LEGO recreates iconic 1980s advert for IWD

Fantastic, love it.

How lovely!

Very cool initiative!

Also, I absolutely love the original advert. The look on that girl’s face... Priceless!

This is pretty cool, but I must say as someone who tried to use a lot of diverse minifigures in my latest MOC, Lego really needs to break the mold open on minifigure color in their sets.

Like, I'm not one to say "Lego needs to include a 'person of color' minifigure in every single set", but the availability of minifigures with any alternative skintones is straight up anemic.

I get that minifigures use a yellow skintone, which isn't really a natural skintone in general, but it wouldn't hurt them to start incorporating colors like reddish brown into their regular sets. It was exuberantly expensive just for a female reddish brown minifigure because the amount of available parts for those minifigures is awful.

The Friends and Elves themes generally do a pretty good job, but it's time Lego moved into using alternative skintones in their general themes.

They advertise Lego as a product for everyone (which it is), but there's a large group of people where obtaining a minifigure they can use to represent themselves would be difficult.

I'm not trying to spark a huge debate or anything, and as I said I don't think they need to go to any extremes, but as I was collecting minifigures for my latest build I was just thinking to myself "this would suck if you had a daughter with a darker skintone and she wanted a minifigure to represent herself."

EDIT: Just check the color guide on Bricklink for Reddish brown and click on minifigure heads to see just how bad availability is.

EDIT EDIT: I know Lego tends to have pretty great customer service, so I went ahead and submitted my thoughts on the matter to them in an e-mail. I'll be interested to see how they respond.

@Brick_Belt said:
"I'm not trying to spark a huge debate or anything, and as I said I don't think they need to go to any extremes, but as I was collecting minifigures for my latest build I was just thinking to myself "this would suck if you had a daughter with a darker skintone and she wanted a minifigure to represent herself.""

The yellow skin colour is used for the very purpose to represent any person with any skin colour. So the daughter with a darker skintone may use any of the yellow minifig heads.
As LEGO Customer Service writes:
"We want every one of our fans, wherever they live and whatever their own skin colour, to imagine themselves as part of the action. When we invented minifigures almost 40 years ago, we chose yellow because it’s a neutral skin colour – nobody in real life has bright yellow skin, so LEGO® minifigures don’t represent a specific race or ethnic background and nobody is left out."

@Papirbaba

I mean, I understand that.

But as an example years ago I put together a custom Lego snowglobe for wife before we were married. It wasn't exactly difficult for me to find parts that represented the two of us. However for someone with a much darker skintone I don't think anyone would recognize a yellow minifigure as one that's supposed to represent them. Yellow works for the most part, but it very clearly leans towards one side of the spectrum. I don't think it would hurt Lego to use both yellow and reddish brown, and I think that would do a good job of representing a wide range of both lighter and darker skintones.

@Brick_Belt said:
" @Papirbaba

I mean, I understand that.

But as an example years ago I put together a custom Lego snowglobe for wife before we were married. It wasn't exactly difficult for me to find parts that represented the two of us. However for someone with a much darker skintone I don't think anyone would recognize a yellow minifigure as one that's supposed to represent them. Yellow works for the most part, but it very clearly leans towards one side of the spectrum. I don't think it would hurt Lego to use both yellow and reddish brown, and I think that would do a good job of representing a wide range of both lighter and darker skintones."

Think about what that would do. It would essentially be saying "well, yellow doesn't represent everyone, after all". It would *separate* black people from yellow people and basically erase inclusiveness from their *entire previous history* of products, retroactively. "These were all white, back then. Now we have black, too." Do you really think they would ever want to do that?

Instead, they've found ways to emphasize the idea that you shouldn't assume Caucasian origin from the yellow skin tone, like the clearly black family on the left in 60234.

There was a survey last year about the skin colours, but as far as I know, the result is not published yet.
https://brickset.com/article/52167/what-lego-minifigure-colour-represents-you-best

@Papirbaba said:
"There was a survey last year about the skin colours, but as far as I know, the result is not published yet.
https://brickset.com/article/52167/what-lego-minifigure-colour-represents-you-best "

I guess I'd be interested to see the results of that.

It's not really something I've really particularly thought much about until I was making my most recent MoC. I was trying to find minifigures to represent the people I've taught martial arts too and I had a lot of trouble finding a set of minifigures that could represent a variety of different people. It made me think about how it would feel if I ran into that issue while attempting to make one to represent myself . . . as there's been multiple times in the past I've put a minifigure of myself in my models.

@CCC

Yeah I can see that being an issue. I mean Elves and Friends already moved away from yellow so maybe they've considered that for their other themes. The yellow minifigure is so iconic though so in some ways it'd be a shame.

EDIT: I took a further look around that website the survey is at. I don't necessarily agree with everything on it, but it does make some great points. For instance, reddish brown being first introduced to represent Lando Calrissian while licensed themes still used yellow minifigures implies that Lego does, or at least at one point did not, consider yellow to be adequate to represent everyone.

@CCC said:
"They used to use quite a lot of girls in their advertising in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Yet in the 90s and 2000s it became a bit of a boys' toy. I wonder what it was that made this happen. They obviously did Scala and Belville, distinguishing boys' LEGO and girls' LEGO but at least they seem to be bringing girls back to LEGO these days."

The 80's introduced boy and girl specific toy aisles (pink and blue) and lego ended up in the blue aisle (along with video games).

This looks like a good initiative, just wish the example posters given were a little less "hearts, rainbows, unicorns". My young daughter asks to do bridges, castles, spaceships, jungle animals when we build together. She's built a quite large castle herself (in lots of colours).

As LEGO Customer Service writes:
"When we invented minifigures almost 40 years ago, we chose yellow because it’s a neutral skin colour – nobody in real life has bright yellow skin, so LEGO® minifigures don’t represent a specific race or ethnic background and nobody is left out."

Do people generally believe this story? I mean, in 1970's Denmark when diversity and inclusivity where not on any agenda, a group of white LEGO designers decided that yellow would best represent everyone in the world? Sure, maybe, I wasn't there, so I don't know.

But to me it sounds far more likely that those designers made their decision from their own, white, perspectives and choose yellow from the limited colour palette available at the time to best represent themselves and their surroundings. The 'yellow is no one and therfore everyone' seems more like a convienent side effect for todays world.

For me, the yellow is an important part of the LEGO aestetic and I would hate to lose it. But I can also imagine that identifying with a yellow figure is harder for someone with a dark skin tone than it is for someone with a light skin tone.

To me, yellow is still the only true colour for minifig skintone.

Please, people, stay on topic.

That original advert is how advertisement should be. It is honest and informative. It is not selling some unrealistic lifestyle, it is selling a means to a goal. Without shouting. I love it.

This comment thread is going to turn out awful isn't it

Better yet, why don't we see more sets like this, instead of trying to pursue every single IP LEGO and whoever they're trying to get the license from can form an agreement on? To me, sets based on real vehicles, movies, or video games hamper creativity, and we're seeing more and more of that in the lineup.

Technic had tons of "Universal' sets into the 1990s. There are none today. The current Basic sets have way too many odd-colored parts in small quantities, so not of much use.