As promised, here’s a post about old Lego Catalogues/Brochures/Flyers/whatever you want to call them.
For reference, the website Brickset has a whole collection of scanned catalogues, complete with a little Javascript-based interface that lets you flick through them. If you’re interested in this subject, I suggest you head over there and take a look at what they have on offer.
I Loved Lego Catalogues
I loved them for a lot of reasons. They let me know what sets were in a given collection, which help in figuring out which ones I wanted, as well as which ones I had a reasonable chance of getting.
The Catalogues also sparked my imagination. As you can see, many pages contained little scenes and dioramas showing some of the sets in “action”. Whoever staged these scenes was very good at their job. The lighting, the backdrops, and the staging of the sets themselves all worked together to create a “vibe” that was unique to each product line.
When I played with, say, Space Lego sets, my minifigures from Ice Planet had different personalities, motivations, etc than those from Blacktron or Exploriens (and their vehicles all served wildly different purposes). Maybe some of that came from my imagination, but the seeds were planted by these brochures.
I Hated Lego Catalgoues
Well, not really. I don’t think I actually hated them at the time, but they did generate some amount of negative emotions.
For example, seeing all the sets in a given product line was useful, but it also made me feel a little hopeless, knowing there was no chance I’d ever have them all.
Similarly, while the dioramas inspired me, they also felt a little misleading. Even if you did have all the sets, no kid was going to be able to recreate those backdrops or lighting. You could recreate these scenes in your mind, but never in real life.
No More Need
There’s really no need for these kinds of catalogues anymore. For one, Lego isn’t really big on making original, standalone product lines like they used to, instead preferring to make sets based on lots and lots of licensed properties. And since most big licenses never really die, the product line for any given property never really stops. You can’t print out all the Star Wars sets in 2-4 pages of a brochure.
Second, modern Lego (the company, not the product) is seemingly much more interested in making big, splashy, individual sets, and hyping them up on social media. This Catalogue format runs counter to that approach.
In other words, they’re a relic of the past, a time when Lego’s business model and communication channels were different, for better or worse.