Friends Insert In LEGO Club Magazine

During one of my daily travels across the internet reading up on (or at least trying to read up on) all things LEGO, I ran across this article on The Learned Fangirl, LEGO Marketing Sex Change: The Follow Up, where Heather, the blogger, describes a follow-up email she received from LEGO Customer Service. The blog post itself is a follow up from a previous post, Dear LEGO®, In Regards to Your Marketing-Imposed Sex Change For My Son!, where she expressed her dissatisfaction about how LEGO handled the distribution of their Friends insert in the monthly Club Magazine. Friends insert what?

According to the article, depending on how you or your offspring were flagged in their subscription database, you would receive either the normal Club Magazine if you were marked a boy or the Club Magazine with a special Friends-themed insert if you were marked a girl. After reading this, I called up LEGO Shop@Home and inquired about the insert, and the rep verified that there is a special Friends insert and that anyone can receive it if they so wish. I signed up my daughter for the Club Magazine right then and there. I was told my daughter should expect her first issue around January so until then I really have no idea what to expect. I’m not expecting much, maybe some sort of loose story tying some of the sets together to basically act as an advertisement. We shall see.

Going back to the articles themselves, they’re an interesting read and worth the few minutes of your time. Heather’s six-year-old son is a fan of LEGO and also has an affinity for all things pink. She objected to having to identify her son as a “girl” in their database in order to receive the Club Magazine with the Friends insert, but beyond that, she touches upon a bigger overall picture about gender equality and the controversy that the LEGO Friends line introduced when it debuted. I agree with a lot of what she stands up for; however, there is one inaccuracy she states in the “Dear LEGO” article:

I won’t do it, LEGO. First of all, it’s illogical when you insist LEGO Friends isn’t for girls, but your database says otherwise.

LEGO has never denied that LEGO Friends isn’t for girls. Perhaps she left out the word “only”, so that bolded sentence should have read, “First of all, it’s illogical when you insist LEGO Friends isn’t only for girls” because she alludes to that sentiment earlier in the article.

Whatever the case may be, I applaud Heather for sticking to her guns. I’d like to believe that the changes presented to her by the LEGO representative are real, but the LEGO Club Magazine subscription sign up page still has the gender drop down menu:

dropdown

If the child’s gender is no longer used to identify which subscribers receive the Friends insert, what other purpose could it serve? It sort of flies in the face of their gender-neutral stance, but without any proof of the gender being used for targeted marketing purposes, it’s only conjecture at this point.

Ah well. I just look forward to January to see what the insert will be like.

Amazon Discounts 41015 Dolphin Cruiser by 20%

Amazon is applying a pretty nice discount to the recently released 41015 Dolphin Cruiser. It is 20% off of MSRP at $55.99, down from $69.99 MSRP.

Get it while the gettin’s good!

I also noticed that they’ve put a few of the smaller sets on sale with a 20% discount off of MSRP. They’re $7.99 each before any taxes and any shipping charges. If your order reaches $25 or more, you’ll get free shipping. A quick note: Amazon’s base price on these sets are slightly higher at $11.99 which makes the savings seem even greater, but since MSRP is $9.99 the actual discount is less, but still pretty good at 20% off. Anyways, here’s the list:

And finally, from last week’s post, 3315 Olivia’s House is still 21% off at $59.31 and 3184 Adventure Camper is down 23% off at $27.09.

Friends-style Power Loader From Aliens

One of my favorite films of all time, other than Star Wars, is James Cameron’s Aliens. Great action, great story, great acting (yes, I’m including Bill Paxton’s performance when I say that), and it still stands up to the test of time. It may be a bit violent for this site’s younger readers, but there is a great underlying message of girl power with its strong female lead, Ellen Ripley played by Sigourney Weaver. I’m going a bit off topic but the whole point of me bringing that up is this MOC by Simon Liu:

Get away from her you ...

If you’ve seen the movie you’ll immediately recognize the resemblance to the Power Loader used during the climactic fight scene at the end of the movie. He used the MOC in another shot to tease a big project he was working on, which is even more reminiscent of the movie:

Opening BW2013/Brickfete WIP

Great stuff all around.

Before The Dolphin Cruiser, There Was…

The Friend Ship

The “Friendship”. Flickr user Okay Yaramanoglu built the above Friends-themed yacht. Unfortunately, there aren’t any additional photos of the yacht but it would be interesting to see if there was any sort of interior like 41015 Dolphin Cruiser has. Okay built the Friendship for the Summer of Friends building contest hosted by Eurobricks last year. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can browse through the various categories to see some more great entries.

Amazon Discounts LEGO Friends Sets

Amazon is discounting a handful of LEGO Friends sets, all at least 20% off. The sets are a bit older, but it would be a good time to fill the holes in your collection before they’re retired and harder to find.

3315 Olivia’s House is one of the few Friends sets that has a male minidoll, and it was the ONLY set to have a male minidoll before 41005 Heartlake High and 41015 Dolphin Cruiser came out.

New Friends 2014 Set Images

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Hoth Bricks posted a few hours ago some images of new Friends sets for 2014: 41027 Mia’s Lemonade Stand, 41028 Emma’s Lifeguard Post, and 41029 Stephanie’s New Born Lamb. These look to be in the $10 price range of sets given their piece count. The most popular one would have to be 41027 Mia’s Lemonade Stand, pictured above, for two reasons. One, it has cookies. And two, it’s a cheap way to get the new scooter in a new color that until now was thought to be exclusive to the recently announced modular building, 10243 Parisian Restaurant. More pics below:

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LEGO Friends TV Show?

I was cruising around YouTube when I noticed that there is a Friends TV show? I’ve never heard of anything airing on television, so this may have been produced exclusively for the web. The above episode is 22 minutes long, which is about the running time of a 30 minute show with commercials, so who knows. It may have been shopped around to networks but ultimately passed on. There seems to be only two episodes uploaded to LEGO’s channel, the one above and another one here. And that’s not counting the mini movies of which there are seven episodes (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). And the strangest thing of all other than the way their eyes are animated? The Chinese characters following the titles. I’ll send an email to LEGO to see if I can get any official word back.