Remembering Lego

Joel Johnson wrote an article of some of his favorite Lego sets (50 Years of LEGO: Nine Sets I Have Known and Loved), and the pictures inspired me to look up some of my beloved sets (you'll have to click through to see the pictures):

  • 483 Alpha-1 Rocket Base. It came with rubber tubes for fun space plumbing. Multiple steering wheels made for vehicles that supported multiple drivers. Love those crazy transparent yellow bricks, which I'd use as a Energon cube-type resource. Also see all those kind of boomerang thingies? Three of them are being used in the box photo to support the rocket. Well, those were spaceship guns! At least in my variants. Hmmm... I guess they're more mini-handsaws than boomerangs.
  • 6970 Beta-1 Command Base. Oh yeah, here's the megapuppy of the bunch. So many goodies here, from the flag (important for landings and exploration!) to the big screen piece (high def, natch), to those awesome clear mugs. No day in space is complete without your space caffeine. I just loved that these guys had a little house, complete with bunks and swivel chairs. OH and there's a large rotating window piece, which is only partially visible in the box picture. This badboy required TWO lunar floorplates. Also cute: little hangers for the spacemen to hang their oxygen tanks on while they were chillaxing between launches.
  • 6929 Starfleet Voyager, which was actually a cargo ship -- that big white caboose on the back end contained a box that you could attach/lock into place. That actually gave me the idea to build a bunch of detachable ships/pods etc. Otherwise, this one didn't introduce much other than the rad transparent blue pieces. Oh, you can see the cargo box on the planet's surface in the background, apparently being pillaged by ghosts.
  • 6842 Shuttle Craft. Hover jets for faster vehicles and extra hover-ability, I was somewhat concerned that the craft did not have a space-windshield.

I had other Lego, but these were the only space-themed ones. Oh man seeing these pictures again really does take me back, back to a more innocent time when my bed was the surface of a planet far, far away.

Ha, they even have some Maersk sets: 1651 Maersk Line {Promotional Set}!

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