Hacking the Death Star

As those of you with children will know, Lego ain't what it used to be. The notion of getting a box of bricks and using your brain to construct a rough approximation of something, and then letting your imagination fill in the blanks is a thing of the past. Now Lego is themed with endless kits that make one or two things from the enclosed instruction booklets. It's a great way to let children achieve something that looks exactly like the illustration on the box in a matter of an hour or two and then put that to one side and open another box. In short it's a great way for Lego to make money time and time again.

Lego Star Wars episodes 4-6, Lego Star Wars episodes 1-3 and now Lego Star Wars Clone Wars. Where will it all end? Answer: With children wanting their beds removed from their bedrooms to house their museum collection of pristine models of this or that ship from this or that episode (as Framey told me his son had recently requested). But of course eventually they break, and get resigned to the "Big Box of Lego" that every child has, containing everything and yet nothing because you can never find the bit you want in the color you want in the orientation you want.

Alexander has pretty much given up on trying to do anything with his "Big Box of Lego" and has focused himself on the little Lego people. He keeps them dissassembled in a separate compartmentalized box that I got from the hardware store. A veritable Dr. Frankenstien, he has it all organized into heads, torsos, legs and of course weapons. The Lego people are a big deal for him and he chooses his Lego kits based on the number and type of the people he gets as part of the kit. (You can't of course, get the key people except as part of a kit!)

I could go on... Lego today is a frustrating money maker that leaves its audience constantly wanting "the next" but not giving them enough insight into themselves to learn that they can do very well with a little imagination and what they already have got. In short Lego is not on my side anymore.

So what is to done?

Faced with Alexander turning 8 and his requests for the Lego Death Star kit- a box of Lego that makes one stylized not to scale, model of said spaceship, inhabited by Lego Star Wars people that you can't get anywhere else and costing a mere $500, I decided it was time to act...

This weekend Alexander was spending Saturday night at a friends house so I decided that I would take matters into my own hands and hack a Death Star together from the Lego he already had. All in all so far it seems to have gone quite well. Alexander was suitably amazed at his old mans building skills and insisted on showing the friend that dropped him home my handiwork. It's by no means perfect, resembling more a tree house than the Death Star, but after all the "real" Lego Death Star isn't much different. It is just is a bit bigger and has a few more bells and whistles which we can add as we go along.

Phase 1 of the project shown below was simply to create the basic structure and beyond that I think Alexander and I can fill in the various areas with Star Wars type things along with the menagerie of Star Wars characters and things he already has. We made a start this afternoon and will add more stuff over the next couple of weeks.



Non Flash folk can click here.