Sunday, April 22, 2012

The fun is beyond the bricks

As a AFOL (Adult Fan od LEGO), my infatuation with LEGO Star Wars goes beyond the collection and building of the toy. LEGO marketing team has gone WAY beyond the usual bricks sets to maximise their market share in the competitive toy industry (I am a willing victim here so I have lost the right to complain). While I am not into collecting every other merchandise that LEGO throws in the collectors' direction, my selection of non-brick set collections include magnets, books, table lamp and even Christmas Tree ornament! 

The LEGO Star Wars Character Encyclopedia was especially cool, providing insightful information of how the LEGO Star Wars minifigs have evolved through the years. Yes, they do evolve. In the earlier sets, the human characters still have the generic LEGO smiley yellow faces. Now they come with customised expressions and more human like colours. For the astronomical price we pay, some of the characters even come with 2 faces! That's a good deal, isn't it? I still remember the day when I bought the book and finished reading them in a day. All 205 pages of it. The exclusive Hans Solo that comes with the book did add some collector's points as well as contributing to the overall thickness of the book. A must read for fanatics like myself.


Discovered this ornament by chance when I was at the LEGO store checking out the latest products. It is a collaboration between Hallmarks and LEGO so the quality was unquestionable. It is slightly bigger than the typical minifig and comes with a hefty price tag of HKD399. Although made as a Christmas tree ornament, I do believe that not many collectors in the right mind will ever buy a few of these and hang them on the Christmas tree for decoration purposes! Darth Vader is the only character I know that has been produced. Looking forward to other characters next Christmas!

Yes. Cult. That's the word to describe the AFOL all around the world. This book documents the LEGO philosophy and what AFOL around the world have been up to. A quote from the book especially interests me "We are all members of the Cult of LEGO - the only membership requirement is clicking two pieces of plastic together and wanting to click more". It cannot be more appropriately put than that.

My latest addition. A 2nd generation table lamp of LEGO Darth Vader. Can be operated by batteries or USB and it looks incredibly cute on the bookshelf or besides the bed. The light intensity can be adjusted, albeit only two levels are available for choice. Comes with a cape (a gigantic version of the minifig one) that I have till date, not figured out how to remove the head of Darth Vader to place it in. 


No comments:

Post a Comment