88 Bricks per hour
December 20, 2012 2:23 PM   Subscribe

Lego has announced it will release a Back to the Future Delorean next year

The design was supplied through their Cuusoo system, a user submission based program where fan created kits that garner more than 10,000 likes go to their approval board for review.

Previous kits created through this system include the Minecraft kits, the Japanese Satellite Hayabusa and the Shinkai 6500, a manned research submersible.
posted by Twain Device (50 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Oh, hell yeah. I will be buying this.

Also, a LEGO Delorean, kind of, was featured previously on Metafilter.
posted by gauche at 2:27 PM on December 20, 2012


Wow, I would totally get one of these if it wasn't destined to sell out in about thirty seconds and then half the stock put back on the market at a 500% markup.

Also, speaking of Back to the Future in other mediums, anyone think there's something a little familiar about this Magic: The Gathering card?
posted by griphus at 2:29 PM on December 20, 2012 [1 favorite]


88 bricks per hour. But only with 1.21 brickawatts.

"I took their plutonium and in turn gave them a shiny bomb case full of Duplo."
posted by hanoixan at 2:29 PM on December 20, 2012 [7 favorites]


Does anyone else sort of cringe when Doc Brown starts shrieking about 'jigawatts'?
posted by shakespeherian at 2:30 PM on December 20, 2012 [2 favorites]


Does Lego sell simple boxes of bricks anymore?
posted by Thorzdad at 2:37 PM on December 20, 2012 [1 favorite]


AND the 1% royalty payable to the kit designers is, in this case, being donated to a Michael J. Fox’s Parkinsons charity. This is awesome all around.
posted by radiosilents at 2:37 PM on December 20, 2012 [7 favorites]


I wish LEGO would stick to the happy people doing everyday stuff instead of all these goddamn franchise tie-ins. It really cheapens LEGO compared to what it was for me as a kid.
posted by dunkadunc at 2:37 PM on December 20, 2012 [7 favorites]


Lego has announced it has released a Back to the Future Delorean next year.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:41 PM on December 20, 2012 [6 favorites]


The "One point twenty-one" bothered me.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 2:46 PM on December 20, 2012 [2 favorites]


We should all take a moment to clean out our attics on the off chance that we might find a dusty, thirty year old lego model of a Delorean.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 2:47 PM on December 20, 2012 [5 favorites]


Does anyone else sort of cringe when Doc Brown starts shrieking about 'jigawatts'?

Hey I still cringe when people say 'ghig-a-bytes'.
posted by gubo at 2:49 PM on December 20, 2012 [1 favorite]


Thorzdad: "Does Lego sell simple boxes of bricks anymore?"

Yep! I got one for Christmas a few years back.
posted by brundlefly at 2:53 PM on December 20, 2012 [1 favorite]


I wish LEGO would stick to the happy people doing everyday stuff instead of all these goddamn franchise tie-ins.

Me too. NYT, from 2009: "Turning to Tie-Ins, Lego Thinks Beyond the Brick."
posted by MonkeyToes at 2:54 PM on December 20, 2012


giga·watt
noun \ˈji-gə-ˌwät, ˈgi-\

Yes, Doc Brown's is listed first.

I am not, however, going to start referring to 32 "jiggs" of memory any time soon.
posted by dhartung at 3:00 PM on December 20, 2012 [3 favorites]


The actual script for the film says 'jigowatt' though.
posted by shakespeherian at 3:03 PM on December 20, 2012 [3 favorites]


Q: Doc Brown outsmarts the Libyans, but he dies anyway. Why is that?
A: He gets hit in the head by a brick.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:04 PM on December 20, 2012


The system is simple: aspiring designers cook up a Lego set they’d like to see made and sold; you publish a Cuusoo page for your kit and get web users to endorse it; any kits that get 10,000 “likes” go before Lego’s official approval board.

What’s more, any that are then sold pay a 1% royalty fee to the original designer.


I will see you guys in a few months.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:06 PM on December 20, 2012 [7 favorites]


Loses points for the missed opportunity to feature "The Power of Love" on the video soundtrack, but gains them back by having the hoverboard. Still could use a Pit Bull though.
posted by Beardman at 3:11 PM on December 20, 2012


Oh, they're releasing a Lego Back to the Future Delorean next year.

Oh well.
posted by Jairus at 3:14 PM on December 20, 2012


I inherited my sister and brother's Lego (though, for some bizarre reason, I was never allowed to play with my brother's Lego Technic - really annoying as we had some at school when I was seven and I built a working drill) so I just had brick sets. I'm not sure if the City-type sets existed then, or if I just didn't think to ask for them, but my god am I jealous of Lego kids now. We have to test toys in my office that get advertised on TV, but we never get Lego as it's pretty obvious what it does and doesn't do. And I really want to find a child and buy them the Lord of the Rings sets so I can play with them too.

Same goes for the miniature John Lewis store. Sigh.
posted by mippy at 3:38 PM on December 20, 2012


Does Lego sell simple boxes of bricks anymore?

You've already gotten a "yes" on this, but I'll go further: Lego still sells boxes of bricks in the same way you can still get Play-doh in containers without the merchandising or playset angle. Which is to say, they're there, but you won't notice them for all the marketing efforts pushing you towards the other stuff in stores. But, as with Play-doh, they're cheap and they're out there.
posted by davejay at 3:42 PM on December 20, 2012


The Delorean was ugly and slow and no amount of nostalgia will ever make it a good car.

We all know this, because some Bucket o' Joy always comes along to say it whenever they get mentioned.
posted by adamdschneider at 5:39 PM on December 20, 2012 [3 favorites]


Hff.

/wonders how this relates to previous Cuuso decisions regarding other peoples IP.

/OH HANG ON!
posted by Artw at 5:43 PM on December 20, 2012


You've already gotten a "yes" on this, but I'll go further: Lego still sells boxes of bricks in the same way you can still get Play-doh in containers without the merchandising or playset angle. Which is to say, they're there, but you won't notice them for all the marketing efforts pushing you towards the other stuff in stores. But, as with Play-doh, they're cheap and they're out there.

Depends on the store really, and there's always online. And Lego have been doing themed sets since 1978. Really the conspiracy to hide all the basic bricks because it's all one place moulded stuff now exists only in the minds of online moanerss, who will of course turn up each and every time Lego is mentioned anywhere.

Bioncles ran over your dog.
posted by Artw at 5:52 PM on December 20, 2012 [9 favorites]


You can also buy bricks in bulk from LEGO. I have ordered several thousand bricks from them this way...
posted by dfriedman at 6:06 PM on December 20, 2012 [1 favorite]


Did you know the Delorean had the engine from a Volvo 260?
posted by dunkadunc at 6:35 PM on December 20, 2012


Delorean Yay! But we still lost the Shaun of the Dead Lego Winchester.

(originally wrong section posted)
posted by FJT at 6:43 PM on December 20, 2012


Does Lego sell simple boxes of bricks anymore?

Gosh, with all these newfangled notebooks out there, does anyone sell reams of paper anymore?

Lego sells *more* simple boxes of bricks now: the basic ones that are bunches of bricks, sometimes in a few colors (the boxes, I mean, not the legos themselves) and a ton of other ones that aren't branded or in sets for assembly. There's a lot more sets of stuff like the Mindstorms stuff and other machine stuff, which sometimes has ideas for stuff you can assemble with it but also you can get pretty creative with it too. And then there's the various sizes of bigger legos for kids who're too young for regular legos and might choke on them.
posted by NoraReed at 6:52 PM on December 20, 2012 [1 favorite]


I step on Lego Blues all the time. They hurt.
posted by stratastar at 7:23 PM on December 20, 2012


The Delorean was ugly and slow and no amount of nostalgia will ever make it a good car.

Voice, female, offscreen: "How far you going?"
Marty [looking over top edge of mirror shades]: "About thirty years."
posted by newdaddy at 7:38 PM on December 20, 2012 [1 favorite]


82mph it says in the Lego Delorean. FAIL.
posted by banished at 8:09 PM on December 20, 2012


Yeah, the branded Lego sets don't bother me. My boys ask for branded stuff (Star Wars and Lego City respectively), put them together according to the instructions, play with them as is for a while...then tear them down and recycle the parts into whatever insane spaceship/submarine/roller coaster combo they've come up with. Creativity seems to be unaffected.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:27 PM on December 20, 2012 [3 favorites]


The Cuusoo project I was most excited about was the modular western town, an absolutely beautiful old-west take on Lego's amazing modular architecture series. I just saw that they've rejected it as conflicting with one of Lego's own ongoing projects, which I think is a huge shame.
posted by simonw at 11:10 PM on December 20, 2012


82mph it says in the Lego Delorean. FAIL.
Well, if the speedometer read 88, which I guess is what you’re getting at, the car maybe wouldn't be there any more.
posted by scottjacksonx at 11:28 PM on December 20, 2012 [3 favorites]


My sisters and I broke at least three windows with our Lego "airplanes". I guess they just weren't meant to fly.
posted by Pudhoho at 12:46 AM on December 21, 2012


Yay! We could have gotten modular Western buildings but instead got yet another gray thing that nerds can put on their desks at work.

Love Cuusoo in theory, but in practice it's been largely a waste.
posted by Legomancer at 5:24 AM on December 21, 2012


You know what's better than a themed logo set? The plain brown box a fridge came in when I was a kid. A marker pen and that walk-in sized box, with hyper-real dials and controls (drawn on) was intergalactic levels of awesome. Oh the places we went in that starship.
posted by panaceanot at 6:33 AM on December 21, 2012 [1 favorite]


The emphasis on the branded merchandising tie-ins by Lego is partly a result of the entry of products like Mega Blocks into the marketplace. The problem with emphasizing generic brick sets is that there's no real differentiation between Lego and it competitors (I'll leave the quality issues off to the side for now) in the minds of consumers. Lego is well on its way to becoming shorthand for a whole class of toy, as opposed to a particular brand of toy.
posted by KingEdRa at 7:18 AM on December 21, 2012


Or Megabloks is becoming shorthand for not-Lego crap I won't have in the house.
posted by Artw at 7:20 AM on December 21, 2012 [1 favorite]


GET BEHIND ME, SATAN!
posted by Artw at 7:35 AM on December 21, 2012


I'm on board with the branded sets. When I was a kid, I had to make my own superheroes out of Lego figures. It was fun - I used clay and paint and such - but it never looked as good as the real figures and also it meant I got clay all over everything. The fact that there are now Ninja Turtle Lego sets as well as superhero ones - it just blows my mind. I would have done pretty much anything to have a Lego Batman (that didn't look like shit) when I was about ten years old.

So I think it's great that kids nowadays have that. Not only that, but the figures are all the same size, so it's not like when you were young and you wanted He-Man to hang out with Batman but Batman only came up to his waist and it was awkward. Now you can have Spider-Man team up with the Ninja Turtles to take on the Shredder and Doctor Doom! How cool is that?
posted by FAMOUS MONSTER at 8:46 AM on December 21, 2012


Just received the Cuusoo Minecraft set my 11-year old had on his wishlist for Christmas. It was expensive, and it looks... tiny. I'm really wondering how he'll deal with it (its meta-ness mainly). The computer version had first drawn him in creatively, and then, via schoolfriends, for the chimera of griefing fame&riches (still looking for resources on how to deal with that...) - and now here's a miniature life-size simulacrum, made of the stuff of his own bygone childhood days. Interesting times...
posted by progosk at 11:27 AM on December 21, 2012


So do you really need a set to make a minecraft world?
posted by Mister_A at 11:52 AM on December 21, 2012


Kidding aside, this cuusoo thing is great!
posted by Mister_A at 11:54 AM on December 21, 2012


Curious that they went with the 1950's retrofit version of the car from BTTF 3, which was the least popular of the films. The Modular Western Town would have complemented it nicely.

DeLoreans are gracefully ugly, but oh-so-distinctive. Yeah, they're slow and handle terribly, but trust me, ride around town in one and you'll have an absolute blast.

I guess it's a problem with the small scale of the Lego people, but this kit looks pretty...not great. 1:18 scale is probably about the minimum size for a Lego car with a decent amount of detail.

Also, chrome or metallic bricks would be awesome for this.
posted by ShutterBun at 2:37 AM on December 22, 2012


Really what bothers me about Lego is how gendered the marketing is. If you go into the store to get a bucket of bricks you get to pick from the blue bucket (with the same bricks we're all used to) or the pink bucket (with "girl colored" bricks). The last time I bought blocks I wound up buying the 50th anniversary box because the packaging was less sexist than the modern.
posted by Karmakaze at 2:52 PM on December 22, 2012


This warms the cockles of my heart, for the sole reason that Back to the Future was the only film i saw in the eighties (no tv, parents not the type). I didn't even particularly rate it, yet every time it's mentioned, a warm glow of nostalgia washes over me. For this reason alone, i wish i'd been taken to see Disney movies, ET and Dirty Dancing - at the time, i had zero interest, despite being the target audience.
posted by maiamaia at 3:49 PM on December 22, 2012


From the NYT: Has Lego Sold Out?
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:54 PM on December 22, 2012


Lego is well on its way to becoming shorthand

Well on its way? That's over and done with for years now. I remember plaintive little "please don't call them 'Legos', they are 'Lego-brand bricks and toys'" trademark-protection notes when I was a kid in the '80s. They were silly even then.
posted by Mars Saxman at 6:52 PM on December 22, 2012


Pff. Infidel American. They are "Lego", not "Legos".

Also that NYT article is stupid even by Lego doomsayer standards. "There are Lego branded non brick items now, creativity is doomed!", "there are a bunch of totally sweet Avengers sets on sale now, kids will only be able to build one thing!"
posted by Artw at 7:05 PM on December 22, 2012


« Older The Things You Should Have Already Experienced On...   |   Art Crawl! Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments