In completing my Lego City review of the 10218 Pet Shop set, I decided to write up a small blog on a possible wish list. Right now, I’m quite happy with the direction Lego has gone with regards to the types of city structures. Most city structures over the years had a 2-3 revolving year policy between fire, police and gas station sets. Right now, we still see the fire and police themes make their rounds, but we also get the occasional deviation.
My thing is that as a hard core town collector, I would like to see even more deviations from Fire and Police based themes or at least give us more than 2-3 cycles and introduce other themes and styles into the mix. Although vehicles tend to be easy sells, the actual buildings themselves seem to have far less emphasis because I feel Lego sees them as not being popular with children. And probably that’s due to the lack of action features for most building sets. However, I think that the lack of realism at the expense of action features can hurt the city theme in terms of variety.
In order for me to put out my wish list, I first would like to review all the major buildings that we have seen over the years to see where our gaps are:
- Fire station
- Police station
- Hospital
- Gas Station
- Parking garage
- Pet Shop
- Cinema
- Town hall
- Monorail
- Train station
- Museum
- Toys store
- McDonalds Fast Food restaurant
- Motorcycle shop
- Bicycle shop
- Repair garage
- Medical clinic
- Airport
- Restaurant
- Coast Guard
- Surf Shack
- Skateboard shop
- Bus stop
- Cargo Center
- Mini Market
- Various homes/apartments
- City construction yard
- Clothing botique
- Sea port
- Post office
- Pizza shop
- Race track
- Bank
- Truck stop
I’m sure I’m leaving out numerous other types. But these are the main ones from my memory. For my money, I still feel that the town has an overall sense of emptiness. Or at least incompleteness when you compare it to an suburb or metropolitan zone. What we could use are:
- Shopping mall
- Electronics shop
- Supermarket
- Hair Salon
- School/University
- Library
- Power plant
- Major bank
- Zoo
- Homeless Shelter (good luck with that one though!)
- Park
- Liquor Store (or at least something like a 7-11 or AM/PM)
- More restaurants!
- Clothing boutique (smaller one)
- Church (not a big fan but it does belong more or less)
- Major store (e.g. Walmart, Target, KMart)
- Office building/corporation tower
- Car dealership
- A new metroliner
- Furniture shop
- Gardening Shop (Home Depot, Lowe’s Hardware, etc.)
- Club (disco)
- Theme park (Disneyland perhaps?)
I’m certain that a few of these sets already exist but just not for the City theme itself. I’ve always wanted a Lego shopping mall. Surprisingly, they’ve never done one. I have seen shots of a humor “Town Square” but I haven’t seen exactly what it will be. Perhaps, this set could fill in the shopping mall idea. If not, it would be neat to see a bunch of modular shops that you could configure via the connector pieces (like the downtown sets).
Some sets, I doubt we’ll ever see in existence. Others, like the school, furniture shop or barber are things that seem like an easy 100-200 part set. If you look at the old Ideas book (I think it’s 6000), you’ll see that Lego already can produce these types of sets and that the idea does exist. It’s mostly a matter of either producing stickers or a few specific pieces. I want to see them do it out of completeness.
My car dealership idea is just a variation on the parking garage idea. But it seems like a great idea to have. Maybe a small shop with some guy cooking hot dogs outside, a flat plate with several parking spaces and including 3-4 variations on SUVs, sedans, sports cars and possibly a carrier.
Also, I would love to see Lego do more partnerships with companies like a Walmart or Target in producing an in-store only type of set. I loved the Toys-R-Us toy shop that Lego did a few years back. It wasn’t a fancy set but I really liked how Lego provided something that was drastically missing all these years.
My other main wish is that I want Lego to revert back to the 4 stud wide vehicle style. I can tolerate to a degree the 6 stud wide vehicle style, but anything beyond that like the dump truck is just ridiculous. I dislike the inconsistencies in scaling and hope that Lego moves back to standard 4 stud wide scale. It just feels that most of the vehicles set are being overcharged and that there’s too many that take up space unnecessarily by being 6 studs wide.