Random set of the day: Sabre Island
Posted by Huwbot,
Today's random set is 6265 Sabre Island, released during 1989. It's one of 12 Pirates sets produced that year. It contains 96 pieces and 3 minifigs, and its retail price was US$15.5.
It's owned by 7,234 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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"So I see you've brought a gun to a swordfight! Foolish of you to turn your back to me!"
The guy in the boat came running because he thought it said "lightsaber island" and wanted to be in a Star Wars set. I hope he's not disappointed though, Pirates is great too
Long since departed from my possession but endless hours of fun for me as a kid. Astonishing to think how far 96 pieces used to go in a more innocent version of myself. Love this set so much.
I have that wall part with the bricks decoration
This set manages to make its tiny printed island baseplate feel larger than it is (by extending a corner of the tower into the water). I like the generous number of soldier minifigs and weapons (each minifig can be armed with both a saber and a flintlock). The instructions have you place the large flag, saber, and torch at different locations than the box art shows. The palm tree is strangely 1 trunk unit shorter than most of the other palm trees in my pirates sets.
As far as I can remember, this was my first LEGO set one Christmas morning….I still have this little treasure…so much fun! I guess this is why I always used the blue coats as good guys, and pirates as the bad guys!
Great play set as a kid and now a great display set next to eldorado fortress.
Well...it'd be easy to 'foot patrol' on, that's for sure...or is that 'shore'...:)
Ah yes the year minifigs got varied faces, as exemplified by our sabre-wielding fellow, here. Someday I will have this set!
Pure nostalgia! Have two of these since my childhood, now proudly guarding the entrance to my pirate harbor. If it wasn’t for the pirates theme to come out, my dark ages would have started years earlier. I think I own all of the first and second year sets and I have kept them in great condition. Just love this theme!
Some of these had blue coloured under side for the plate, and sone had it grey.
Neat little outpost set. Was there ever any backstory or lore as to why it was called Sabre Island? Like yeah, they have swords, but so did a lot of other pirate sets. Was the island supposed to look like a saber?
That's great, Hollandsglorie! I always wanted this and the fortress, but sadly do not. My brother had two islands populated by pirates and a pirate ship, but I had small sets with the blue coats.
@MCLegoboy:
"For the last time, Carl, we're on the same side!"
LORE:
The year was 1640 and the Spanish Armada had established a small outpost on Sabre Island. The men stationed there never saw any action and read all the books at their disposal for entertainment. With their library exhausted, they began to write their own books. Soon, they had chopped down trees on the island and milled their own paper. Sabre paper became well known for its excellent quality. Eventually, as the Armada disbanded, the descendants of the men stationed there kept producing their fine Sabre paper and eventually formed a paper company named Sabre. By the early 2000s, the company had expanded to include a whole line of office products which were sold around the world. In 2010, Sabre purchased a company known as Dunder Mifflin. (Refer to 21336 ) Two years later, the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company was bought out by former Dunder Mifflin CFO David Wallace and Sabre ceased to exist and the brand was dissolved.
I would always take the tower and add it on top of Lagoon Lockup to make a large fort for my soldiers. Great set!
My favourites as a kid was Castle and Town until 1989 when Pirates came sailing in to town! Something change that day when I first saw the Pirates theme in the catalogue and I probably spent many hours the next years looking at the pictures there and dreaming.. I believe the first set my brother and I got was the @6255 the golden medallion comic so we read that a lot and dreamed of more sets. The following birthdays and Christmases we got some of the smaller sets and for some reason my favourites was the bluecoats especially the normal soldier whit the backpack, shako hat and flintlock musket gun. The best set where you could get 2 soldiers was @6265 Sabre Island (no way we could afford @6276 Eldorado Fortress) so I saved up and probably used most of my money at the time on that fantastic set :D
I feel like such a tall tower on such a tiny island is just asking for trouble; one particularly large wave and that base is gone!
AlwAys felt sorry for these guys as a kid when the barracuda came a long! My one non pirate set.
Pontins Bluecoats a bit fed up with their extra duties after the Knobbly Knees contest and Donkey Derby....
I hope this set will get a remake similar to 40567
imagine the outrage now. "wa, the tower is just made up of big panels pieces. There's no interior detail. The boat's just a big specialised piece. bumping up the piece count with all those cannonballs. Rubiish!!!"
I have a very warm place in my heart for Saber Island because:
A. Governors!
B. Printed Baseplate!
C. This might be the very first set I ever parted together from disparate sources. I got the baseplate, flag, and the tower wall sections in my very first batch of used LEGO ever (ca. May 2002). When I was collecting what I needed to finish it off--around 2007--the tree trunk sections were the hardest/most expensive bits for me (those were the days: I don't ever remember sticker shock on the figs, which I assure you would not be true today).
Love this tiny imperial guard set.
I still have it on display, bravely fighting the huge wave of pirates surounding it. Simple but great!!
One of my favorite childhood sets! The only thing that always annoyed me was that the roof had an asymmetrical overhang.
My brother and I each had our own copy of this set (…so now I have two!). Such a simple build but somehow so aesthetically pleasing, even by today’s standards.
@PDelahanty said:
"LORE:
The year was 1640 and the Spanish Armada had established a small outpost on Sabre Island. The men stationed there never saw any action and read all the books at their disposal for entertainment. With their library exhausted, they began to write their own books. Soon, they had chopped down trees on the island and milled their own paper. Sabre paper became well known for its excellent quality. Eventually, as the Armada disbanded, the descendants of the men stationed there kept producing their fine Sabre paper and eventually formed a paper company named Sabre. By the early 2000s, the company had expanded to include a whole line of office products which were sold around the world. In 2010, Sabre purchased a company known as Dunder Mifflin. (Refer to 21336 ) Two years later, the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company was bought out by former Dunder Mifflin CFO David Wallace and Sabre ceased to exist and the brand was dissolved."
You are a genius. I tip my hat to you!
Yep. when you wanted an opponent's base to raid for your pirates but 6276 was Christmas-only-budget. Anyway, three staff, a cannon, bring it on!
I'm a bit sad, this is my largest Pirate set of the 1989-1997 era, but well it's surely a nice one to have.
You got plenty of the new for 1989 elements, like the white walls, cannon, palm tree and big imperial flag, which was kind of cool.
Design wise it's a bit odd, if you begin to over-analyze it, those fences in the top level are so small, they barely protect anyone from falling off at all! Also being on a small watch tower on a tiny lonesome island is surely not the most desirable thing I can imagine...
But to be honest I never cared about that as a child. It really paired well with the smaller 6259, especially when you combined the parts into a more 'complete' building.
The interesting thing about this set and 6260 is that the baseplate came in both a blue and a grey version (with the grey one being fully painted blue, so you could not tell it was grey until you turned it over). As far as I could figure out, the grey ones are from the first batches produced, similar to the stickered flags in early copies of 6276.
The only explanation for this I could come up with, is that they didn't have the plastic for baseplates available in blue at that time. The separate 32x32 plate arrived in 1991, but still there is 6077... Are there grey 32x32 fully painted blue? o_O
@elangab said:
"Some of these had blue coloured under side for the plate, and sone had it grey."
Any idea why? I just looked at mine and found I have three grey and one blue!
This was the last Imperials set I needed to complete my collection. I've currently taken another island plate and built a little fort out of some spare Broadsides' Brigs and added a rope bridge across to the Sabre tower. I always wanted to make sure they had a way up, and now they have ladders!
This was my all time favourite LEGO set when I was a kid
One of the most classic pirates sets there are!
It's so strange to see a set with 3 out of 3 figs belong to the same faction. Those were the times!
@dimc said:
" @elangab said:
"Some of these had blue coloured under side for the plate, and sone had it grey."
Any idea why? I just looked at mine and found I have three grey and one blue!
This was the last Imperials set I needed to complete my collection. I've currently taken another island plate and built a little fort out of some spare Broadsides' Brigs and added a rope bridge across to the Sabre tower. I always wanted to make sure they had a way up, and now they have ladders!"
Since the grey ones use up both an additional color and way more paint overall, I think it's safe to say the blue ones were cheaper to produce. My copy (blue plate) was from around 1991/1992, so I guess the grey ones were an earlier version.
Maybe they also tried to make these more similar to the raised baseplate of 6276, that was similarly grey with blue printed up all the way to the part's outer edges (also making it prone to paint rubbing off).
We haven't seen printed studs for quite a while now, isn't it?
First time a mugging is depicted in LEGO?