8057 Wreck Raider

Just a smaller post today, but 8057 Wreck Raider is a smaller set. I'm actually kind of surprised I never posted about this set before--I took the picture below over a year ago, last summer when I posted about a few other Aquazone sets in my collection, but somehow it never translated into a post of its own.

For being the smallest set of the line, Wreck Raider is surprisingly robust. It features a powerful submarine vehicle. For a set of its size, it also has a fairly decent collection of parts, including a number of curved red pieces. Ultimately, though, the highlight of the set--as with so many sets--is the minifigs, who belong to both sides of the theme's conflict: explorers and Atlantis fishmen.

Two Atlantis Sets: A Comparison

A few months ago, I had two Atlantis sets in my collection: 8057 Wreck Raider and 8073 Manta Warrior, for an aggregate total of three figs. When I had Lance Spears appear on Aquazone Breakfast News, I borrowed him from my brother. The situation has changed in the last couple months, however, and the two sets present a somewhat interesting contrast.

On the one hand, I got 8058 Guardian of the Deep for Christmas. This is a smaller-medium sized set, with one minifig ("Bobby Buoy") and an outrageously large shark that is apparently intended to be bionic (this might have been slightly more apparent in the following picture if I had applied the stickers).



Shortly before Christmas, however, I picked up 30042 "Mini Sub". Like "Guardian of the Deep," this set comes with one explorer minifig (in this case, I now have my very own Lance Spears), but where "Guardian of the Deep" has an enormous bionic shark, "Mini Sub" is a polybag with a... mini-sub.



What's interesting about comparing these two sets is what a different number of minifigs can make in evaluating sets. For a set the size of "Guardian of the Deep," one minifig seems a little sparse, while this is solidly expected of a polybag. The contrast between these two sets also emphasizes the importance of set-design. While "Mini Sub" isn't the most innovative design in LEGO's vault, it is a cute little set. Speaking as someone whose entire Aquazone collection is composed of "Mini Subs," this Atlantis set holds up with the best of them, and even uses a bit of snot in effecting its design. The giant shark, on the other hand... fills like filler.

So does a polybag trump a small-medium set worth 4-5 times as much? In this case, yes.

6107 Recon Ray

Once again, good readers, we present you with a review of a tiny little Aquazone set, for the simple reason that my Aquazone collection was among the few bits of LEGO that came back to Canada with me. In the picture below you can see the entirety of my Stingray (the subtheme, not the animals) collection--and, no, that does not include the two baseplates.



6107 Recon Ray was a new release when I bought it in the summer of 1998, while staying at my grandparents' for a week. It was also not the foremost among my purchases that week, since my focus was on the two Fright Knights sets I acquired (small, the both of them), and Recon Ray was just an afterthought because, hey, I had few bucks left, and I didn't have any Stingrays yet. (For whatever reason, I always figured I should try to get at least one of everything in my collection, rather than focusing on a theme or two. I'm better in my "old age," but the instinct still holds.)

While this little guy may have been an afterthought in 1998, he is a bit more significant than either of those Fright Knight sets: neither 6007 Batlord or Fright Force are recognisable as distinct sets in my collection these days. Of course, Recon Ray had an unfair advantage insofar as I've been re-accumulating my Aquazone sets with this Aquazone Breakfast News in mind, but the fact is that both those Fright Knights sets were more army-builders than stand-alone sets, and Recon Ray is, at least, a stand-alone set.

Actually, when I think about it, it's the most standalone "classic Aquazone" (aka, 1990s sets actually sold under that name) set I have. The reason? Unlike my five other classic Aquazone sets, Recon Ray is the only one to include something apart from the little submarine and its pilot. Yup... of all my old Aquazone sets, this is the ONLY one with a Hydrolator crystal--and NONE of them have sharks, octopi, or seaweed pieces.

6115 Shark Scout

I believe it was mentioned somewhere in the last few weeks worth of Aquazone Breakfast News that 6115 Shark Scout was my first Aquazone set. I got it late in 1995, the year it was released, as a present. From these modest beginnings came, well, a theme that never really amounted to much... at least not until the debut of Aquazone Breakfast News.



In those early years, my brother managed to amass a rather larger Aquashark army (his Aquanauts were playing in the same league as mine, however) than me, and since both his Aquashark subs came with sharks, my little Aquashark tended to borrow the shark from 6234 Renegade's Raft--after all, it's not like the poor shark had a lot of opportunities to eat people in that theme (people rarely died in my LEGO battles; as a general rule, they were only wounded).

As sets go, I always thought that this set had one of the handsomer "tiny submarine set" models. Although I wouldn't really go so far as to say that Shark Scout is comprised of a host of useful pieces, it avoids the appearance of having any Pieces-of-one-Part, and the one arguable P-of-1-P that it does have is the rather attractive Aquashark front piece. The black, blue, and neon orange colour combination was a handsome one, in my books, reminiscent of a cross between the original Space Police theme and Iceplanet. Unfortunately, this was the only set I really had in the colour scheme; the only other Aquashark set that I acquired was the rather terrible 1095 Super Sub. Like pretty much all the Aquazone subthemes, I acquired one token tiny submarine to say that I had some, and then failed to think of any reason to acquire more.

6125 Sea Sprint 9

In my attempt to restore some sort of blogging regularity, it made sense to start with something fairly simple, like a set review. Given that I have pretty only brought my Aquazone sets with me from Boston, you can expect that they will appear here over the course of the summer. In case you didn't deduce that from the punchlines of some of the Aquazone Breakfast News issues, I don't have a large Aquazone collection. Indeed, of the sets that I own (as opposed to piecemeal-acquired Aquazone elements), the following set is in contention for the largest one I own:



Yes, that is 6125 Sea Sprint 9 (apparently called Aquanaut Octopod in some places), and yes... it was the smallest set in the original 1995 Aquanaut release. The thing is, though, that EVERY Aquazone set I have (for the purposes of this post, I am *not* counting the 2007 Aquaraiders or Atlantis sets as "Aquazone," though I normally consider them as belonging to broadly the same theme) was the smallest in its line--or smaller (in two cases, I acquired a polybag set that was released later and trumped the original for small size).http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

I originally acquired Sea Sprint 9 in the fall of 1996. I no longer remember whether I bought it or whether it was a gift (or a bribe), but I think I bought it. It was my second Aquazone set, after 6115 Shark Scout, and my first "good guy."

I suppose that if one looks back, this set was one of the first steps in the direction of eventually producing Aquazone Breakfast News. Not only was this my first Aquanaut, but it established the Aquanauts as my favourite Aquazone theme. Years later, when I acquired another copy of this set for $3.00 as an add-on to a larger Bricklink order, it was a significant step in the direction of acquiring the medium-sized Aquanaut army that was the direct cause of setting my comic strip underwater. Because the wider Aquazone theme is one I used hardly at all, and because I like Aquanauts and wanted to acquire lots but couldn't justify them in that context, they were the perfect fit--or the perfect misfits, one might say--to host the comic.