Retrobots Revisited: Lego Creator bots!

 

It's my usual day off, and I'm just getting into a career transition. To fill the time, I decided to go through some more Lego material (see the giant 1990s robot and Lego dino post). As it happened, I acquired not one but two sets recently, including still in the box. To kick things off, here's the packaging for the Space Mining Mech set.

Usually, I would make fun of packaging, but Lego does a good job.

This is a set that's been out for a while and clearly popular. For a little while, it looked like it was off the store shelves, and prices online were going up accordingly. In the last month or so, however, I sighted it and picked it up on a return trip. I finally built it the same day as this post, and it was good fun despite a few unnecessary complications. It looks cool enough that there's not a lot else to say, beyond the fact that I find it a little odd there wasn't a pilot minifig included. Here's a lot more pics. And yeah, I figured out the hand is upside down.

I think this was the best position of the saw thingy.

Meanwhile, there was another set I had gotten earlier, along with the dino set. This is just called Super Robot, and if you're wondering what anime they're ripping off, the safe answer is all of them.

Despite my usual disregard for keeping things in the packaging (see above), I have usually been saving the boxes for Lego sets, if only because it's the easiest way to keep track of manuals and extra pieces. This time was an exception, as the box came very roughed up. Instead, here's pics of the manuals.

And here's a few more pics of the bot. The hands are... weird.

Also, here's another bot I have had for a while, and the extras from the mining mech set.

About the style of these sets, it's certainly debatable if these are "retro". The anime bot obviously calls back to the 1980s and perhaps the 1990s, The mining bot and the tracked guy above (I think of the not-uncommon configuration as "centank") are less specific. They're a little more sophisticated than what we were getting from Lego in the 1980s or the early 1990s, but they would still fit in with sci fi of that vintage. That  is really the trademark of Lego Space and its successors; outside of movie tie-in sets, the style is always just generalized enough that it doesn't feel self-dated the way more typical toys do. One of these days, I'm sure I'll do a more detailed post about it. For now, I'm in no hurry.

And here's something I thought about including with the dino set. I have had this around a long time (apparently it came out right at the beginning of 2015), and finally built it as a way to convince myself that buying more sets wasn't going to be a waste of time. It's the kind of thing I get once in a while just to have something that isn't sci fi, military and/ or paleo (see the saga of the Truckstop Queen). Until I unpacked it, I thought this was a lady and her boyfriend, then I realized that one set of legs is for a kid. I had a little bit of fun trying to figure out a relationship. A mother and her son? A teenage girl and her little brother? A teenage girl and her little sister??? Even I really don't need to know.

And that's enough for me to call it a day. Needless to say, Legos have been my lifelong interest/ obsession. More recently, things have been a bit cyclic, but I've never given up entirely. And here's one more pic just for fun. That's all for now, more to come!