New Lego Brand Ethos Creating Generation of Mindless Assembly Line Worker Drones

"Hollywood themes are commanding more shelf space, a far cry from the idealistic, purely imagination-oriented play that drove Lego for years and was as much a religion as a business strategy in Billund." Did you read the Times article over the weekend about changes in the Lego company?

Amazingly, today's Lego is booming. Sales were up 18.7% last year—23% during the first half of this recession-mired 2009.

As the father of a four-year-old Lego enthusiast (and the husband of a recently outed 37-year-old one) I can confirm that the new, far more complex and instructions-dependent movie tie-in sets are much more popular than the old fashioned "Our City" varieties (with which you make, like, a fire-truck out of red bricks with 90 degree angles.) As far as a basic set of cubes and rectangle shapes with no explicit end-goal? I don't even know if they sell those anymore.

This saddens me. I remember the fun of Legos being coming up with your own designs. When I was a kid, I ignored any blueprints that were ever included with a set of Legos and got straight to making up my own new kind of gun or sword or rocket-ship or an even a more creative penis substitute. My kid does this sometimes-but only after whatever high-concept Batman hovercraft-speedboat has been assembled precisely the way the instructions dictate, so that it's an exact replica of the image on the front of the box, and kept like that for as long as possible before being shattered in a fit of rage over not being allowed to have seconds of ice-cream. (I really like ice-cream. Just kidding. I'm still talking about the kid.)

But my wife feels differently than I do. She enjoys following the directions and achieving the prescribed results. She'll push the kid's hands out of the way, searching the box for the last piece to complete diagram A12: rear-left pontoon. It's a different thing, using a different part of the brain. And still valuable, she argues, in that it involves information analysis and problem solving. Less fun in my opinion. But it should be noted that she's a much better cook than I am.

Do the contemporary Lego sets spell the death of creativity in society? Probably not. But doesn't the old stuff vs. the new have something to do with the difference between the simple and clever and very-nice-to-look-at creations of Christopher Neimann or Michael Hickox (above video) and the and the my-God-don't-you-have-anything-better-to-do-with-your-time displays of obsessive-compulsive disorder in evidence at the Brother's Brick website and events like BrickCon '09 (video ad below) taking place in Seattle next month. I mean, check out that creepy talking deathskull. (Assembled per instructions, no doubt!)