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Alt. Brick Thread

edited 2023-09-02 12:24:21 in Meatspace
There is love everywhere, I already know

Comments

  • Looking at Mega Construx people, I'm assuming places/objects are supplsed to be much larger than in LEGO?

    Also TIL there are Mega Bloks of World of Warcraft.
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    Yeah, MCX figures are gi-ant versus LEGO. American Girl, Halo, Call of Duty, etc. On the bright side, that means wall building pieces are more prominent. I'll take some pictures of my American Girl sets sometime to show the overall size difference. Well, once I rebuild Lanie's set, which I scrapped for parts.

    MCX did try to go smaller once with a line called World of Yootz!, but as you can tell from the name nobody cared for it.

    There's been Mega Bloks/Construx a lot of things, since the line was really big on licensing (thanks Mattel! <_< >_>) before the current era. They went all in on Barbie a while back, but frankly those sets were an embarrassment to building blocks and the new (well, 2018-ish "new") ones are somehow even worse (I might be tempted to buy a figure or two though, despite the high resale markup on the new-in-box ones).

    They do a lot of He-Man, but I've heard complaints about the newer figures' paint jobs. I kind of wanted to get one, because I did have a (good-looking, svelte, ie not the terrible normal scale) He-Man figure as a kid once. I didn't like him like, a lot or anything, but there's a bit of nostalgia there. Right now they're starting to license the Alien franchise bit by bit. There's even one or two The X Files figures.

    Licenses that MCX has actually lost to LEGO include Despicable Me/Minions and TMNT. I don't know if the License Road will be more fruitful for LEGO than it was for MCX, but maybe this'll mean some new decent parts sets from MCX eventually. Inventions was brilliant, but it's been gone a long while now.
  • edited 2023-09-02 12:24:52
    There is love everywhere, I already know
  • edited 2023-09-02 12:25:13
    There is love everywhere, I already know
  • edited 2023-09-02 12:25:34
    There is love everywhere, I already know
  • edited 2023-09-02 12:25:56
    There is love everywhere, I already know
  • edited 2023-09-04 04:22:23
    There is love everywhere, I already know
    Due to various circumstances, 2020-Early 2022 was a non-LEGO time for me. This is about all the cool and amazing alt(ernative). bricks I discovered along the way before I became a full-on LEGOid again in late 2022 (right before my favorite line was killed and rebooted, as tends to happen).

    Obviously, my first love, as documented in this thread and elsewhere, was Mega Construx. Mega Construx has a major advantage over LEGO in that it has Barbie as a sub-brand, and I really like Barbie, especially all the different incarnations that Barbie has in the land of MCX. I think I'll discuss those in detail some other time.

    MCX has some other cool brands, which have mostly come and gone. There was once World of Yootz, and currently, Pokemon.

    But today, I want to talk about Enlighten! From what I could gather (well, what they say on the official site, which I don't believe at all), Enlighten (also known as ENLI and Qman, yeah, weird alt. name) was started sometime in the 90s by a toymaker in Hong Kong.

    ENLI exploded onto the international scene when they flooded the non-English speaking European market with LEGO line knockoffs some really cool products such as ENLI CITY (not trying very hard are we?), ENLI Kyanite Squad, ENLI Princess Leah, and ENLI Cherry.

    Obviously, my favorite of these lines was Cherry, which was 100% not a ripoff of LEGO Friends in any way at all.

    PWySkjB.jpg

    Cherry embraced the bright, ridiculous colors of early LEGO Friends, and combined it with insane Chinese designs that I really, really just ended up loving with all my heart. Also; all that pink. Do you see it? This is a level of pink I appreciate.

    Obviously, Cherry sort of had a story, but mainly characters with names, which is as much as I need really.

    2DvYuTG.jpg

    Our red-headed protagonist is obviously called Cherry, and her friends are called Abby (blond), Emily (blue hair), Violet (...guess), Laien (boy with brown hair, not pictured here, and Cherry's presumed boyfriend) and Guys (blond boy, I had trouble placing this guy's name for a long while since I assumed they were saying "guys" in general).

    Cherry was made up of several lines, most notably the 2017 Beach Vacation line this Beach Villa pictured here is from.

    ENLI, unfortunately, was hit by various sales limits after LEGO realized what was happening to their markets, and this 2017 line was the last to be widely distributed in Europe.

    The Cherry lines I know of;
    • Series 1: The Intro-Line, therefore made up of mostly normal sets
    • Series 2: Beach Villa. Most of the Cherry sets I had are from this line.
    • Series 3: Pop-Stars A smaller series due to the series needing to scale down after losing the European market. The mini-dolls also started going weird around here.
    • Series 3: Snowy Valley. A winter themed series.
    • Series 4: Duckling's Journey. This line made no sense to me, why are the Cherries helping a duckling anyways? As you can probably guess, every set was duck-themed, so at least it was cute (if overly yellow).

    It turns out waiting several years before doing this report means tracking down proper pictures of all these lines will be a chore, but I really liked Cherry and I love ENLI in general. Sadly, Cherry is over now, but it was replaced with cooler (and licensed) themes such as Hello Kitty, Naruto, Doraemon, and Evangelion. Actually, all of these are part of the ENLI sub-series Keppley, which I will talk about in detail later.

    Anyways, I'm surprised I could stay calm up till this point, because it turns out Cherry was replaced with a super-super cool new line with articulated dolls called Una! Actually, Una was around when Cherry was around, but it was just a minifigure dress-up line. I always wanted to get a set, but it was hard to without an AliExpress account (which I still don't have).

    enzvRmX.jpg

    The original Una line's second series; Youth Campus. Not sure what was so Youthy about it. These were actually on sale on Amazon in 2-packs under some pseudonym but I'll never find that now.

    However now Una got a serious glam-up and I am absolutely enthralled.

    4XFChZD.jpg

    Sad that the fashion-change element was somewhat abandoned, and I can see that this set is a remake of the Princess Leah Music Box, but I'm really excited for it.

    Obviously, it is now practically impossible to get hold of non-LEGO or non-MCX building sets, aside from Sembo I guess, but by George I am getting myself this new Una and I'm getting it soon.
  • There is love everywhere, I already know
    Apparently, Russia replaced all of it's LEGO stores with "World of Bricks", which I thought would be an own-brand full of LEGO sort-of-knockoffs, but they just sell the typical alt. bricks like Loz (the smaller scale bricks, also known as 'Diamond Bricks'), Pantasy, Mould King and so on.

    It motivated my sense of wanting something that's sort of like the cool thing, but not exactly like the cool popular thing. It reminds me of how basically all non-mainstream toys (ie Hong Kong fakes) nowadays are too terribly made to like.
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