Childhood Memories ....

So I recently sold my entire LEGO collection to make some cash to get by. It was quite an impressive collection, but I needed the money desperately. The thing that saddens me is that was my childhood. That being said, anyone here ever have LEGOs? What did you build? What was your greatest creation? good memories?

Discuss.

We did have them, although my brother used them (and demanded more sets of them) much more than I did. I preferred playing with plastic miniatures of dinosaurs or fighters of different kinds, or with toy weapons against imaginary foes. An incipient DOOM player, no doubt :p

I did at one point sell all my Star Wars action figures (including a dog-sized AT-AT,) but while I enjoyed them during childhood, I didn't really feel I was losing anything by parting from them.

I still have all my old lego sets (all smashed up and in pieces) and lego guys in a large plastic bin in my closet. I remember my brother and I would build large vehicles from assorted vehicles and have battles with them. Also, sometimes we would build small, sturdy bunkers and drop them from various heights to see if they would survive or not.

Ahh, good times.

Yeah, for sure. My brushes of the past.

Never built anything worthwhile, mostly helicopters and spaceships that would quickly crash or be shot down. Lego stuff had some nice damage physics. I especially liked Lego Technics - kind of regret never having tried all of the alternative constructions on the manuals.
I still keep all of them in a large box, stashed at my parents' house for the sake of nostalgia, even though I know I'll never use them again. Last time I got them out was a couple of years ago for scanning them to make Lego textures. Didn't really work out.

EDIT: Shub Legorath's Pit anyone? ;)

I still have a good portion of my childhood toys (mostly assorted LEGO sets and self-built LEGO modes) and some vintage handheld electronic games, as well as stuffed plush animals.

Some of my LEGO models were so good that I essentially turned them into permanent display models, like this self-made model of a Mercedes 300 SL Gullwing:

A whole-body pic of it (Image is 1024 x 768).

Other pics of it (all are 1024 x 768)

Pic 2
Pic 3
Pic 4
Full frontal view
Rear view
Bottom look. Sturdy frame there ;-)
A peek at the interior. Door removed.
Under the hood.
Under the hood again
Read window removed.


Also, I still have this "Alien Attack" VFD game in working order.

Funny you should mention it. Just the other night I had a dream where I was cleaning out my closet and I found an old tub of legos. It was so exciting, but then I woke up and realized there aren't any legos in my closet. So much more disappointing than it should have been for a grown adult. Strange thing is, I never really had many legos as a kid, but I absolutely loved any chance I got to play with them.

geekmarine said:

Funny you should mention it. Just the other night I had a dream where I was cleaning out my closet and I found an old tub of legos. It was so exciting, but then I woke up and realized there aren't any legos in my closet. So much more disappointing than it should have been for a grown adult. Strange thing is, I never really had many legos as a kid, but I absolutely loved any chance I got to play with them.

You should buy yourself a set on ebay or something. As an adult you'd probably want a pretty big set as you're likely to be much more ambitious now than when you were a kid.

I just saw an unopened batman lego set go from $150 to $197.50 in less than two minutes. :D

My childhood friend used to have legos and build space ships and the like. I always thought they were pretty cool, but don't really have any memories of being able to build anything even half decent. As a Waldorf student I had lots of wooden blocks that I played with and a wooden train set. My parents did get me a Construx set once, which was quite fun. They had instructions on how to build different vehicles, but you could build just about anything you wanted if you were creative enough.

When I had legos, I made too many creations due to me being over-imaginative, which came from video games...
I tended to make Castles, don;t know why, they just appeared most in my mind, and I made a few vehicles that were to break down the castle. But I got tired of those and then used hot wheels cars being launched from a track set.

I had made some really fucking awesome Pod Racers with legos a long time ago. I took pictures with a disposable camera and somehow it ended up getting opened and the film was exposed. I was pissed because I had taken them apart and couldn't remember how I had put them together.

Oh wow, Lego, this was my life, I used to make building, castles, flying saucers, rockets, aircraft, mining machines, Indiana Jones type tombs with traps - best toy ever

What was your favvourite Lego themes? The Rock Raiders and those UFOs were my favourites.

The Adventurer legos were by far my favorite, as well as the astronaut ones. Mainly I used to used the parts for making lego cities and such...

I liked the Spyrius set the best. Then later they came out with the explorer guys and the UFOs. But the space stuff was my favorite. I always wanted to get the big set with the tram, but could never find it (and probably could never afford it.

Anyway, I still have a tub full of Legos here, though I never play with them anymore. My friends and I would always make huge space ports with a slight Star Wars theme. We'd try to remake ships and droids from the series. One of my favorites was making a spider-droid, but my friend made an awesome T-16. He had these cool spaceport boards we used and combined with regular roads. Also, all the incarnations of our spaceports had a cantina. :P That was often the center-point for them, in fact.

I once designed a little motorcycle for a contest at Target. I got first place and won a huge spaceship set that was worth quite a bit of money. My mom told me several years later that I was the only one who entered the contest :(

Danarchy said:

I liked the Spyrius set the best. Then later they came out with the explorer guys and the UFOs. But the space stuff was my favorite. I always wanted to get the big set with the tram, but could never find it (and probably could never afford it).

Those are the only sets I can get behind these days; the present ones don't have the same "feel" or... well, "Soul" to them like Spyrius and the Exploriens.

I have each set from each line, and copies. I have pretty much kept em' together, too. You can find the Unitron Tram on ebay every once in awhile.

I used to build 2 and 3 story apartment buildings, let them get "run down", then after "vandlaizing" the structure (remove windows, and cave in some floors/walls), I tied a string around a dead motor from one of the LEGO sets, and demolished the buildings.

I used to make tons of buildings with working elevators. I had a pneumatics LEGO kit as well, and built a building with a "hydraulic" elevator (Plunger in the center to raise and lower the car). Worked well going up, got stuck going down very frequently.

Best thing was, I built View Master projectors with LEGO, and if you're old enough to remember those old 35mm still frame projectors, I built one of those in 3'rd grade, and it was used in a presentation.
In 8'th grade, I made a projection microscope with them. Under a shoe box, was a conveyor the slides get placed on, and projects the microscopic samples on a screen atop the shoe box.

My big boss at work puts it best. He says the best thing about having kids is, that you get to play with your old toys again. :) I may not have had kids of my own, but with nieces and cousins, I did.

shit dude I'm never getting rid of my legos. I loved em when I was a kid. My favorite thing about having giant bins and a ton of lego sets all merged into one was taking a big handful of it and seeing what I could make out of it trying to use all the pieces. I've built entire cities, giant military bases, towers, alien monsters, trucks, tanks, airplanes, helicopters, boats, and probably a ton of other things that I can't picture off the top of my head.

I subscribed to the lego magazine when I was a lad, I grew less and less interested in legos in my later years because of Star Wars lego sets that were really big at the time, and the new introduction of 'Bionicle', both of which featured lego pieces that served virtually new purpose other than to make what it was intended for and couldn't be used with anything else. I remember buying cowboy lego sets purely for the lego $100 bills and revolvers, and construction vehicle sets just for the jackhammers, hard hats, and wheels. I wish legos were still as fun now as they were back then.

Oh shit LEGOs. I just had a nostalgia flashback and nostalgia took the form of Mike Tyson clobbering me across the chin before biting my right ear off.

I used to get down on LEGOs all the time. I had a bag filled with a bunch of LEGO parts and a base template thing that let me build buildings on top of it. Of course, instead of making buildings I made the most extreme, Picasso-esque shit ever. I just slapped things on without a care in the world, no plan whatsoever, and I was happy.

Ah, those were the days. (:

It's LEGO. Singular and plural, capital letters. There is no such thing as "legos", rage :P

I had a pretty epic collection too. I remember once I built a house complete with alot of internal detailing (for a ~7 yearold anyway), removable angled roof and all bricks in the right colors. I didn't dismantle that for ages. I had an Optimus-Prime-shaped red truck I'd make too, came up with the design myself and I thought it was better than most boxed-set LEGO trucks I owned.

You can get BlockCAD to make LEGO stuff on the computer, though it's nowhere near as fun.

I have a pyro-GX from descent made out of legos sitting in my room right now. I've had these things for ages. And I'm still building up my collection. They are fun when you have nothing else to do.

How this thread is missing blockland is beyond me...

I <3 legos and so does UD.

I lived for LEGOs when I was younger. I have a pretty big collection. They're under my bed in a roll away box silently collecting dust. Occasionally though me and my younger sister will break them out and build all sort of stuff. If I can remember I'll get some pics up of them.

Yep, plenty of Lego still tucked away in the closet. Not much point in selling it since I'd only need to buy it again if/when I eventually have kids. It's almost like a currency that never depreciates in value, only more fun.

Super Jamie said:

It's LEGO. Singular and plural, capital letters. There is no such thing as "legos", rage :P

I concur with the plural bit, but I'm not using all caps unless someone can prove it's an acronym, heh.

I never did much with Legos (or LEGO). I was more of a Knex person, myself. But I remember I did once make a miniature Madcat Battlemech once. it wasn't anything impressive, it was only about 6 inches tall. That was before I made a larger 3 foot tall one out of Knex.

I was only slightly obsessed with MechWarrior as a kid...

Well this thread has reminded me I still need to go get the LEGO bin out of my mom's shed before she throws it away. Awesome little things, I fondly recall making many crappy creations with them and then smashing them together. My brother and I did make a pretty cool castle one time. I used the flag posts and red playdoh to impale lego men on. Problem was that I never really had complete sets, and even if I did they got mixed in with all the other ones. But still, a white, grey, black, green, red, and yellow spaceship is pretty badass.

Also the LEGO Star Wars games for PS2 are totally awesome. Especially the second one, which does the original 3 movies. LEGO Indiana Jones is also cool, though I was never into Batman so skipped playing LEGO Batman.

DooMAD said:

I concur with the plural bit, but I'm not using all caps unless someone can prove it's an acronym, heh.

It's not an acronym, it's a trademark, like iPod or DOOM.

But it's the plural thing that gets to me most :P

Hell yeah. :P However it is rare I "play" with my own stuff as it is at my parents' home.

Actually I was in Lego land this summer when we were on a trip, heh.



Note: Btw, the name LEGO / Lego comes from two danish words "LEg GOdt" (play well). Also it seems that it means "I put togther" or something similiar in latin.

Lego >> all for early toys...not just for the fun but for the development too. (kids these days don't know what proper, non-electronic non-automated toys are :p)

Can't remember that many specifics, except that I started with a random (small) crate of handed down bricks, and had a few of the pirate sets too.

The Ultimate DooMer said:

Can't remember that many specifics, except that I started with a random (small) crate of handed down bricks, and had a few of the pirate sets too.

The pirate and space sets were the best ones.

Patrick what exactly did you sell and how much did you get? I've been wondering about selling mine. Yes it's my childhood, but I'm never going to work on them again. I would imagine though that shipping a giant box of lego pieces is expensive, did you just sell to someone in your area?

Man, this thread is making me really want to bust out my Lego collection. Also, checking on Wikipedia, it seems the brand name is Lego and the plural name for the toys is "Lego bricks" or just "bricks".

Lastly, the greatest thing ever done with Lego bricks...