It falls so short of the potential. Anyone can sell a Daft Punk branded lunchbox.
Lego could have chosen a BOOST reboot and incorporated Daft Punk samples, they could have chosen a working 808, they could have a Vidiyo set, and instead it's just a model that sits quietly and gathers dust.
For me, part of being a Daft Punk fan was digging into the creativity behind their music. I think it's why they worked so hard to build an entire song around Giorgio Moroder and the potential to do anything with music. Did they do that just to fill a track or was it an intentional passing of the torch to the audience? I would like to believe it was the latter.
A Lego set collab with Daft Punk that does not challenge the 'player' to create something new (and especially to create music) is just an awful waste.
I think lego is reaching levels of absurdity that I didn't know were possible. I get that you have to target another demographic with prices like these, but I'd love to hear why. Does no kid play with lego anymore? Are these prices justified or are they now a luxury type of brand for collectors? What is the deal with lego these days?
I'm so juiced to buy this. I went to Alive 2007 at Coney Island, which was a surprisingly intimate venue for the show (if this is your thing, go watch it if you haven't - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmR4zLcORNc), and it remains one of the more remarkable musical experiences I've had. One, it was pre-phone saturation, so the crowd was engaged and the experience was novel. Two, it was astoundingly unique at the time; the production values and concept were just so far forward. For those of you who are younger, it's a little hard to explain, but for me there is "before Alive" and "after Alive" in terms of larger scale electronic music performances. It's sort of like seeing the beginning of a new evolutionary tree. Then of course it becomes really interesting that Random Access Memories really was a fundamental rejection of the beast they'd helped generate. I thought it was super interesting that Bangalter did Ally Pally with Fred Again recently... he seems, along with a newer generation of DJs (Barry Can't Swim is another), to have gotten the message... took a while.
Edit: when I say the experience was novel, I mean I had only heard the faintest of news that I was going to this amazing show. I had no prior visual information on what to expect -
I have listened to Alive 2007 more than any other live album. I am unbelievably jealous.
I want to see the Sphere in Vegas, but so far there hasn’t been an act that interest me. Frankly, all I need are two actors in robot costumes to press play on Alive 2007.
I quite like Daft Punk but that ™ makes them uncool very quickly. Immediately makes me assume it's just a brand name now, run by an agency, music work outsourced to freelance ghost composers, and so on. Like Philips TVs and "Jamie Oliver" cookware.
In a final act of defiance, Salazar Slytherin™ constructed The Chamber of Secrets™. A huge Basilisk
was bewitched to honor his 'true heir' and bring ruthless destruction upon all Muggle™-born.
When i built the lego hogwarts set i had to read through stuffs like this. I know. Lego is a big corporation. Harry potter is too. normaly i can ignore that i am just feeding money to geedy Corporate. But i could not this time
I think big organizations, by necessity, operate in a very compartmentalized way. Almost nobody is viewing the whole. Designers care about aesthetics. Lawyers care about risk. Developers care about shipping. IT Security cares about vulnerability. I really think this is unavoidable at scale. There's just no incentive for any of these groups to care about the other groups. Which is why you need a buck stops with me BDFL Steve Jobs like a-hole that looks at "DAFT PUNK™" and says, "absolutely not."
I actually asked about this on HN a long, long time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20704840 My takeaway from the feedback there was that IP lawyers just aren't the sharpest tools in the shed.
Nice! I’d been wondering about this for a while too and reading the thread I come to the same conclusion as you. If Apple can survive without splashing those symbols all over then surely LEGO can as well.
Part of their schtick is wearing those costumes right? So you don't even know who's performing. The only song of theirs that I know is a collab with a different singer and has a guitar part from Niles Rodgers, so while they probably do have some impact on the music, it's not clear to me how one would be able to tell this hasn't always been the case.
RAM Drumless Edition, the Fortnite stunt, now this... It's sad to see Daft Punk™ trying to get every last dime out of that brand name, even after splitting up. They used to reinvest a lot of their early profits into new music, videos, etc., but now it just seems like a sad cash grab. Hope they got some good real estate on the French Riviera out of it at least, it leaves a bad taste on their whole catalogue to me.
Surprised to see this take. Even musicians want money and the decision to do pop electronica, which is what daft punk is, was calculated. You wouldn’t have heard about them nor would they be a global hit by some mysterious force of good vibes. To go even more blunt than that, RAM itself was a cash grab album. It sounded like phoning it in and selling out. But I was never a big fan of the band to begin with. Cheesy all around.
Daft Punk's music itself is mostly composed of samples from other tracks which are not credited. They don't even play instruments really, they play samplers. And their music is quite mid, I really never understood their popularity.
Sad to see Daft Punk smear their legacy with a thick coat of dog shit lately, but I guess money is money after all, and this new low won't be the lowest for very long.
Once upon a time kids had train sets, however, other toys such as LEGO came along and train sets fell out of fashion. However, in time, the boomers that did have train sets retired and some of them built the train sets that their nine year old former selves could only dream of. The toy for kids became a hobby for retirees.
I wonder if LEGO is going to follow the same fate, to no longer be of interest to Roblox and Minecraft obsessed kids, to develop an increasingly elderly customer base, ending up with just retirees.
Daft Punk became a household name in the late 1990s, placing their core audience as Gen X, which is reasonably elderly, and well on the way for the kids to retirees pipeline. Expect LEGO to be grand-pa only in a couple of decades.
What remains of the train set business makes a token effort to appeal to kids, all of it is priced out of their league and not marketed to them in ways of yesteryear. Instead it is all about limited edition, very expensive and highly accurate models that get sold to a diminishing customer base, necessitating ever higher prices and further consolidation in the industry.
Imaginably, LEGO in twenty years time will be like this, making nothing but a token effort to sell to kids yet making money with expensive and even more elaborate reissues of models such as this one.
Hopefully this won't be the future of LEGO, however, they do need this adult market given how kids don't play with toys now they have tablets.
I wonder if LEGO is going to follow the same fate, to no longer be of interest to Roblox and Minecraft obsessed kids, to develop an increasingly elderly customer base, ending up with just retirees.
I don't think this is true at all. Our daughter played a lot with Duplo and then Lego from ~2-12. Overall, she must have collected thousands of Euros of Lego from birthday, Christmas, and Sinterklaas presents. When friends were over, they usually wanted to play with Lego.
Us older people who remember the days of Lego without franchises and a focus on your own creativity/imagination might be grumpy about modern Lego (though they have been good at making adult Lego sets as well). But Lego is still wildly successful because they found ways to connect with younger generations and the franchise-based Minecraft/DC Comics/Star Wars/Harry Potter/etc. Lego is exactly one of the ways they have managed to do this, along with Lego for specific focus groups (e.g. Lego Friends).
I'm pretty sure this has already happened to LEGO. That's why it is so expensive now, they want their nostalgic core audience to go back and buy more with money. And they don't really sell random 2x4 brick assortments, they sell nice looking models with all sorts of specially shaped bricks that are hard to reuse for any other purpose.
> they do need this adult market given how kids don't play with toys now they have tablets
adults are on their tablets too, tho pretty much shell out for nostalgia
i'm a little miffed mindstorms and the 'smart/connected' lego stuff didnt take off
i could imagine it would be a real cool bridge between generations if they could see a lego light turn on and off in their parents' builds when you e.g. hit a switch in minecraft or did a redstone circuit
I don’t think Lego is going anywhere. My boys (4 and 7) play with Lego at least an hour a day and so do a lot of their friends. The toy pipeline for them has been Magnatiles to Duplo to Lego. Their favorite thing to watch on YouTube are silly Lego stop motion videos.
But they also don’t really know about tablet games yet.
MY kids are now teenagers and stopped playing with lego years ago, but even when they were ALL about the lego it was a very different approach. They have a lot more than I ever did, and it was collect-assemble-display for the most part, compared to my childhood remix approach. I guess when you have a shark that's essentially two-pieces snapped together, or branded minifigs it dramatically cuts down on flexibility & imagination...
This is a subtly ageist view. The adults buying these LEGO now are likely the same kids who grew up with them. It is good for a company to adapt to their customers as they go through phases in life. This gives old generations and new generations a common ground to bond over, instead of segregating them into separate circles. Also, kids today might not be as interested in LEGO. Know your audience.
Lego could have chosen a BOOST reboot and incorporated Daft Punk samples, they could have chosen a working 808, they could have a Vidiyo set, and instead it's just a model that sits quietly and gathers dust.
For me, part of being a Daft Punk fan was digging into the creativity behind their music. I think it's why they worked so hard to build an entire song around Giorgio Moroder and the potential to do anything with music. Did they do that just to fill a track or was it an intentional passing of the torch to the audience? I would like to believe it was the latter.
A Lego set collab with Daft Punk that does not challenge the 'player' to create something new (and especially to create music) is just an awful waste.
Edit: when I say the experience was novel, I mean I had only heard the faintest of news that I was going to this amazing show. I had no prior visual information on what to expect -
Thanks for sharing the video, but I haven't seen one that does justice to the actual live experience.
I want to see the Sphere in Vegas, but so far there hasn’t been an act that interest me. Frankly, all I need are two actors in robot costumes to press play on Alive 2007.
I quite like Daft Punk but that ™ makes them uncool very quickly. Immediately makes me assume it's just a brand name now, run by an agency, music work outsourced to freelance ghost composers, and so on. Like Philips TVs and "Jamie Oliver" cookware.
When i built the lego hogwarts set i had to read through stuffs like this. I know. Lego is a big corporation. Harry potter is too. normaly i can ignore that i am just feeding money to geedy Corporate. But i could not this time
What else can it be since they parted ways?
Were two artists. That’s what makes this weird. It’s DaftAI(tm) or other such junk more likely.
Sad to see Daft Punk smear their legacy with a thick coat of dog shit lately, but I guess money is money after all, and this new low won't be the lowest for very long.
I wonder if LEGO is going to follow the same fate, to no longer be of interest to Roblox and Minecraft obsessed kids, to develop an increasingly elderly customer base, ending up with just retirees.
Daft Punk became a household name in the late 1990s, placing their core audience as Gen X, which is reasonably elderly, and well on the way for the kids to retirees pipeline. Expect LEGO to be grand-pa only in a couple of decades.
What remains of the train set business makes a token effort to appeal to kids, all of it is priced out of their league and not marketed to them in ways of yesteryear. Instead it is all about limited edition, very expensive and highly accurate models that get sold to a diminishing customer base, necessitating ever higher prices and further consolidation in the industry.
Imaginably, LEGO in twenty years time will be like this, making nothing but a token effort to sell to kids yet making money with expensive and even more elaborate reissues of models such as this one.
Hopefully this won't be the future of LEGO, however, they do need this adult market given how kids don't play with toys now they have tablets.
I don't think this is true at all. Our daughter played a lot with Duplo and then Lego from ~2-12. Overall, she must have collected thousands of Euros of Lego from birthday, Christmas, and Sinterklaas presents. When friends were over, they usually wanted to play with Lego.
Us older people who remember the days of Lego without franchises and a focus on your own creativity/imagination might be grumpy about modern Lego (though they have been good at making adult Lego sets as well). But Lego is still wildly successful because they found ways to connect with younger generations and the franchise-based Minecraft/DC Comics/Star Wars/Harry Potter/etc. Lego is exactly one of the ways they have managed to do this, along with Lego for specific focus groups (e.g. Lego Friends).
The (electrified) lego train set was a solid product and didn't cost anywhere near what star wars lego does. Same for technics.
adults are on their tablets too, tho pretty much shell out for nostalgia
i'm a little miffed mindstorms and the 'smart/connected' lego stuff didnt take off
i could imagine it would be a real cool bridge between generations if they could see a lego light turn on and off in their parents' builds when you e.g. hit a switch in minecraft or did a redstone circuit
But they also don’t really know about tablet games yet.
(Of course, it's not possible to keep them in isolation forever and I wouldn't even suggest it. But good on you for keeping it that way so far.)
Wikipedia says that Gen X was born 1965 to 1980. They are therefore aged 61 to 46. Not one of them has hit early retirement age in the US.