Estudio de Casos

The genius behind LEGO was the combination of building sets and playsets into a single product, resulting in the introduction of the LEGO System in which every piece fit together with every other piece, the first “system” in the toy industry. When LEGO bricks first appeared on the market, building sets like Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoy could build specific kinds of things (e.g. log cabins and stick-and-spool structures or vehicles, respectively), but they generally were not used to build entire settings, nor did they contain characters that children could use as avatars to vicariously experience what they had built. Playsets, on the other hand, feature detailed settings and characters to inhabit them, but they were limited to what they already represented; everything was ready-made, and little or no new building could be done. LEGO, however, suggested settings that could be built (which determined what pieces came with each set), but children could build other things with the same bricks, and could even combine multiple sets together to build even larger settings.

The gradual merging of the playset and building set can be seen in the early development of LEGO. The first plastic bricks, Automatic Binding Bricks were produced by the company in 1949 and the first set in the LEGO system, Town Plan No. 1, appeared in 1955, along with other sets that could

5 See “Kenner Star Wars Catalogs,” Plaid Stallions, accessed May 15, 2017, http://www.plaidstal- lions.com/starwars/index.html.

6 “Kenner Star Wars Action Figures,” Wikipedia, last modified May 4, 2017, accessed May 15,

2017, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenner_Star_Wars_action_figures.

7 See Christian Wienberg, “Lego Outgrows Hasbro, Mattel as ‘Star Wars’ Sets Boost Profit,”

Bloomberg, March 1, 2012, accessed May 15, 2017, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-01/

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be combined with it to enlarge the town. The cars, trees, and especially the miniature people, however, were still like the plastic figures found in other playsets; each was a single piece that could be used during play, but not changed. LEGO wheels, and the bricks to which they attached, came in 1961,8

allowing children to build their own vehicles. But characters, so crucial to the playset because of their role as children’s avatars, would not become buildable for some time. In 1963, Master Builder Set #004 displayed on its box cover a human-like figure built of LEGO bricks, but as a construction around two dozen bricks tall, it was more of a statue than a usable avatar, and much too large to be used with typical LEGO vehicles and buildings. The following year, several small sets appeared that were character-based;

Seesaw #803, 3 Little Indians #805, Cowboy and Pony #806, and Doll Set

#905, and another set, Clowns #321, appeared in 1965. In all these sets, the characters had no faces or jointed limbs; yet were a step closer to a usable avatar in their design and smaller size. Over these years, dozens of vehicle sets appeared, and vehicles remained the main avatars for LEGO play. One set, Baggage Carts #622 of 1970, even had a few bricks that represented the cart’s driver, but only as a feature of the cart rather than a character that could be used separately. Six of the Basic Sets released in 1973 (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, and #8), along with Building Set #105 and Building Set #115, show brick-built people amidst the scenes on their boxes, but still the blocky, faceless kind. It was not until 1974 that LEGO finally introduced specialized pieces representing people, which had round heads, faces, and jointed arms and hands, and which were scaled to fit vehicles and buildings. Nine sets were introduced that featured these human figures, and one set, Family #200, was made up entirely of people.9

While the introduction of human figures broadened the possibilities for sets, the scale of these figures was still large enough that they could not be included with some sets, which had smaller vehicles and buildings representing larger structures. In 1975, a new kind of LEGO figure appeared, one that did not have a face or jointed arms, but which had a specialized head, a torso piece, and a single piece representing legs and feet. These would be updated over the next few years, until in 1978 when the modern minifigure would appear, with a painted face, movable arms and legs, and

8 Daniel Lipkowitz, The LEGO Book (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2009), 21.

9 The other eight sets with people were Antique Car #196, Aeroplane and Pilot #250, Windmill

with Miller and His Wife #251, Locomotive with Driver & Passenger #252, Complete Kitchen with 2 Figures #263, Livingroom with 2 Figures #264, Complete Bathroom with 1 Figure #265, and Children’s Room #266, according to Sebastian Eggers, et al., ed., LEGO Collector: Collector’s Guide (Dreieich:

hand pieces that connected to the arm pieces. Although the minifigure would eventually replace the larger LEGO people, the two were produced contemporaneously, even appearing together in some sets (like Mother with

Baby Carriage #208 and Nursery #297, both from 1978, and Bathroom #261, Family Room #268, and Kitchen #269, all from 1979), with the minifigures

positioned as babies or children and the larger people as parents and adults. Minifigures were featured in the sets for the new Town, Castle, and Space themes, allowing their structures to be populated with characters (minifigures would be an important part of set #10188, which included 24 minifigures and droids, the most to come with any LEGO Star Wars set up to that time). Along with the new application of themes, LEGO sets were now available that had all the features of other types of playsets, completing the merger between building sets and playsets. As the sets were designed at minifigure scale, the larger people no longer appeared in sets after 1979.

Themed sets meant that LEGO could be designed to connect with prevail- ing themes in popular culture at any given time, yet without licensing any particular property or franchise; the appearance of a space theme, in 1978, would certainly have fit in with the new popularity of science- fiction projects due to the continuing success of the Star Wars franchise. New space-themed sets would be released every year during the 1980s and 1990s, including subseries of sets known as Blacktron, Futuron, Space Police, M:Tron, Unitron, and U.F.O. The subseries designations grouped sets together into LEGO’s own in-house brands; despite the rise of franchising and merchandising tie-ins during the 1980s and 1990s, LEGO preferred to create their own original properties. But that policy changed in 1999, when LEGO licensed its first property since the early 1970s,10 _{and the first LEGO}

Star Wars sets appeared.

The change in this decades-long policy may have been in part due to financial concerns. In 1998, the company had experienced a decline in profits for the first time since 1932, signaling that changes were needed (the company would experience further losses in 2003 and 2004).11 _{Apart from}

selling some foreign properties and reducing their staff and the variety of

10 Some of the earliest LEGO sets included brand names, though they were typically from the automotive industry, like the Esso Trailer #252, VW Beetle #260, and Esso Filling Station #310, all of 1958, or the Citroën DS 19 #603 and Fiat 1800 #605, both of 1965, or the Shell Service Station #648 of 1971. LEGO also produced some bathing rings and a wooden pull-toy featuring Disney characters in 1956. Lipkowitz, The LEGO Book, 156.

11 James Delingpole, “When Lego Lost Its Head—and How this Toy Story Got Its Happy Ending,”

Mail Online, December 18, 2009, accessed May 15, 2017, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/

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brick components produced (both about by half), LEGO also changed its thinking about the kinds of toys it produced. According to reporter James Delingpole,

What Lego’s staff also had to do was abandon their high-mindedness. Typical of this was the internal row that had broken out in 1999, when a product tie-in with Star Wars was first mooted: the older company hands had objected on the grounds that any product with ‘wars’ in the title set a bad moral example. The Star Wars series went on to become one of Lego’s biggest sellers.12

Aside from helping the company’s sales, the success of these licensed sets led to the production of over 200 different LEGO Star Wars sets, as well as the purchase of other licenses, including ones for the Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, Batman, Minecraft, and Lord of the Rings franchises. But Star Wars would remain the company’s most lucrative license.