Category:Legoland (toy range)

After launching their first Legoland theme park in Billund, Denmark in 1968, Lego decided to capitalise on the new branding with a new "Legoland" range (1969-) to replace the existing Lego Town Plan range.

What stayed the same

Lego retained the same basic concept of the Town Plan, that users would want to create not just individual buildings but complete town scenes, and not just individual cars but road traffic. The obvious advantage of this approach was that rather than construct a building and wonder what to do with it, and then disassemble to it construct a different building, in order to be able to have several buildings, previous models would need to stay intact ... and the user would need to buy a whole load more Lego.

Rather than be a system where the owners built one thing at a time, and then took it apart to make the next model, the town concept encouraged users to be collectors, and to build up collections of models for display.

The Legoland connection

After visitors to Legoland had experienced an immersive world made completely out of Lego, they could be encouraged to go home and build a Lego-based world of their own ... as long as they purchased enough Lego to be able to do it.

What changed

Vehicle scale - Miniwheels

Compared to the Town Plan scale of 1:87 (model railway HO), the new system was scaled around vehicles made with a new brick, number 3137 introduced in 1969. This was a 2×2 brick with a pair of little axles that let one fit a pair of tiny red one-stud wheels with tyres. Brick 3137 revolutionised the scale of small Lego vehicles. Most vehicles using the existing wheel system had used a 4×2 axle-block sideways, so that the final model was at least six studs wide, including the wheels. The new wheel system allowed cars and lorries that were now only four studs wide including the wheels, and still managed to look good.

The dedicated one-piece bodyshell plastic 1:87 cars were now withdrawn.

The new vehicles were a defining feature of the new system: of the first three sets, released in 1969 (344 "Bungalow", 345 "House with Mini Wheel Car", 346 "House with Car"), all three had green baseplates and two had the new cars. In 1970, of the ~thirteen sets released, eleven were vehicles, one was a promotional castle and one was a fire station with vehicles. In 1971 of about 28 sets released, two-thirds of the sets consisted purely of miniwheel road vehicles, and some of the remaining sets included a garage and a service station.

Road scale

The size of roads was now more fluid. The slightly inflexible smooth Town Plan fixed layout board was now discontinued, and some sets included their own little "islands" consisting of a thin plastic studded baseplate. How far apart one spaced them was up to the user.

Figures

Legoland acquired figures that were approximately to scale with the four-stud vehicles. The new Legoland figures consisted of a blank version of what later became a minifigure head, with a hat, attached to a two-piece unjointed "pillar" body.

1975: Examples of the new Legoland figures, and vehicles using Microwheels, 659 "Police Patrol" set

These started to be phased in from 1975, with sets such as 362 Windmill, 363 Hospital with Figures, 364 Harbour Scene, 365 Wild West Scene, and 615 Fork Lift with Driver.

Branding

As well as often featuring a large "LEGOLAND" logo on the box packaging, models of commercial vehicles often included a 4×1 brick with the LEGOLAND logo on the side, to produce a Legoland truck, or Legoland airliner, or Legoland kiosk.

1973: Sud Aviation "Caravelle" airliner with Microwheels, Legoland set 687

However, other than these obvious explicit examples, use of the Legoland logo on packaging and leaflets was often inconsistent (verging on capricious), and often seemed to depend on whether or not the box designer had a free bit of space that they wanted to use up. With hindisght was can impose order fo the range by sayign that the Legoland range were scaled to work together, to go with four-stud-wide vehicles that used the new mini-wheels. But there are miniwheels form the period that con't carry the Legoland logo, and also the occasional ut-of-scale model that is counted as Legoland, the classic example being the hugely overscale Double Decker Bus, which used standard train wheels fitted with tyres (to get a spoked-wheel effect).

One also has to remember that sets would have been sold at Legoland outlets, and that since Lego didn't seem to ever quite explain what the Legoland brand was supposed to represent (other than Lego), Legoland branding would have been useful way of selling sets with larger boxes, even if they were dramatically off-scale with respect ot the other contemporary sets.

External links

• Legoland range (bricklink.com)