Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
I don’t know if you’ve had the same feeling as I had, looking at the new LEGO Movie sets coming out… I keep thinking Timmy & the Time Cruisers. It’s not that Time Cruisers was a bad line, it just felt like there was no real deeper story, than a few drunk designers got together one night over a few too many drinks with some spare parts from different themes and said “I know how we can save the company some money; we’ll just take these excess parts from all these different themes and combine them in ways, like this guy Timmy is traveling through time.”
We may never know the truth why this theme idea was put into production, but it remains a part of our fan checkered heritage.
The new LEGO Movie sets seemed like a very controlled PR experiment, releasing a new image every so often when the buzz about the movie (or new sets) has cooled off. They look interesting; like Time Cruisers, they make good parts sets — but nothing screams why I should buy any of them, except maybe one or two.
I also found that LEGO making Junior sets again feels like a blast from the past as well. Fans use to complain about the juniorization of sets with Town Jr. and yet, here we are again… I wonder if it’ll be just like 1998 and we’ll hear the same reasons why their price per part is so high when compared to other sets.
And to top it all off, the company's high ego seems to fit Mr. Santayana's quote just as nicely as these two gems. I'm not excited about the movie sets either…