Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Gator Landing. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Gator Landing. Sort by date Show all posts

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Favourite Sets: 6563 Gator Landing

Another of the ongoing topics that I want to visit with this blog is that of my favourite sets. Given my age, and when I started collecting LEGO, these are probably going to be sets from the mid-1990s and later. Anything earlier than that would probably be more appropriate to the Ones That Got Away series--in other words, this series will focus on sets that I actually own.

The first set I will look at in this series is 6563 Gator Landing. Released in 1996, this set is something a precursor to the Outback line of sets that came out the following year. I picked it up in the summer of 1997, when I found it on sale with a couple other sets at the "Real Canadian Superstore." Even before I got it, I thought it was a pretty cool looking set, but the fact that it makes my favourite list now is more a testament to 13 years of ownership nostalgia than anything else.

The main reason I've selected Gator Landing as my first set is because I recently rebuilt it, after having it in pieces for over six years (like much of my LEGO, it is slowly reassuming set-built form). Consequently, it's been on my mind of late, and as I've been hunting down pieces and rereading instructions, I've come to appreciate it all the more.



As a set, Gator Landing seems to be based in a swamp, or at least a lagoon or something of that nature, since it has a hut built on stone (well, grey) pylons, with a swinging rope bridge to a rock promontory. The presence of the lone bush piece suggests that there is land at hand, and the alligator gives the set its moniker.



In addition to the landing proper, the set includes three vehicles: one each from land, sea, and sky. The sea vehicle is this hydrofoil craft, piloted by a stetson-wearing Townlander in that familiar green vest, with storage for two suitcases in the back.



In hindsight, I think this truck is my favourite of the three vehicles. It's a cool looking red and black jeep/truck, with my first set of yellow tire-wells (indeed, my only set for a number of years, in any size), and a design aesthetic similar to the truck in my oldest Town set, 1720 Cactus Canyon.



Although the jeep claims my favouritism now, the seaplane was the real reason I wanted this set back in 1997. My brother had the first airplane in the house, from an Outback set, and I was green with jealousy. After all, planes could fly--and who can deny the swooshability factor? I certainly couldn't, and the big reason I wanted this set was so that I could have a plane too. I always felt a little bit cheated that it was a seaplane, rather than one with wheels, but I like the black, red, and yellow colour-scheme, and it's still plenty swooshable.



Boasting all of a chair and a glass mug, with a half-high door and more roof than walls, this little shack may not seem like much, but back in the day it was a millionaire's palace. My LEGO town had a severe shortage of housing, and this was the first, and for a long time only, Town set I had that came with a building--and a building that wasn't related to business. As such, it was a sauve waterfront estate in the midst of the cruder, basic brick houses I had built otherwise out of Freestyle sets.



Of course, the possession of three vehicles and a waterfront estate wasn't all the evidence I had that these three characters were millionaires: there was also the conspicuous presence of money in this set. How I missed it then, I don't know, but it looks pretty clear that this is a hideout in the bayou/swamp somewhere for... robbers, smugglers... someone apparently unsavoury. That never once occurred to me. For whatever reason, these three fellows, Messrs. Smith, Smith, and Octan, were millionaires who happened to carry a lot of cash on hand. In suitcases.

Sunday, August 3, 2014

Android Files

So much for returning to regular posting here, huh? At least I can claim that this is because I've been busy with LEGO. As noted in the last couple posts, I've been working on a new LEGO comic, made in a style similar to Grandfather's Tale, but with (an initial) focus on Town instead of Castle.

http://androidfiles.webcomic.ws/


So far, I have posted five chapters, one each of the past five Saturdays, and another seven are in production for the coming seven Saturdays, bringing Season 1 to completion in late September. I have plans for the next season, but as I have yet to fully outline it or photograph it, I will hold off from announcing a release date, as that may prove premature. (If anyone is paying really close attention, they will notice that the above image does not exist in any of the five chapters released yet. It is a pre-text-added image from Chapter VI, coming this Saturday.)

"Cactus Canyon, Part I" starts here.
"Cactus Canyon, Part II" starts here.
"Launch Evac 1" starts here.
"Slick Racer" starts here.
"Gator Landing, Part 1" starts here.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the next episode will be "Gator Landing, Part II."

Gator Landing, Cactus Canyon, Launch Evac 1, and Slick Racer are all Town LEGO sets from the 1990s, and using the names of sets that feature in each comic as the title of the chapters is a convention that I intend to follow--at least for the rest of the season. It looks probable that I'll continue with that in Season 2, but I may change my mind, or at least play with it a little. Three of the four sets mentioned so far have, in fact, been reviewed on this blog: Cactus Canyon (my most recent post, and a teaser for the comic), Slick Racer, and Gator Landing. Launch Evac 1 may well get a review someday, since like these others, it has deep roots in my childhood, but it has not been
done yet.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Favourite Sets: 6625 Speed Trackers

In my last "Ones That Got Away" post, I made reference to the fact that I *did* manage to acquire a number of Police sets over the years, just never a police station. One of those sets is today's "favourite set."

6625 Speed Trackers was the first Police set I owned, and it's one of my earliest Town sets (#4, I think). I got it during the summer of 1996 (the year it was released) on a roadtrip to Montana with my parents and one of my brothers. That was a very traumatic LEGO experience for my brother, as he lost the head to the Royal Knight king he purchased, but my policemen made the trip back to Alberta in one piece each, and their vehicles likewise.



Both vehicles are quite lovely. I've always had a thing for the old motorcycles, and this would ultimately prove to be the only one I would ever get in a set. I would manage to get one in the mid-2000s (minus one side of the handlebar), but for most of my formative LEGO years, this was the only two-wheeled motorcycle I owned, making it even cooler than it perhaps deserved. The car was also much appreciated, and I think it is still a nice design, if a bit smaller than a lot of the more recent cars. Its main deficiency is that the driver cannot wear a hat--but, as you can see, LEGO helpfully didn't give him one.

This driver was more than just a mere patrol officer in my Town. Since I never acquired a police station, or even a larger set with a police chief fig, the hat-less man in black with this set became known as Chief Samuel Smith, and his motorcycling partner became his brother, the ace detective Officer Gregory Smith. As the Smith name (which also appeared with a couple of the Gator Landing figs) may tip you off, I wasn't particularly inventive with names, and the fact that these two characters got full names is indicative of the high favour they enjoyed.

I would eventually get a real police chief when I got 9293 Community Workers, but that was the better part of a decade later, and much too late to knock Chief Smith off the top of the totem pole--besides, I had two towns, and someone had to be chief of police in Paridisaville (that would be the new guy's post). Eventually, Chief Smith got a new uniform, while retaining his head, so I'm not sure who's actually in the picture here. Perhaps the Chief still likes to ride the beat now and again, for old time's sake.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

1720 Cactus Canyon


I've alluded in the past (not that I expect anyone to have any readers left, let alone any who remember the particulars of three-year-old posts) that my first true Town set was 1720 Cactus Canyon. It wasn't my first set (it was my seventh), nor was it the first one I would use in the Town world (that would be a Basic set, 525 or a Fabuland set), but it was and remains one of my favourite Town sets. It was also, on a note of trivia, the first set I ever received the same year that it was released, since I got this Christmas 1994.

For those keeping score at home, 1720 Cactus Canyon was released in 1994 and was an amalgam of three other sets: 1740, 1741, and 1742, which were also released in 1994. In that respect, it was much like some of the other sets of the decade, which were released in some countries as polybags under one set number and in others as boxed sets under another. Cactus Canyon has a single instruction book for the three subsets and, growing up, I never really thought of the set as anything other than a complete unit, though I was sort of vaguely aware that it wasn't QUITE a normal set--at the very least, unlike most of my sets, its picture never appeared in the catalogues of the era, a fact it shared with the polybags.


Each unit of the set has a minifigure and a vehicle. Starting with the smallest, we have a kayak (though the paddle is not a kayaker's paddle)--a very simple build indeed, with a grand total of seven elements required.


A little bit larger, certainly in the piece-count department, is the dune-buggy. This subset also includes two natural elements: a grey falcon/hawk piece and a bush--the titular cactus, I always assumed. Growing up in Canada, "dune buggies" weren't exactly a regular part of my lexicon, so this vehicle was generally just referred to as a car or possibly thought of as a four-wheeler or ATV.


Speaking of things with four wheels, the largest of the three subsets has the real highlight of the set, the truck. A fairly standard mid-1990s LEGO truck, this has always been one of my favourite vehicles in my LEGO city. It's looks a bit chunky compared to some more contemporary vehicles--and quite a bit smaller, since it hails from the 4-stud-wide standard era, but it's still pretty vroomable (the driven equivalent of swooshable).


In most sets I'd consider it a fairly minor point to bring up the minifigure accessories, especially in a theme where these are unlikely to be weapons--because who really needs to army-build guys holding walkie-talkies? In this case, however, because of how early Cactus Canyon falls in the timeline of my collection, almost all of the items pictured above were significant. With the exception of the oar (I had two in a Pirate set), each of these were the very first of their kind in my collection. The pickaxes and shovel would remain the only ones until the Adventurers theme in 1998--and it is worth noting as a sidebar that before the Adventurers were released, I did use this set to supply my town with its very first archaeologists or paleontologists, because, clearly, that's why they had picks and shovel, right?


And, of course, there were the minifigs. At this point I'll note that my choice of reviewing this set isn't pure nostalgia; it's nostalgia that's been awakened by the recent drafting of these three minifigs as the main characters in my new webcomic series (coming soon to the Internet near you). The exact characterisation of these three changed over the years, but as the first Town figs in my collection--figs who were, helpfully, not limited by a job-specific uniform, they filled many roles in many games.

From the left we have Carson Smith (who drove a car--note too the facial resemblance to the Smiths of Gator Landing and Speed Trackers), Nick Townson, and Larry, aka "Boaty" Townson. I'll only say this about the "inventiveness" of the names: yes, one guy from a Town set has a boat and was named Boaty Townson. Notably, he and the other Townson here have the same head: it was a convention in my Legoverse and my brothers that Town figs with the same head belonged to the same family. For the longest time, these were my only figs with that head, which a point of some soreness to me, because I thought the head was really cool... and my brother had five of them.

The roles they'll be playing in my upcoming series won't be 100% identical to what they would have been in my youthful LEGO games, which is probably just as well because what appeals to a 12-year-old boy is rarely universally appealling, but it is based on them to an extent. Anyone paying attention will note that nostalgia is a key element in why I create webcomics and why I run this blog. So there was really no competition for main characters when I decided to make a new comic.

In case anyone is wondering, the working title for the series is "Android Files."

Monday, January 16, 2012

Favourite Sets: 6598 Metro PD Station



I've blogged before about 6598 Metro PD Station, the flagship of Town's Rescue theme from 1996. In that post, I wrote about Metro PD as one of a couple of mid-1990s Police Stations that I wanted as a kid, but never got. It was "one that got away."

But no more! Thanks in no small part to this blog, my brother got me Metro PD for Christmas, and rather than finding myself disappointed with the set as over-hyped now that I'm an adult, it more than lived up to expectations.



Part of the attraction of Metro PD is that it comes with a full range of crime-fighting vehicles: air, sea, and land are all covered. The helicopter is on the smaller side, although it's rather standard for 1990s LEGO copters. I had 1782 Discovery Station and my brother had 6328 Helicopter Transport, both of which had similarly sized copters.

Particularly when compared with these helicopters of a more similar vintage, Metro PD's copter holds up well in terms of design, and it's mostly-black colour scheme is pretty badass. Unfortunately, however, the way the copter is put together is a little bit less stable than what I remember of Discovery Station's. Even though I haven't had it quite a month, and I haven't really played with it anywhere to the extent that I would as a kid, it's shattered on me a couple times.



By way of contrast, though, the boat is really solid. It has one police officer seemingly assigned to--one of the officers in vests with white arms, wearing a white cap, making him match exactly the two officers of 4012 Wave Cops, which came out the same year. It's a two-seat boat and an extra life jacket for whoever else rides along. In contrast to the helicopter, which still holds up well in design, though it is small, after all these years, the boat is quite blocky. My brother got 4641 Speed Boat for Christmas, and the differences between the two were striking. Although Speed Boat was only a one-man boat, it was large and powerful-looking and had rounded pieces. Next to it, this simply looked... clunky, though that was rather nostalgically attractive.



Even more dramatically demonstrative of the changes LEGO's Town scale has gone through was the jail van, particularly since I also got 4441 Police Dog Van for Christmas. Granted, there's roomed in the latter for the dogs, but even so it is a full order of magnitude smaller. Which isn't to say I disliked the older van... but it does feel *very* small.



That takes us out of the vehicles for the set--there are also two motorcycles, but while I love classic LEGO motorcycles, there is little to comment on with them--and back to the station proper.

Well, not quite.

As it happens, there are two separate baseplates in this set, each with their own building. Both baseplates have a dock on the side for the boat, which is presumably the means of transport between the two--hence the backseat and the extra life jacket. The smaller baseplate is a prison cell, with a tunnel already prepared for Jailbreak Joe to break out through.



And that brings us to the *real* Police Station. It's already been a fairly substantial set at this point, and there's still the crown jewel to look at. It's a good size, and had more going on in it than I expected. At the same time, however, it was a more juniorised build than most of the set. The large window pieces didn't bother me, but a lot of the structure is just 1x2x5 bricks. The final result is a well-designed playset that looks pretty good from the front. My main quibbles are the wobbly design caused by the post-brick constructions and the green "carpeting" brought on by the baseplate.

One of the most exciting parts of the police station, for me, was the evidence room at the top, which has a wanted poster... of one of the guys in 6563 Gator Landing. I posted about that set close to a year ago (see here) and I reflected there that these guys were probably supposed to be thieves or something of that nature--something that I'd never cottoned on to at all during my childhood. This poster would seem to confirm that suspicion.



Well, the poster could come from the captain's office too. The copy of the set my brother found did not include the instructions, which he printed off from an online copy instead. This was more than functional, but it means that I couldn't actually see the print on the poster when building the set. It's not a major problem, since it would only mean swapping the tiles. As you can see in the immediately foregoing picture, the alternative is a Jailbreak Joe wanted poster. It makes sense to me, though, that since he's already caught, that the one in the evidence room is the guy living large in the swamp.

Wanted posters aside, the captain's office is my favourite room in the station. This is partly because it's the most finished room in the station and partly because I really like the city map behind the captain's chair. It's an awesome design that I didn't know came with the set.



There are also a few nice details down in the reception area. I always wanted the keyboard and monitor pieces to the computer, and they tended to elude me over the years as a general rule. Now, of course, they're amusing to look back on a "old" technology.

I was also impressed with the coffee-maker. It's a very simple build, but it's strikingly effective, and even with all the new parts that have come out in the last sixteen years, it's not really in need of updating.

All told, I was still impressed with Metro PD Station after fifteen years of it being "one that got away" and even against the best contemporary sets it holds up fairly well, the main exception being the boat, and secondarily the van. It was a lot of fun to open a box and have a whole pile of old grey, and I really appreciated the overall smaller size of pieces. Even with the early-onset juniorisation of the station, there were a lot more pieces in the 1x1 plate range (including 1x1 plates themselves) than in more newer sets. It was an awesome Christmas.