There's an Alligator in My Soup, or What I Learned from Playing LEGOs

It's hard to believe LEGOs are 50 years old! Growing up in the 80s, I thought that LEGOs were created just for my brother, my sister and me. I remember spending hours on end playing with our LEGO sets, well with my brother's sets, sometimes making them by following the instructions, but mostly working on our own creations, such as building a garage for our Matchbox cars. Following the instructions took so much time, after all, and they were usually lost within a week anyway.

Ten years later, my younger brother was born. If there really was a LEGO maniac, he was it. He started off with a cardboard LEGO box full of my older brother's blocks, but over the years we had to graduate to a ten gallon bin full of the things, as LEGOs were the only thing he ever asked for his birthday or Christmas. Finally, we had to put a moratorium on the LEGO gifts, since even the Rubbermaid bin was filled to overflowing.

My little brother's favorite thing to build was restaurants. He and I would each build a restaurant, make a menu with paper and magic marker, and then have the customers fight with the waiter over the bills at the end of their meal. Also, a man selling alligators was a frequent visitor to the restaurant, much to the chagrin of the owner. A third peril of the restaurant patrons was the earthquakes and animal attacks which would ultimately destroy the buildings. This severely affected their Zagat ratings.

Another favorite activity of ours was to create hats for the people, with everything from boulders to trees to the legs of other LEGO men. Then the little men would try to steal these hats from one another, sometimes with the aid of an alligator. (All the island sets came with them, so we had an overabundance of reptiles to choose from.)

Three sets that I remember the most clearly are: (a) The LEGO kitchen. This was the only set that was mine alone, not belonging to one of my brothers. It had cabinets, a stove, a dishwasher, a table and a family that lived in the house. And, true to the 80s, you could interchange their badly styled plastic hair. It wasn't that fun to play with, (really, how fun is it to pretend to cook a roast?) but I could hide it from my brothers since it was mine. (b) The tiki island set. It had really big rocks that could be used as hats. It also had creepy witch doctor LEGO characters. (c) The gas station. This was my older brother's first set. It was an Exxon station with gas pumps and cars. We mostly used this set for the road it came with. We could use it to race the LEGO cars we built. It was a rather short road though, maybe 12 inches by 12 inches, so it didn't take long to determine a winner.

The longevity of LEGOs isn't that surprising, since new sets are invented all the time. I would compare their international success to that of the Barbie doll. And if you think they are popular in the U.S., wait until you see all the sets available in Europe. (If you didn't know, they were invented in Denmark.)

There are definitely more technical sets than there used to be, such as the electronic sets and the Bionicle line, but all still need the main ingredient for LEGO play: imagination.