Featured set of the day: Star Justice
Posted by Huw,
benredstar tells us about a set from the short-lived fan-designed Factory series:
10191 Star Justice has special significance to me as it’s the set that brought me out of my dark age. At the time, about 10-12 years ago, my interest in LEGO began to flicker back to life and I started cheekily looking at the LEGO web store when this set caught my eye. I’m a child of the 80s and this was clearly the most Classic-Space-like thing they had, and therefore “proper LEGO” in my eyes. I remember it was about £25 reduced from £50 but still I debated for some time whether to buy it, even dragging my wife into my deliberations.
Eventually I caved in and bought it; and spent an enthralling evening building LEGO for the first time in around 15 years. I remember being surprised that so many of the pieces were so familiar from my childhood, like I’d subconsciously memorised what the underside of a 2x2 round brick looks like. It was actually a great set and a real bargain for £25: you got two spaceships big and small, a truck/rover vehicle that hinged in the middle and a little base on an outcrop of rock; plus a sort of power generator thing and a ton of figs, robots and cool parts.
Star Justice was from the now defunct Factory theme, a line of set that were designed by fans. Recently, fuelled by nostalgia I looked it up online and realised I didn’t really know much about it or how it came to be AFOL designed long before the cuusoo/ideas initiative, so I tracked down the designer Chris Giddens and spoke to him briefly about it.
Chris told me back in the early 2000’s the LEGO fan community was much smaller and the LEGO group was only just waking up to the potential of adult fans. Top management began to attend AFOL conventions like BrickFest, developed the idea of a line of FACTORY sets and approached AFOLs like Chris to design them. As Chris says “Through talking, being friendly, and building decently…. we got in!”
The set had its roots in Classic Space. The truck with its 8 hinged wheels was a throwback to 6950 Mobile Rocket Transport and the base was open at the back like the classic bases of the 80s and 90s. The Star Justice theme gave it a clear goodies-v-baddies playability (there was a companion set, 10192 Space Skulls for the baddies, designed by Mark Sandlin); and Star Justice had these 2×2 trans-neon yellow “round brick power/battery/container thingies” they had to stop Space Skulls from stealing.
I had two of these sets and I swear I am still using the robot arms and headlight bricks! Chris told me they deliberately included useful parts “We wanted it to be fun to build, then when you wanted, you had great parts to rebuild with.” But it seems the limitation of parts imposed some drastic last-minute changes “My set actually had 3 spaceships and no base, but parts got dropped and I had to quickly redesign it”. Check out Chris’ Flickr album for some of his work-in-progress designs.
The Star Justice logo was also designed by Mark Sandlin and combined a LEGO Western Sherriff’s badge and the Classic Space swoosh. “It was fun bringing that back to a set… first time it had been done in a long time.” It was details like that which piqued my dormant interest in LEGO and eventually dragged me out of my dark age. Whilst it was never very popular (it was really overpriced; I only bought two because they were half price) it paved the way for the resurgence of interest in Classic Space which continues today. Chris closes “Knowing this set brought joy to a good number of fans makes me glad” and I can assure him it brought a lot of happiness to me!
Remember at the start of all this how I deliberated over whether to buy this in the first place? Well, a few days after the set arrived in the mail ANOTHER copy of the set turned up. Turns out that by the time I caved in my wife had already bought it for me and the one I’d already opened was the one she bought, this second copy being the one I bought several days later! So every time she moans about me filling the house with LEGO I remind her it was all her fault in the first place.
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19 comments on this article
I really liked the design of the Star Justice and the Space Skulls. It is sad that we will never get a continuation of this.
Edited: Well, my imagination and bricks will make a continuation for this. And Congrats too Chris Giddens and Mark Sandlin to create these beautiful sets. I hope that one day I will be able to get them.
cool story
In 2018 I bought this set MiSB very cheap. It costed only 185 pln (about 40$).
I preferred this over the Space Skulls, but don’t own it. Might be a forgotten gem.
I don’t agree that the UK price for this set was all that overpriced. Adjusted for UK inflation, this would be £67.22 in today’s money, or $82.00 with the present exchange rate. Yes, the price to volume of stuff is a bit rough, but far from terrible. And the price to part ratio is certainly intact.
Contrast this to the US price, which adjusted for inflation would be about $119.00 in today’s money. Ouch.
Such nostalgia- not from owning it, but looking at the pictures as I flipped through Lego catalogs over and over as a kid!!!!
I never did buy this one ... but years later, I found the "Space Skulls" set in a toy-shop. It was obviously old stock. The box had been kicked around a bit and was falling apart. So, on a whim, I bought it.
And absolutely loved it. It was pure Lego supervillain fun.
Thanks for contacting the designer of this set and sharing the story with us!
I never owned this set, but I vividly remember seeing it beside Space Skulls in the Lego catalogue, and being completely mystified by it.
Great story about how it came to life, but I'm not going to lie, I always found the Factory Space sets incredibly ugly, with the Skulls one being the worst. They looked so uninspired and boring... and I always felt they were somewhat overpriced.
This set, along with its Skull companion, also gives me flashbacks from the terrible era we had to use an extremely limited LDD to make MOCs. It was awful.
I've always thought that this set was not your average company designed set. Now I know the story to it. Thanks.
Speaking from personal experience, each of the builds in this set is pretty neat on its own but the whole is less than the sum of the parts because it's so overpriced. The Factory theme cut costs wherever possible, so many of the parts are reused so many times that economies of scale surely could have brought the PPP below 10c USD; unfortunately, it's well above that. The minifigs aren't even printed, for goodness' sake! They're just stickers! Also, the monochromatic white-on-light-gray color scheme is so boring. Finally, the cargo bed of the rover is awkwardly sized: much longer and wider than required for one cargo pallet, yet too short for two cargo pallets. That said, the rover looks great and is fun to play with. It rolls easily over any obstacle and it's easy to put the driver in and take him out. The retractable landing gear on the small flyer and the spaceship is fun too. Overall, the set is an interesting time capsule for the early days of Lego's AFOL outreach and for mid-2000s building techniques, when SNOT was starting to become more prominent but before Lego had developed today's wonderfully versatile selection of SNOT parts.
Here's some more background to this set that I repeat at every opportunity. I think it's true but I'm not sure. At the time, Chris Giddens was the most prominent builder in the AFOL trend of "Pre-Classic Space", which aimed to depict Lego Space before the Classic Era, so everything was chunkier, rounder, and less colorful. Mark Sandlin was the most prominent builder in the 3VIL trend, which featured skeleton antagonists for the Pre-Classic Spacers with a heavy dose of Alpha Team and Blacktron parts. I think those fan themes might even have been the brainchildren of Giddens and Sandlin. Star Justice and Space Skulls, then, are official sets born of fan-conceived themes at Lego's invitation. Here are more Pre-Classic Space and 3VIL builds from Brickshelf, if anyone's interested.
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?q=3vil&stype=dfic
http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=232883
Never particularly invested in this one, retro though it is, but was thrilled by the Space Skulls. Their big ship like a skull with tentacles is really unique and surprisingly poseable, and they’ve been merged with some of my alpha team sets to be part of Ogel’s armada
One of my first "what is this?" finds on the internet.
Picked it up as I just loved the design of the ship, but fell in love with the rest of the set after, it does not feel anything at all like a "professional" set, has it's own uniqueness.
In fact I think this is the first set I reviewed on Brickset! I even went back to take a look at it again after all this time.
Factory most certainly was "Cusoo 0.5"
I always think there is no theme I had never heard of, and again, there is stil (at least) one.
Star Justice and Space Skulls were always an interesting concept to me. Most of the time themes like Creator, Ideas, or in this case Factory don't have a whole lot of "story" content (licenses ignored,) with a lot of the sets being more filler/slice-of-life content you can slot in about anywhere. Whenever story elements are included they can usually be easily connected to another theme, for example the EXO Suit came with two Classic Space figures and Redbeard is included in Barracuda Bay.
SJ and SS though are a different story. Here we have two teams of space-farers who are clearly well established and developed in their universe, but there aren't really any ties to LEGO's other original IPs. There are minor things like the aforementioned sheriff star or the Space Skulls resembling Skulkin, but for the most part these sets are in a world of their own!
I also have to applaud this collection's treatment of "battle in a box." Usually a LEGO set will include one large item for one team, and a small item or single minifig for the enemy team, and that's your battle. Especially considering usually around 70% of the sets are based on protagonists and just 30% on the antagonists this can create a pretty one-sided fight scene. Here however, we have two sets of roughly the same size and same amount of content completely dedicated to one team each. If you want a perfectly even fight, get the same number of each. If you want to tilt the scales, buy a ton of one and a handful of the other. If you couldn't care less about one of the teams, just buy one set and not the other. Such a simple change gives you a surprising amount of flexibility in army building, the closest thing we've gotten in mainstream LEGO to that would probably be the retro Space and Castle stuff or Legends of Chima.
The best part of Star Justice and Space Skulls was that they were official LEGO versions of Giddens’ PCS (Pre-Classic Space) and Sandlin’s 3vil, which had many fans amongst the AFOL community. There are TONS of PCS and 3vil MOCs our there, by many different builders. If you’re a spacer and you don’t know these builders, take some time to flip through the Internetz and find their stuff. You wont be disappointed!
WARNING! Controversial opinion incoming! Read at your own risk!
Star Justice and Space Skulls walked so that Space Police III could run.
Hey! Thanks for the shout out and review of this set. It's been so many years but it's great to hear it meant a lot to so many! It was the best we could do with a limited and changing parts pallet. (For example, the bots were to have battle Droid torsos in gray, that got pulled)
I want to pretend the new space guy in the new space rover references these figs. I like to pretend. Space on. <
A lot of us have already decided to pretend the same thing!