Lego Advent: Day 18

Categories Lego Advent

Special, today only: two for one.

Santa has visited early this year, and has brought a Lego Advent calendar. There are 24 little numbered doors, each containing a dime bag of Legos. There’s a new toy or doodad to build every day, which, in turn, builds anticipation for Christmas.

I will build these and attempt to discern what they are.

December 18: Rocket/ing Horse

Today’s build is both a rocket ship and a rocking horse, which is rad. I want to believe that this was some wacky translation mix-up when the English-speaking marketing consultants talked to the Lego brass in Denmark about what to put in today’s kit, but I looked it up and “rocket” in Danish is raket (as in wuts all that raket, which is what people in Florida text each other every time something launches from Cape Canaveral) whereas “rocking horse” is gyngehest (as in i gotta go back to the gyngehest. i think im pregrant again). Any similarity in the first syllable seems to be confined to English, and I’m not sure if could have been mistranslated in that direction.

Rating

Fun ★★★★★

These are super fun. The rocking horse actually rocks (in the literal sense) and the rocket has a kind of orange blast effect behind the engine.

Ease of Build ★★★★☆

The horse has some odd parts and its tail seems unnecessarily articulated, but other than that, no surprises.

Comprehensibility ★★★★★

I totally get it this time. These items make sense. I assume that it’s a toy rocket, and that both of these are presents for children.

Extra Parts ★★☆☆☆

Extra parts for this include a beige triangular thing, a chocolate-brown round thing, and a taupe different round thing, similar to an arm adapter for a scarecrow. I don’t think any of these will be highly useful, and I’m nearly out of words for this earthy color scheme, but I’ll throw in an extra star for volume.

Overall ★★★★★

I actually had both of these toys as a kid. My recollection is that my rocking horse was mostly made out of 2x6s or something similarly heavy-duty, except for the head, which was a silhouette of a horse’s head cut out of 1x material, and a thick, round tail that must have been made out of an oar handle. My uncle made it, and it met no child safety standards of any era. The head had an ear that stood out like the spike on Chingachgook’s club in The Last of the Mohicans, and it was entirely possible to rock it so ferociously that it would flip over, bang your head off the carpet, and crush you with its weight, but it was simultaneously so robust that you could ride it down the stairs and it would inflict much more damage to the house than it would suffer. I was also into model rocketry for a while and made some cool stuff, mostly experimenting with pushing the limits of minimal recovery systems so that I could fire them in a small clearing and not have them either drift a quarter mile into the woods and get stuck in a tree or lawn dart near where I was standing. Like NASA, I didn’t have the allowance to keep up with my taste for rocket fuel and couldn’t really compete with the rich kids, so I became more of a research organization (i.e., I still got the Estes catalog in the mail).

Regardless, it’s a good day in Lego City when you can identify the objects.

"Prepare to fend off the bridge abutment."