A bunch of these were in my family's "Lego bin" as a kid. My mom had them as a kid and held on to them :) Unfortunately some of the pieces are now broken because as a small child I literally ate them. But if I ever have kids they'll get to eat them too!
0:36 It's interesting that the babies in the maxifigures era look EXACTLY like the minifigures we'd see a few years later, including the arms, and heads with printed faces! Not sure if it came before or after the 1978 minifigs, though
The last run of homemaker sets (as well as the people/family theme), the ones that show a regular minifig as a baby/toddler, ran from 1979 to 1982. So the minifig as we know it had already debuted.
The Pinocchio minifig head being separate from his hair is one of Lego's greatest ideas. Now ANY minifigure can be cursed with the simple addition of nose!
I remember my brothers and I would get so frustrated when they started straying from the classic yellow figures. We loved mixing, matching and swapping parts. Having your character have one random beige hand was the most frustrating thing 5 year old me had gone through 😂
The first non yellow skintone released by Lego was in 1977's set 215 Red Indians containing 1 red minifig (armless and faceless) and 4 red maxifigs with printed faces.
Technically, the maxifigures did not have a limit on height. Even though you get photos and instructions to suggest scale, they were still just a head and arms. The rest of the body was normal bricks. Which means they could be as tall as you wanted them to be. ;) Also note that their arms make an appearance in many Lego space kits as mechanical arms.
not only Space. They also get a last outing (even with a few new molds) in Aquazone more than 20 years after their initial release - but then where quickly phased out.
I was born in the 80s and my sister in the 70s. I inherited the few lego sets she had. No instructions, I think maybe they weren't full sets? But I still have one or two of those old figures. And the original solid mini fig bodies. Unfortunately they're mixed up with aaaalllllll the other lego I have. That's a project for another time. Super nostalgic video.
Homemaker heads do not have "Technic pins" on the bottom. It's a totally unique connection that's technically supposed to be permanent. Source: I have one.
well, 1980s black Technic pins can sometimes be quite permanent as well - but nothing beats Bionicle brains (are those even supposed to ever be removed?).
@@kailahmann1823 It didn't occur to me back then that there are "non-removable" Lego pieces and used my teeth on them. But the Toa Mata brains were a bit difficult to pull out.
Who else remembers first getting the heads with choke holes in them and having fun trying to whistle through them? Ironically I was probably more likely to choke doing than lol
Okay, hold on. Point of order here. The 2000s were absolutely not the first time Lego printed alt color heads. From the skeletons in white to the droids and aliens in the 90s, alt color heads were all over the place. They just weren't used for human skin tones.
Minifig Jar Jar: "Meesa is a good figure, but meesa be tinkin', why everyone be saying that meesa is bombad?" Minifig blue Avatar: "You think YOU have it rough?"
OMG...... set 363 at 2:10... first time I've seen this since probably a year or so after I had it!!!! I'd completely forgotten about this style of minifigure!!! 😲🤯 This nostalgia is hitting hard.... 🥺
The name "technic" may well have been from 1982 but they had "Technical Set" as a designation before that. I somehow managed to coerce my grandma to buy be 853 car chassis [1977] when I was 8. Back then it was more than 50% regular Lego with lots of technical pieces added. 853 had steering, 4 cylinder engine, gear box (hi/low) adjustable seats and even a differential on the back axle. The advantage of the old technical sets is that they are much easier to customize even for younger kids. I had no problem at 8 modifying my Technic sets.. I don't think I would have been able to do that very well with the modern Technic sets.
Yeah, as a kid my first introduction to Technic was my dad's old "Expert Builder" (as Technic was called before 1982) sets which he passed down to me. Since they were basically regular LEGO with holes, it was easy to start building with them. While modern Technic is much more versatile and arguably better, it is harder to learn how to build effectively with it. I think there's definitely room in the LEGO lineup nowadays for some more functional Creator sets with gears and pins and beams - after all, LEGO still makes all those old-style Technic parts. They make a nice introduction to more advanced modern Technic stuff.
True, but the video was focused on the history of minifigures, so it makes sense to pinpont the debut of the Technic line for the introduction of the new figures.
Great video but the titles of your videos are always inexact or misleading. I guarantee that if this video was named "History of lego figures" you would get more views.
Funny how two people in different generations named Jens helped take the world by storm involving building things for fun, one in a physical manner, one digital.
LEGO needs to make a "Museum of Minifigure History" set that brings back all the old figure designs. There was that one set, who's name I don't know, where the original minifigure pieces were used to create a "Town Founder" statue so it's not out of the question. If I had an infinite supply of every brick ever made and enough time and interest to build my own LEGO city, I would use the old non articulated figures as the oldest citizens, and maybe have the first LEGO people be these legendary giants or something. I find it funny how those old figures had wheelchairs right away but it took decades for the current style to get one.
coincidentally i also thought of this idea but i also thought of an archeological dig of a home maker house with one of the mini figures being frightened by the giant skeleton
Gonna be honest with LEGO, they need to bring back the air holes. I find the post 2010 heads to cause air trapping the stud on the neck post, holed heads felt like it solved that problem.
I had one set with one original armless minifigure and one set with three maxifigures. I put most of the maxifigure arm pieces together to make a manipulator arm for spacecraft and their hands became "lights", switch levers, "laser emitters" and whatever else I imagined them to be.
Wow, I'm kind of surprised these already used those flexible/bending parts for arms. I remember getting introduced to those with some of the space sets having them e.g. for robot arms. Also kind of surprised they had different printed faces. I thought that was something new early 90's.
Honestly looking back i like the yellow skinned star wars figures better than the current ones... except maybe aliens i think all lego humans should have yellow skin.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Fabuland's characters. I had a few of those, and they were very... interesting compared to normal figures. My favorite were the cats.
I had a few Maxifigures when I was a kid in the later seventies and the early eighties but the arms wore out quickly. I had no vehicles for them (unless a kid had a large number of LEGO) and the minifigures were more fun. Within just one Christmas or birthday, a person could have a small community of LEGO, with people, vehicles, etc. All of it also took up very little room in a toy chest. Similar to having a huge number of Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars, so many toys in a small space.😂
I think I still have some of these in the big box of lego in my parents attic. I used to love how posable they were when I was a kid. They were my mums originally
Same for me, and the arms were the best part, because you could make them really long and articulated, so they make great arms and legs for robots and truck-sized walker type vehicles for minifigs to pilot. I used to think those are really old Lego Technics people, because how obviously not to scale they were for normal Lego sets, and about the size of a modern Technics man.
Woah looking at that color of Lego bricks chart is really cool. It looks like 2005 had the most colors to work with. I wonder which ones we're missing today!
Sand red, sand purple, neon-trans-orange, neon-trans-yellow, what else am I missing? (If you say that neon-trans-yellow is still in use, that's neon-trans-green)
2:56 I actually had set 600 as one of my first sets, I think it must have been an old set even back then, but iirc I got it in a box. I don’t know where I have the car these days (Probably dismantled), but I think I saw the cop lying around recently.
In the 70s, Lego had basically the colours red, yellow, blue, white, and black. Green was only for baseplates and vegetation, and light and dark grey came later.
I had a ghost that consisted of a completely bwhite minifig with a blank black headand a glow in the dark ghost robe worn like Lego hair. It was from a time machine Lego set that had this gothy vehicle with a swirly tank and skulls that bobbed up and down. That set had a lot of cool pieces. A swirly spiral dome, nice blue cones with a hole that could be some kind of spaceship nozzles, an airplane wheel, bat wings, coins, trumpets, a clear round fishtank, a fan and a round dome canopy. I really liked it and all the other Time Twisters that I didn't have, both for what it was and for how many other uses its components had. Very Tim Burton-esque, and reminded me of the Batman movies with Michael Keaton as Batman, plus the obvious coolness of time travel.
Just noticed about the maxi figures, the baby is literally just a normal lego minifig so im just imagining a horrified adult male lego guy surrounded by giant mutants made from the bricks that compose his buildings
I never bought the idea that yellow was "universal". It seems obvious that it was picked because it was the closest to a pale skin tone out of their existing colors. The fact that they gave Lando a different color while still using yellow for the rest of the star wars characters more or less proves this. If it was truly universal, they would have made a yellow Lando. I don't have an issue with them using yellow since it's classic and iconic and they don't want to use realistic tones for their sets, but claiming it was for some altruistic reason seems weird.
Exactly. More like it was close enough to both white and Asian skin colours as not to warrant actually having separate plastic colours just for making hands and heads. There is plenty of yellow and brown bricks that aren't people parts, so that is a good cost-cutting measure. Properly white would be way too white to be a human white colour except some rare cases, like vampires, extremely pale people, geishas, clowns and other people with powdered makeup. Yellow just looks more natural and lively.
Before they started making articulated joints and hinges, the family figure arms were the way to make them. I used to use the pieces of several arms to make a long robot arm.
Press F to pay respects to Maxifigures 👇
f
F
F
F
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My gran still has the set "family" from when my dad was a kid, crazy to see how it's changed
Dam
Also have that. Loved that as a child because you can be very creative with them
Is this jperm
A bunch of these were in my family's "Lego bin" as a kid. My mom had them as a kid and held on to them :)
Unfortunately some of the pieces are now broken because as a small child I literally ate them. But if I ever have kids they'll get to eat them too!
@@ENCHANTMEN_oh. YOU'RE the kid which that one warning was about.
0:36 It's interesting that the babies in the maxifigures era look EXACTLY like the minifigures we'd see a few years later, including the arms, and heads with printed faces! Not sure if it came before or after the 1978 minifigs, though
The last run of homemaker sets (as well as the people/family theme), the ones that show a regular minifig as a baby/toddler, ran from 1979 to 1982. So the minifig as we know it had already debuted.
1:42
LEGO
The Pinocchio minifig head being separate from his hair is one of Lego's greatest ideas. Now ANY minifigure can be cursed with the simple addition of nose!
0:38 Seeing a minifig being held like a baby by a larger figure is weirdly surreal and kinda cursed
My dad used to have all the old lego sets.... And it's crazy to find the different pieces that evolved into today's lego.
I remember my brothers and I would get so frustrated when they started straying from the classic yellow figures. We loved mixing, matching and swapping parts. Having your character have one random beige hand was the most frustrating thing 5 year old me had gone through 😂
Lego should acknowledge them in-universe as the equivalent of the ancient giants conspiracy.
The first non yellow skintone released by Lego was in 1977's set 215 Red Indians containing 1 red minifig (armless and faceless) and 4 red maxifigs with printed faces.
Technically, the maxifigures did not have a limit on height. Even though you get photos and instructions to suggest scale, they were still just a head and arms. The rest of the body was normal bricks. Which means they could be as tall as you wanted them to be. ;)
Also note that their arms make an appearance in many Lego space kits as mechanical arms.
not only Space. They also get a last outing (even with a few new molds) in Aquazone more than 20 years after their initial release - but then where quickly phased out.
'physical, tangible proboscis' are three words I never thought I'd hear uttered without someone cracking up, bravo Spit. 👏
is that seriously his name😭
@@doctorelijah It's the name of he uses here, so why would I call him anything else?
@@JakeCWolf idk i just feel like itd be better to say spitbrix instead of just spit
I was born in the 80s and my sister in the 70s. I inherited the few lego sets she had. No instructions, I think maybe they weren't full sets?
But I still have one or two of those old figures. And the original solid mini fig bodies.
Unfortunately they're mixed up with aaaalllllll the other lego I have. That's a project for another time.
Super nostalgic video.
Homemaker heads do not have "Technic pins" on the bottom. It's a totally unique connection that's technically supposed to be permanent. Source: I have one.
well, 1980s black Technic pins can sometimes be quite permanent as well - but nothing beats Bionicle brains (are those even supposed to ever be removed?).
The bionicle brains were cool because you can shine a flashlight through them and the eyes lit up 🤩
@@kailahmann1823as a kid I used to ask my dad to remove those with a electrician's screwdriver, luckily no parts broke
@@kailahmann1823 It didn't occur to me back then that there are "non-removable" Lego pieces and used my teeth on them. But the Toa Mata brains were a bit difficult to pull out.
“Source: bro trust me”
Fun fact: yellow/black actually has higher contrast than white/black.
I'm glad that the shoulder/arm parts of the Maxifigures had a long afterlife as armatures for space sets.
Yes I remember that we had some of those unprinted heads of mid 70s and used some water soluble inks to draw faces to them.
Who else remembers first getting the heads with choke holes in them and having fun trying to whistle through them? Ironically I was probably more likely to choke doing than lol
Maybe that's why the holes are gone again. If you make a new set of Lego-spec molds it costs a lot of money, so there must be a reason to do it.
Pen caps with holes is for the pressure difference in flying.
I like using the blank minifigures' white torsos for my psych ward patients.
0:40 wait a second so the regular Minifigs were just dolls for the MaxiFigs
Another banger by Spitbrix!
Okay, hold on. Point of order here.
The 2000s were absolutely not the first time Lego printed alt color heads. From the skeletons in white to the droids and aliens in the 90s, alt color heads were all over the place. They just weren't used for human skin tones.
Minifig Jar Jar: "Meesa is a good figure, but meesa be tinkin', why everyone be saying that meesa is bombad?"
Minifig blue Avatar: "You think YOU have it rough?"
OMG...... set 363 at 2:10... first time I've seen this since probably a year or so after I had it!!!! I'd completely forgotten about this style of minifigure!!! 😲🤯
This nostalgia is hitting hard.... 🥺
Lego should bring back their old sets in some way
Yes they should me sad 😢 now
This misses atleast 3 OLD versions of "people" figures. Fabuland (1979-1989), Belville (1994-2008) and Scala (1997-2001)
Yeah, I'm sad that SpitBrix skipped past Fabuland, that was a wonderful line, reminiscent of Richard Scarry illustrations.
The 1975 minifig has immobile arms attached to the body. Stubs, basically.
Fun fact: the faceless legoheads are still used to this day
The name "technic" may well have been from 1982 but they had "Technical Set" as a designation before that. I somehow managed to coerce my grandma to buy be 853 car chassis [1977] when I was 8. Back then it was more than 50% regular Lego with lots of technical pieces added. 853 had steering, 4 cylinder engine, gear box (hi/low) adjustable seats and even a differential on the back axle.
The advantage of the old technical sets is that they are much easier to customize even for younger kids. I had no problem at 8 modifying my Technic sets.. I don't think I would have been able to do that very well with the modern Technic sets.
Yeah, as a kid my first introduction to Technic was my dad's old "Expert Builder" (as Technic was called before 1982) sets which he passed down to me. Since they were basically regular LEGO with holes, it was easy to start building with them. While modern Technic is much more versatile and arguably better, it is harder to learn how to build effectively with it. I think there's definitely room in the LEGO lineup nowadays for some more functional Creator sets with gears and pins and beams - after all, LEGO still makes all those old-style Technic parts. They make a nice introduction to more advanced modern Technic stuff.
True, but the video was focused on the history of minifigures, so it makes sense to pinpont the debut of the Technic line for the introduction of the new figures.
So many recognizable sets, a lot of them in storage... Need to get them back in the house
Great video but the titles of your videos are always inexact or misleading. I guarantee that if this video was named "History of lego figures" you would get more views.
real
agree. all you're doing is annoying your audience.
Honestly cus I did NOT think this was gonna be the topic of the video 😭
Yeh
Agree 100%
I have some of those maxifigure heads with their arms. My grandma had some of those old sets i guess.
In the early sets you showed are standard Lego figures included as kids/ babies, clearly visible in sets like 269
Funny how two people in different generations named Jens helped take the world by storm involving building things for fun, one in a physical manner, one digital.
LEGO needs to make a "Museum of Minifigure History" set that brings back all the old figure designs. There was that one set, who's name I don't know, where the original minifigure pieces were used to create a "Town Founder" statue so it's not out of the question. If I had an infinite supply of every brick ever made and enough time and interest to build my own LEGO city, I would use the old non articulated figures as the oldest citizens, and maybe have the first LEGO people be these legendary giants or something. I find it funny how those old figures had wheelchairs right away but it took decades for the current style to get one.
coincidentally i also thought of this idea but i also thought of an archeological dig of a home maker house with one of the mini figures being frightened by the giant skeleton
Gonna be honest with LEGO, they need to bring back the air holes. I find the post 2010 heads to cause air trapping the stud on the neck post, holed heads felt like it solved that problem.
I don't have problem with some of mine
Thank you for the upload. I enjoy watching your videos and look forward to new ones.
I had one set with one original armless minifigure and one set with three maxifigures. I put most of the maxifigure arm pieces together to make a manipulator arm for spacecraft and their hands became "lights", switch levers, "laser emitters" and whatever else I imagined them to be.
Pinokio 😂😂😂 damn that scared the hell out of me
Wow, I'm kind of surprised these already used those flexible/bending parts for arms. I remember getting introduced to those with some of the space sets having them e.g. for robot arms. Also kind of surprised they had different printed faces. I thought that was something new early 90's.
i actually saw the owner of a local resale lego store unpacking a couple of that captain red beard tribute… won’t go on sale til next week though
50 years ago, Maxifigures were released
Maxifigures walked so lego could run
I still have some of those maxifigure heads and arms somewhere 😁
We don't talk about the LEGO technic figures.
Strange that they had maxifigures and minifigures at the same time lol.
6:01 bro i love these they look 🔥
Honestly looking back i like the yellow skinned star wars figures better than the current ones... except maybe aliens i think all lego humans
should have yellow skin.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Fabuland's characters. I had a few of those, and they were very... interesting compared to normal figures. My favorite were the cats.
Am I misremembering, or was there a set with the large family figures that had a minifigure as their baby?
Nope; he showed it at 0:38
Timmy wasn't the first standard minifig with freckles... they go back at least as far as '92.
Oh my god why am I just now learning I had original 1970s maxifigures as a kid....
Was I the only one that notice that in family Lego sets. The modern day Lego figures are used as baby's?
0:36 look at the babies!
I was nine when Pirates came out. It was so cool to have variety in minifig faces.
I had a few Maxifigures when I was a kid in the later seventies and the early eighties but the arms wore out quickly. I had no vehicles for them (unless a kid had a large number of LEGO) and the minifigures were more fun. Within just one Christmas or birthday, a person could have a small community of LEGO, with people, vehicles, etc. All of it also took up very little room in a toy chest. Similar to having a huge number of Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars, so many toys in a small space.😂
You missed an opportunity to point out that the CHILD in that 268 'maxifig' set was a regular minifig...
I’m kinda sad to see the lack of the Jack Stone line here
I think I still have some of these in the big box of lego in my parents attic. I used to love how posable they were when I was a kid. They were my mums originally
I remember playing with those strangely round heads when i was a child that i found in a lego box from my house
Same for me, and the arms were the best part, because you could make them really long and articulated, so they make great arms and legs for robots and truck-sized walker type vehicles for minifigs to pilot. I used to think those are really old Lego Technics people, because how obviously not to scale they were for normal Lego sets, and about the size of a modern Technics man.
"...it's safe to say that they kind of missed the mark"
-> shows a minifig that doesn't look bad or wrong in any way.
Great video! I love seeing all that vintage LEGO.
i still have some starwars sets from when they were making them in yellow skin tones
Woah looking at that color of Lego bricks chart is really cool. It looks like 2005 had the most colors to work with. I wonder which ones we're missing today!
Sand red, sand purple, neon-trans-orange, neon-trans-yellow, what else am I missing? (If you say that neon-trans-yellow is still in use, that's neon-trans-green)
@@funni_moksi69royal blue, pearl light gray, trans-medium blue, old purple and all the chrome- and speckle colors.
1:38 Modern minifigs are *4* bricks tall 🙂
3:25 my grandpa has the ambulance from this era(he was a paramedic).
I wouldn't really classify the neck peg as a technic connection, as it predates the theme and is of another diameter.
Never thought about why they're yellow. I'm not big on Lego anymore but this was really cool to watch.
2:56 I actually had set 600 as one of my first sets, I think it must have been an old set even back then, but iirc I got it in a box. I don’t know where I have the car these days (Probably dismantled), but I think I saw the cop lying around recently.
My grandparents have one of those 1974 legos in their house, the box is there in one piece
I remember the Family set. They were kinda cool to play with at the time.
In the 70s, Lego had basically the colours red, yellow, blue, white, and black. Green was only for baseplates and vegetation, and light and dark grey came later.
Imagine if using that unprinted minifigs as mannequins
I stilk have a ton of my Dad's adventure and 90s Lego City line figures, and it's cool too see them talked about
Those NBA player faces are grotesque...like when someone turns their head upside down and draws eyes on their chin
There was also a glow in the dark blank head and robe for the ghost minifigure
I had a ghost that consisted of a completely bwhite minifig with a blank black headand a glow in the dark ghost robe worn like Lego hair. It was from a time machine Lego set that had this gothy vehicle with a swirly tank and skulls that bobbed up and down. That set had a lot of cool pieces. A swirly spiral dome, nice blue cones with a hole that could be some kind of spaceship nozzles, an airplane wheel, bat wings, coins, trumpets, a clear round fishtank, a fan and a round dome canopy. I really liked it and all the other Time Twisters that I didn't have, both for what it was and for how many other uses its components had. Very Tim Burton-esque, and reminded me of the Batman movies with Michael Keaton as Batman, plus the obvious coolness of time travel.
Kinda was expecting to hear from the double color arms and legs that we got not that long ago
Love your vids man 😊
Lego said that they would not put noses on minifigures but most of the minifigures in the video had 😮
LEGO will NEVER be the same *the ship is in the harbor now see if you can spot him*
5:07 that’s a ball all right
Just noticed about the maxi figures, the baby is literally just a normal lego minifig so im just imagining a horrified adult male lego guy surrounded by giant mutants made from the bricks that compose his buildings
"Jar Jar is the key to all of this"
-George Lucas
I never bought the idea that yellow was "universal". It seems obvious that it was picked because it was the closest to a pale skin tone out of their existing colors.
The fact that they gave Lando a different color while still using yellow for the rest of the star wars characters more or less proves this. If it was truly universal, they would have made a yellow Lando.
I don't have an issue with them using yellow since it's classic and iconic and they don't want to use realistic tones for their sets, but claiming it was for some altruistic reason seems weird.
Exactly. More like it was close enough to both white and Asian skin colours as not to warrant actually having separate plastic colours just for making hands and heads. There is plenty of yellow and brown bricks that aren't people parts, so that is a good cost-cutting measure. Properly white would be way too white to be a human white colour except some rare cases, like vampires, extremely pale people, geishas, clowns and other people with powdered makeup. Yellow just looks more natural and lively.
Yeah, seems more like a kludge that got claimed as a marketing angle later
Before they started making articulated joints and hinges, the family figure arms were the way to make them. I used to use the pieces of several arms to make a long robot arm.
Oooh new vid, cool
8:40 im still greatful for lego making this decision. Im just happy that i live....
Imagine if the daily bugle build was massively expensive. Thankfully it's only $450.
10:30 what is that minifigure on the right from, that is a lego city police badge but i don't recognice the uniform
Those NBA minifigures have horrifying faces.
More amazing history and it is still being made today for Lego.
Holy crap... I have that set 😊 and still have the packaging/box it came in!!! 🤘
My dad was watching and he used to play with the 1970s sets
0:35 they already had a minifigure stand in as a baby for maxifigures
Interesting video!
What about the LEGO Friends minifigures???
My therapist: "Lego Jesus is not real, he can't hurt you"
Lego Jesus: 6:22
The guy in the family set looks like he can moonwalk
Those minifigures are kinda cool!
0:35 Is that the minifigure head piece used as the bottom of the coffee pot before it was used as a head?
Long live our minifigs 🤗🥳🎉
Rip to all the mini figures that have been consumed by Toddlers, Dogs, and Vaccum Cleaners 🫡