Not Quite A Megazord
I love Mecha, that’s no secret. I love seeing giant robots and machines in reality, I love to see them in movies and anime, and read about them in books and comics. I still enjoy Transformers and Sentai, and can be talked in to watching Power Rangers fairly easily. The image of Dai-X from Starfleet gives me a nostalgic thrill, while Megas violating a parody of the Voltron lions makes me feel tingly inside.
When I first saw LEGO Exo-Force advertised on TV a couple of years back, my first reaction wasn’t a “whoa” or even a gentle coo-ing sound, it was more along the lines of screaming to my brother to look at the screen and listen to my mid-twenties self declaring my immense lust to own these construction toys being shown during cartoons. If I’d had a bowl of highly sugared, brightly coloured cereal floating in several pints of ice cold milk, then the scene would have been set. So, just mentally add those in. Give me cool hair too, I’d like cool hair.
Exo-Force is a ‘humans with mecha versus robots with mecha’ saga. No, I don’t know why the robots couldn’t just build giant mecha with AI rather than piloting them, I’m guessing robots suck at coding. There are a whole heap of mecha to choose from, ranging in price and assembly difficulty, and there’s ongoing stories at the LEGO website about the range and their little conflicts.
Japanese influence is apparent, with characters given names with Japanese meanings and location names. They even name the location of the humans base Sentai (with an a S) Mountain.
After Christmas 2006, I bought myself a LEGO Exo-Force Striking Venom, the thing was huge. So large in fact that within 12 hours of it being constructed – and it had taken me five or six to build the damn thing – I had to take it apart for lack of room. Last Christmas, ‘Santa’ left me another Exo-Force, this time a more manageable size. The ‘Cyclone Defender’ (8100).
It’s a pretty neat model, one of the smallest in the range and pretty basic, but it has some nice touches like the moving digits on the hand and the twirling motion of the ‘bladed defense shield’. Though, I have to wonder why they chose to use katanas for blades and the point of the ‘variable-pulse blaster’. I also think it was great value for money, being under £5 when I got it…um, when Santa got it for me.
Click on thumbnails for full images.
Now, I know that I’ve been a bit lax in posting recently, so for the next few days I’m going to do something special. Seeing as I love X-Entertainment and Irregular Webcomic, and in the spirit of sportsmanship and fair play (play or plagiarism, not sure), I thought I’d use a nice little pictorial adventure for construction of the Cyclone Defender. Stay tuned this week for build details.
Some of you may enjoy the episode titles too.
Ah Legos, I have a few from this series too. I couldn’t tell you the names of them but one’s a big orange tank thing and the others a mecha as well. It’s red and has the angry looking pilot guy as well. Can’t wait for the new entries!
Dan, I’ve always loved LEGO sets, from that first real Christmas from memory when I got the fire station and spent ages ‘helping’ my dad to build it, all through the many ranges, it really was about time mecha came out properly as opposed to the crappy robots I built from it. Best thing about the Exo-Force range is that they actually worked out designs on their site for how you can make other mecha by combining kits.
I love Legos as well, sad thing is I didn’t get my first “official” set till I was in my mid-twenties. I was inthe hospital after surgery and a friend of mine bought me the speeder bike set from Star Wars. Needless to say I’ve been hooked since.
I really want a speeder bike from Lego, the 80s toy of the speeder bike was one of my favourites of the vehicle toys (though, I think I loved the AT-ST or snowspeeder more) and I’ve always loved the scout trooper armour (it was my tie-first armour with the Royal Emperors Guard).
I saw the Clone Wars version in Lego today, which has two seats on it, one facing forward the other backwards. It was next to the droid STAP unit, which ranks up pretty high with me because it reminds me of Serpentors air chariot.
I find it a shame that Lego stopped doing the old style figure packs for theme ranges too, like they used to do with the Pirates, Space and Castle ranges. I’d love a pack of Star Wars droids, Imperials or a dozen Scarecrows from the Batman range. I’d have so much fun with Scarecrows.
I’m still saving for the Millenium Falcon set, one of these days it will be mine!! I haven’t seen many of the Clone Wars sets but I haven’t been to a Toys R Us lately either.
I’m with you, I’d love to buy a pack of Stormtroopers/Droids. Oh the battles I could have with them. I haven’t bought any of the Batman sets yet either but those and the Indiana Jones sets are on my list as well.
I want a Kuse and Knacks, but that’s just me. My Cher is lonely. -_-
Oddly enough if I actually dug out all my Lego sets I could totally put Knacks and Kuse together. Maybe one of these days I’ll actually do that.
T_T Do you have the gray head for Kuse? And lord knows I want the little lever thing Knacks has on his head. XD I DO have a James Lipton from last year’s advent calendar ( think they were right; they’re the same sets every year).
Yeah the head for Kuse is from Darth Vader and the lever thing is in quite a few of the sets. I have some extras from the Endor Control Room set I bought years back. I need to find me a James Lipton though, if nothing else because I have Lego flames that I can attach to his hands! XD
In case you want the part number details for an online trader: Right Here.
I love that site.
The Advent Calendar has James, but you have to take the airliner guy’s body and put it w/ James’ head (they don’t come on the same body for my set). I still want my own HU.