The Divergent Timeline of Lego: Space

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Friday Mini-Feature: Space Lego of the 80s (and late 70s).

Also known as the best Lego ever made.

Lego’s Space line was obviously, my favorite Lego line. I had sets from the 80s to nearly the 90s.

Looking back at it now, it’s initial striking how mundane and rooted in actual space exploration technology some of the sets were.Things got weirder pretty quickly, though.

The early sets were nearly identical to NASA sketches.

That’s a Saturn-V rocket, the kind used in the Apollo program. 

This little one-man golf cart is an Apollo moon rover.

The characters looked positively friendly. Like once they came back to Earth they might visit your school and shake your hand.

The color scheme and blocky, practical vehicle construction were straight out of NASA’s (non)design book. The minifigs even had boring-ass white spacesuits. Realism was important at this stage.

At some point in my childhood, someone at Lego made the terrific choice to give some of the astronauts colored spacesuits. There were red, yellow, and black-suited characters alongside the early NASA whites.

This all seemed perfectly normal and totally realistic to me. I kind of figured we had colorful spacesuits anyway. And of course the color of your spacesuit meant something! That seemed obvious to me. Maybe the various colors indicated ranks or job classifications.

I decided that the colors signified allegiances. The red guys were obviously the Russians.

 

It probably helped that thee Space figurines were always hauling ICBMS around. These guys were the frontline of the nuclear arms race. 

The whites were NASA. The yellows were…well, I didn’t know who the yellows were, so they were neutral. Sometimes they were mercenaries or medics. And the black-suited guys were the badasses. They were the rebels who didn’t follow anybody but were still on our side.

Eventually, things began to diverge from realism. Lego put the Space Shuttle in their City/Town line instead of in Space.  City wasn’t “realistic,” it was “real”. If the Shuttle was in City, that meant that Lego equivalent to the NASA space program was “real”.

And there could be only one “real” world.

Which meant…

Lego Space was no longer real. 

To confirm my supposition, things started to get fantastical.

 

The new Space sets were colored with comforting grays and blues.

It was over-the-top, but it felt pretty logical and predictive. Like these sets were scenes from our future and we just had to get there.

I had this set, which was called something like the “Robot Command Center”.

It’s a multistory robot headquarters with satellite dishes for ears, functional storage containers on the sides of its head, and tentacles coming out of its knees.

Although it sounds weird, it was accompanied by a NASA-style moon rover and single-person spaceship, and by a satellite rocket straight out of the Saturn line. It didn’t feel weird.

Somehow I figured this was where space travel was going - where we were going. It felt predictive.

At some point, thought, something happened in the Lego Space universe. We made contact with a new civilization or found a new energy source. Something happened to radically change Lego Space. The equivalent of “Lego First Contact”.

The timelines diverged.

Practically, this was reflected by the Blacktron line of Lego Space.

Blacktron was an entire civilization of badass rebels, with sleek, black ships that seemed to be from another part of the universe.

Almost every brick was black. Those bricks that weren’t black were a neon-y yellow or were translucent.

Lego brought in new pieces, like the 8-stud extension to that cockpit. (We’ll get to the minifig in a second.)

And realism was totally out the window. The new ships included asymmetrical beasts that, to me, were clearly designed only for deep space flight.

 

Anything could happen within this timeline.

What were those mobile red tailfins for? Tacking against an intergalactic wind? That tent-like area in the shaft was storage capacity. Even though Blacktron was new and strange, it all seemed logical to me. Of course this ship needed storage capacity, since it was a deep-space mining vessel. It was all very obvious.

Even the bases got wild. The sturdy Earth-like huts and structures were replaced by gigantic octagonal facilities with huge swaths of glass and giant areas open to space. In my mind this was further indication of Blacktron’s advanced technology: Of course they had some sort of invisible forcefield to keep the atmosphere in their base. How else would those guys be able to open up their faceplates?

Coincidentally, Blacktron came out around the time I got my first pair of glasses, which was devastating to me as I had decided I wanted to be a pilot in the first grade. I knew that you had to have 20/20 vision to be a fighter pilot. I didn’t cry, but I was pretty crushed.

But with Blacktron, I didn’t care. Blacktron let me go totally nuts.  I completely stopped giving a shit about the space program, the Air Force, or any earth technologies. Who the cared about fighter jets when you could make ships like this?

Blacktron was my own sci-fi universe in which I could make anyone do anything, as long as it made sense to me. I wasn’t interested in looks in my Lego creations. Everything was there for a reason. I made functional ships and vessels based on technologies that I understood. It all fit together.

Lego Blacktron is probably the entire reason I am a writer today and not an engineer.

But let’s get back to the Blacktron minifig.

Simply put, the Blacktron minifig was totally badass, totally alien, still somehow functional. His black spacesuit had silver accents that could double as armor or a Jedi’s tunic or as a cyborg torso. His motorcycle-style helmet had a jet-black faceplate, which was completely rad. Obviously it contained some sort of HUD-style readout inside.

With the black faceplate down, he was faceless, anonymous, nameless. A cypher.

The Blacktron minifig was the perfect base figurine for soldiers, alien heroes, robots, and cyborgs. He could be a disposable enemy, a valiant, cocksure lieutenant, or a main hero.

But if you lifted up his faceplate, the Blacktron guy was smiling. No matter how many dogfights and wars you put him through, he was always grinning happily when you opened up his helmet. He had a soft side, too.

In the early 90s, the Blacktron guy was eventually replaced by a friendlier “superhero” style minifig.

He was less realistic, in my opinion, and the color scheme never sat right with me. I usually let my little brothers play with these guys while I stuck with the O.G. flight-suited Blacktron minifig. He never lost my loyalty.

When I close my eyes and think of Lego, I see a Blacktron figure.

Under his helmet, he’s reminding us that anything can happen.