True. I already mentioned that last year:
Thanks for posting these images,
I've got very nostalgic feeling for these.
I did have only a small space set, but I (still) do have the 918 small Space Ship.
The later space themes had even more interesting coloful transparent elements, like Space Police series, Blacktron series, Ice Planet etc.)
I completely forgot about your older post and even noticed I’d liked it at the time. My brain is a sieve!
I went through a period in my pre-tweens and into my tweens when I was singularly fixated on Lego stuff. Story time…
Someone in my family, at some point when I was 7 or 8, gave me my first Lego set as a gift, and it was from the Technic series. After I built it (at an age even younger than the suggestion on the box), other family members I guess saw how proud I was of doing that (even though, age 8, I was following the instructions carefully and not putting it all together by sight alone). So they began to give me more Lego sets, except from the Legoland space series (because I was growing up right next to, well, NASA and knew I was fascinated by that omnipresence in my everyday life).
That‘s how I came to know the Legoland space series. A neighbour-friend down the block was also very much into Lego stuff (and we definitely, for a time, got to be better friends because of this common interest), but he was overall more motivated by some of the other Legoland series of the time — namely, the medieval-themed series. He also had an ugly penchant for mocking a lot of what I made as lesser, simpler, whatever (we didn’t stay friends).
Also, he had, in aggregate, probably 3x the number of bricks across all his sets than I did, so he was often building things of scale I couldn’t match (though, being 8 or 9, I wasn’t much an innovator so much as a mimic, as I’d try to copy what other people, including him, made). To him, it was a size thing, I guess. To me, it was a way to get lost in the possibilities, even if only a handful of things I put together were uniquely my own thing.
Eventually, I had collected together — between family gifts and babysitting/car-washing/lawn-mowing money — a few more of the Legoland space series. I remember the first time I saw the
blue astronaut (as up to that moment, all the astronaut pieces had been red, white, or yellow), and was insistent on finding a set featuring a blue astronaut (one eventually turned up in a set I could afford with my own money). Blue was one of my favourite hues.
By the time I was 10 or 11, I’d sort of reached the apex of Legoland stuff, and I had enough of the space series to put together a tiny moonbase — tiny by the standards of having one of everything from that series (which I didn’t), but enough that it meant building together the connected lunar plates atop a fibreboard sheet (like the material with the holes drilled out, from which one could hang retail items in a store, except mine didn’t have the holes and wasn’t painted or coated) which I could slide under the bed when I wasn’t using it. One of the sets with the clear-blue windscreen/canopy feature arrived warped, so I sent in the piece to the Lego office in North America (Connecticut, I think?), which sent me a replacement several months later.
What I think burnt me out was, ironically, the Lego office’s response
after I sent them a thank-you letter for helping me out, along with a mini-Instamatic (110) print I shot of the whole set I’d put together from all the space series sets I had (along with ones I created from imagination from that original Technic set’s pieces). The pic wasn’t spectacular (unless one owned a 110 SLR, most 110 photos weren’t great, though still better than Kodak Disc camera pics), but it was meant for them to keep, file away, trash, whatever. Besides, the local lab printed two of each pic in a roll, so I already had one for myself.
I thought the thank-you letter would be the end of it, but they sent back the picture with some sort of direct-marketing printed sheet of paper! It sort of hurt my feelings — not because it was probably one of the thousands of generic/amateur pictures which other kids probably sent them each year, but because it felt like they rejected my appreciation of them helping out with that warped piece.
After that, I sort of took apart everything, boxed it up, and moved onto other interests to preoccupy my brain. Somewhere in my archives, I think I still have that returned photo, which I remembered the corner had a scissored sliver cut from whenever they handled it.
The end.
