Vintage set of the week: Car and Caravan
Posted by Huwbot,
This week's vintage set is 379 Car and Caravan, released during 1972. It's one of 16 LEGOLAND sets produced that year. It contains 93 pieces.
It's owned by 349 Brickset members. If you want to add it to your collection you might find it for sale at BrickLink or eBay.
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25 comments on this article
That's a Camper. The only Caravan I know of is the Caravan of Courage.
@MCLegoboy said:
"That's a Camper. The only Caravan I know of is the Caravan of Courage."
Nice old-school Star Wars reference!
Seeing those old spoked wheels and 1x6 arch bricks as wheel wells really takes me back, along with the embossed headlight piece and the 5-color logo graphic (my very first Lego set was 565 Moon Landing). They don't make 'em like that anymore!
The old blocky models will be forever charming.
Pretty much a house with wheels, which is just as well since any new buildings were the smaller miniwheel scale by 1972.
The original 6-wide Speed Champion!
Amazing how LEGO predicted a Mazda Miata so long ago, and pulling a trailer too!
Several years ago, my parents moved to a community that had recently been hit by a tornado. The street they moved to had been wiped clean down to the foundations, so they were rapidly rebuilding on those foundations when my parents were house shopping. A while after they moved in, their dishwasher backed up. Turns out, in the rush to get an entire neighborhood back to habitable state, someone had connected the drain line from the dishwasher to the garbage disposal, exactly as instructed. What they didn’t do is remove the knockout plug from the disposal, so the drain line was a dead end.
I’m looking at this, and all I see is skylight glass that’s been bolted down to a solid roof.
@PurpleDave: 6590 did the same thing. My brother had it as a kid,and that always bugged me.
I'm surprised to see that there were 6-stud cars in 1972 .
Do the fingers come with the set? Or are those sold separately?
That's not a bad car. Simple as anything, but it has a certain timeless quality to it.
There are a number of these old pre-minifig vintage sets that are 6w cars. They used to look so big to me. Now I see this and I say, huh, that's smaller than a Speed Champions car - and it's not even close! Heck, it's smaller than a 6w Speed Champions car. The low angle of the macrophotography really makes it seem bigger than it actually is.
I am one of the people that own this set. I have to say mine does not look as good as the one pictured.
@MCLegoboy said:
"That's a Camper. The only Caravan I know of is the Caravan of Courage."
Funny how different the meaning of the same words can be.
Over here, a Camper is a person who is camping, either out in the wild or at an official camp site.
That thing the car is pulling is called Caravan here, or Wohnwagen, literally "living trailer". Though "Wagen" itself can have a lot of different meanings. It can be used as another word for "car", it can mean "carriage" as in railway carriage, it can mean "wagon", also "cart" or "trolley" as in shopping cart/trolley.
And finally, in lower case, "wagen" is a verb meaning "to dare".
To accommodate the wheels, this strait forward set had two specialized plates as base for both the car and caravan (upn0115 & 781) . Each of the two pieces was used, in a different color, in only one other set:
London Bus 384 & Breakdown Truck and Car 382 .
As a kid who built mocs, I didn't find many uses for those parts back in the day...
That thing is going to see-saw all over the place with the wheels in the middle like that
@oldfan said:
"(my very first Lego set was 565 Moon Landing). They don't make 'em like that anymore!"
Nice! I put that one together from parts orders--very cool set, I have it on display next to 10266
@ElephantKnight said:
"Do the fingers come with the set?"
The photographer was a bit hard of hearing and thought they said, 'What we really need is some mini fingers'. And the rest is history.
I completely forgot they also had that headlight brick 6 wide. I only have a bunch of the 4 wide variety.
Charming set, simple but effective.
@oldfan said:
" @MCLegoboy said:
"That's a Camper. The only Caravan I know of is the Caravan of Courage."
Nice old-school Star Wars reference!"
If Brickset will forgive a non-LEGO digression, it feels just a tinier bit old school as of this month, as John Korty (the director of Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, as well as Twice Upon a Time, The People, various shorts shown on Sesame Street, and most famously The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman) just passed away on March 9th.
This is the Speed Champion set we need.
Can you imagine the moaning and groaning if they released this today and marketed it as a new set?
I fail to look at these sets objectively. I see only beauty. Beauty, Charm & Simplicity. But I guess that's just nostalgia.
@ElephantKnight said:
"Do the fingers come with the set? Or are those sold separately?"
I think I had this set but got it second hand. No box or instructions. Fingers not included.
I'm a little worried about ginormous crack in the windshield. I mean depending in 'where in the world' is, either it's on the passenger's side, or worse; the driver's...
Also @ElephantKnight :
The 'fingers' some separately...in a person sized box...w/a picture of 'you' on front...and a warning: Do NOT Open: You Might Be In Here. (Well either that, or Cousin It is very busy:)).