One after 929
928
Space Lego! For men of a certain age (at this point, north of 50), the words elicit a warm glow of childhood nostalgia. For me it all started around about 1981 when I started getting lego sets as presents. I was 5-6 years old and anything coming into contact with my senses felt extremely vivid (or at least the memories I retain from that time are vivid), and the colour and feel of those first pieces of plastic loom large in my brain.
While the early, modest Lego sets my brother and I received were cool enough, we spied greater riches in the Lego catalogues we’d sometimes acquire. Seeing dioramas of many sets on display - whole cities sometimes - was like peering into another world: an idealised (Danish) version of reality peopled with friendly automatons. (All this was satirised very slyly in the first Lego Movie.)
What attracted me more than life on Lego Earth, however, was the possibility and promise of a glorious future in Lego space, and whenever I was in toy shops (which seemed like every five minutes in the 80s, but probably wasn’t) I loved scanning boxes showing rocket ships in front of interplanetary backgrounds.
Within a year I’d acquired some smaller space sets, but my friend Kevin acquired one of the larger ones, model number 924. This was part of a series of three spaceship models: 918, 924, and 928; all variations of the same blue and grey spaceship archetype (reminiscent of but legally distinct from a Start Wars Star Destroyer). 924 was pretty decent; the engines at the back swung open to reveal a modest cargo bay. But the set that really impressed me was the big daddy of the series, 928. This behemoth sported four grey rocket engines, compared to 924’s two and 918’s one. Its cargo bay contained not just a box of tools but a whole moon buggy. When my grandparents went on holiday to Australia in 1983, my mother announced that they would bring back 928(duty free!).
When they returned to Wellington some weeks later (in a short-bodied 747, landing at Wellington airport, if you can imagine such a thing these days), it turned out 928 was no longer being available. Instead they picked up 6980, 928’s grand successor. (So expensive was this set that it was supposed to be my birthday and Christmas present combined. My parents seemed to have forgotten this come December, luckily.)
Now 6980 was a pretty decent ship and it did have more going on than 928 (a detachable science lab, a twin cockpit, and what looked like four cannons sticking out at the front). And yet it lacked the angular, minimalist, solid seriousness of the earlier dreadnaught. So 928 remained lodged in a more wistful ventricle of my heart, and for many years afterwards (indeed, even into my late teens!) I would periodically attempt to build the most faithful of version of 928 I could from the lego pieces I had. I did a decent job, but I was never going to get there. 6980 turned out to be the last lego set I acquired as a child. Thinking about it now, I’m not sure if my parents felt I already had enough, or if I lost interest in acquiring more sets. Probably a bit of both.
Not much happened for nearly 40 years (has it really been that long?!), until my son Angus appeared on the scene and reached the age of lego acquisition. (And boy has he acquired it; I reckon he has perhaps three times as much lego as I ever did, and he plays with it about a not at all.) I frequently recalled set 928 wistfully as “the one that got away”. Well, my highly practical wife Sally, aware of my childhood fondness by my banging on about it, set about combing trading sites in the hope of acquiring the set.
I have to say that in adulthood I hadn’t considered getting my hands on 928 because I was an adult and it was too late; to get it now wouldn’t be the same as having had the set in 1983. But Sally saw getting the set less as an exercise in whimsical indulgence, than as an opportunity for Angus and his dad to build something together. Well, put like that, sure, why not?
Eventually a set of assorted space lego bricks came up, and spying components from 928 in the listing picture, we took a chance the whole set was in there, and bought it. Our instincts were correct and from the pieces we were able to assemble a largely complete 928 set, shown below.
So, what’s it like the assembling the lego set of your dreams 40 years later? Well, I suppose there’s a certain satisfaction of getting there in the end, but also an awareness I am no longer a six year old. Even building 6980 (back then) felt more momentous. Still, it’s nice to have had the opportunity to build and own 928, even if, perhaps, not having 928 was what originally made 928 so appealing. Oddly, the set doesn’t feel like mine, but more like I’ve borrowed someone else’s. Even so, I can’t deny I do get some satisfaction sometimes by briefly walking around my living room with it making psshew noises.
929
But Sally didn’t stop there. Still keeping an eye on the second hand sites, another set, Benny’s Spaceship from the Lego Movie, became available. She purchased it as a Christmas project for Gus and me.
I found the character of Benny in the Lego Movie a little frustrating. I mean, it was nice he was there to represent classic Space Lego (although I feel he would have been better wearing the OG red or white spacesuit; the blue one was a later addition…). I didn’t much like his spaceship in the movie, either. It was clearly intended to recall 928 (having LL929 printed on the side of its fuselage, like the original), but it lacked the clean lines of the original, and was much too busy in detail, or, to put it less charitably, festooned with crap. I would have preferred if Benny had just flown 928 itself. It wouldn’t have made any sense in the context of the story, but it would have been giving the set the due in the Lego canon that one middle aged man felt it deserved.
So it came to pass that Angus and I received and built 929. Now that I’m acquainted with its physical form, I have to row back some of my criticisms. Although it certainly is excessively baroque, it’s at least well-thought-out baroque, with several nods to other classic space lego sets. And 929 is highly “playable” (a prized trait for a lego set, I’m informed): there’s two sets of missile launchers, and even a couple of mini-fighters attached at the tip of each wing. The rococo ornamentation on the ship does have benefits: the second-hand set we bought had a few pieces missing, but with so much greebley finish on the surface, it’s impossible to tell that some of it is not there.
10497
There’s one final chapter to this sort-of tale. As part of its commemorations of its 90th anniversary in 2022, Lego brought out 10497, a tribute to 928 (the 10497 number is a reference to the US catalogue number for the set, which is 497 - the number on the side of the ship remains 928 though, as with the original 497). Sally asked me if I wanted it, and, perhaps inevitably, I said yes, let’s go for the trifecta. So for Christmas 2022, Angus and I received and constructed 10497.
10497 is pitched as a modern version of 928 (150% the size of the orignal, with twice the number of pieces). Building it was like watching a story unfold, each element was had been chosen thoughtfully.
There are numerous improvements on the original. For starters, the new model makes extensive use of technic bricks for the skeleton of the ship. This provides an opportunity to project the fuselage at a vertical angle to the wings, with the result that the new ship is sleeker and less boxy than the original.
928’s austere cabin gets more decoration; the larger fuselage provides room for beds for (the lack of which detail used to bother me as a child; now if they could just add in a toilet…) There’s also an airlock door between the cabin and the cargo area, which makes good engineering sense. The unfolding rear doors now latch more naturally - no need for the original’s separate 1x2 plate to keep the halves together. The ramp for the buggy extends in an ingenious fashion, and finally (but far from least) the ship sports retractable landing grear.
But there are problems. One is that the wings, originally the thickness of a standard lego plate, are now built much thicker, more than block’s height (or three plates). This change makes for more realistic wings, but the result is an overcompensation, more reminiscent of the curtain of a hovercraft than the wing of a space plane. Similarly, the spoiler on top of the fuselage is a bit overbearing. And while the engines now have a more realistic look, the old grey cones and cylinders of the original are to me the most iconic Space Lego pieces of all, and I miss them on 10497 (and 929 for that matter).
But the biggest problem is that 10497 isn’t really a set you can play with. Much of the exterior, especially the wing, and the pieces supporting the cockpit, fall off when you touch them. The set is too heavy for little arms, as well. Aside from its antennas, which were forever falling off, 928 was built like a brick shithouse. So not without its faults, but I’ll say that on balance Lego did a pretty solid job with 10497. Reverential, certainly. Presumably they made a bit of money from die-hard Lego tragics.
And in the end
As with other fixations I’m documenting on this blog, there’s not much in the way of conclusion. I don’t have any great insights from seeing my childhood fixation through. I will though give a give a shout out to Jens Nygaard Knudsen (RIP), who invented not only 928 and many classic Space Lego sets, but also the Lego minifigure.
I’d like to give a “Lego isn’t what it was in the 80s” speech, but I don’t quite believe that’s true. Lego from long ago certainly feels purer than today’s swamp of sets licensed from media franchises (think Harry Potter or Star Wars), but the creativity and imagination put in to Lego remains high; maybe less so in the sets but in the freeform creativity of Lego practitioners as evidenced on the various Lego Masters series. I do feel exhausted imagining all the plastic extruded to make lego each year, but I can’t begrudge kids today having the same fun I did.
