, with red wings and mouth fire. I guess that was early 90s stuff though
- baud147258 4y ago> Lego was explicitly and deliberately pacifist in outlook For my part, I remember (in addition to the SW kits) cavalry vs indians kits, full with sabers, rifles and pistol, which we often used with modern-day kits.
- bombcar 4y agoLEGO didn't want to sell weapons used in existing conflicts because there may be kids there, too. So most things were historical or fictional (but kids don't care, they can do cops + robbers with anything).