Integration, Lego-style
The last time I commented on the lego situation, the family minifig collection was overwhelmingly male (~90 lego guys, ~10 lego women), with none of them being any color darker than legoguy yellow. Neither of these situations were acceptable -- we might live in a pasty white city in a pasty white section of the world, but (a) the ratio of women to men in the real world is just a wee bit better than 1:10, and it's just not acceptable to have a lego world where everyone is the lego-equivalent of white.
So I've been shopping on the lego aftermarket (mainly Bricklink; I've looked on the online auction sites, but they have nothing), buying Bespin®™© guard heads and "woman-styled" hair pieces, and have finally started to move the racial and gender ratios up to a level that I'm happier with. Of the 90 lego figures shown here (I'm not counting the 15-20 other figures floating around; 7-8 of those figures are women, two of them are reddish brown, and one is peach):
30 are yellow lego guys,
14 are reddish brown lego guys,
15 are reddish brown lego women,
21 are yellow lego women,
3 are peach lego guys,
1 is a peach lego woman, and
4 are skeleton guys.
There are still more yellow lego guys than any other type, but they're now just a plurality instead of being a majority. I'm up to about 25% reddish brown and 35% female, which even if it's not perfect (particularly the guy:girl ratio) it's at least good enough so it's not a complete embarrassment.
We'd have more lego women, except that Russell wanted a "lego birthday" this year, and we're giving away lego people as part of the lego kits we made up for goody bags. While we were in the throes of making up the kit, someone (either Russell or the best) suggested that we put a woman into each lego kit.
The peach-colo(u)red lego heads are a bit strange. Apparently Lego has decided to make all of their movie tie-in minifigs look more caucasian, and all of the St*r W*rs, Too Much Coffee Man (more commonly known as Batman), H*rry P*tt*r, and other random TV and movie tie-ins are now being delivered with peach-colo(u)red head pieces. It's too bad that this decision has come in after the Teen Titans anime started to lose popularity, because I would have loved to see the more, um, realistic colors for Teen Titans minifigs [update: I'm not claiming that Lego actually made Teen Titans minifigs. I'd like to see them produced, but Lego, for some reason, doesn't pay any attention to my desires] (I'm sure the clothing style would be appalling, but I'd love to get my mitts on an orange Starfire, a grey Raven or a green Beast Boy (there's already a Too Much Coffee Boy (aka Robin) minifig, and I'm afraid that Cyborg would simply be a printed torso and a variant of the existing robot headpieces.))
Comments
I like the idea of having more dark-skinned lego people.. but the yellow seems to be the most generic. You say “lego-equivalent of white.” when it’s also the “lego-equivalent of asian”. of cores if your in Asia or live in California like me it’s no big deal.
It’s funny bcz I go to the Lego store a lot (living in the Los Angeles aria) and no one seems to care…
Growing up with Legos, it didn’t even occur to me that they might be white, although it was funny when they finally came out with the brown-lego-people(the sports figures) and then I was like “oh…. so then what are these yellow ones suppose to be?” latter they started making everything “movie related” with natural skin tones, witch was funny bcz if you had “Harry Potter” or “Star Wars” all your new mini figs were in there with those odd yellow ones LOL.
…and now days they even have black skeletons, witch is strange bcz no-one has a black skeleton LOL.
anyways…..
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I think you could call some of the skeletons female even if they don’t have ponytails.