I have seen the light.
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 21: Festive Streetlight
This is a festive streetlight.
Rating
Fun ★★★★☆
I’m not sure how you’d play with it (unless you anthropomorphized it, gave it a personality and had it roaming around the town and getting into all kinds of high jinks or something) but I’ll give it an extra star because it is a handsome decoration. (see also: Extra Parts)
Ease of Build ★★★★★
This has very few parts, and it was a very clear build process.
Comprehensibility ★★★★★
Such streetlight!
Extra Parts ★★★★★
I am piling up the small round red things, and I’m not sure what I’d ever do with them, but I’m pretty sure that the other thing here is actually a Lego lightsaber. The upper half of the streetlight is also a lightsaber, which I think is cool because it’s clearly not meant to be an actual Jedi weapon, but is being used to lend a little fine detail like a greeblie. When they were making the model spaceships and things for Star Wars, they did a lot of kitbashing, which is taking the individual parts from plastic model kits and gluing them to something else in a novel way to imply a sense of scale and complexity without having to craft a ton of tiny doodads. They called the model parts “greeblies,” and it turns out that if you glue a bunch of them to a styrene spaceship and paint it all gray and light it well, you can make it look highly technical and visually interesting, and do it much more quickly than if you had to hand-craft ducts and panels and hyperdrive inverse flux generators. Adam Savage explains better than me. The actual lightsabers in the movies probably had a bunch of greeblies on them, and in this case we have a model of a lightsaber being used as a greeblie on a street lamp, which is fun to me.
Overall ★★★★★
This rating system is kind of shot at this point, and I’m not sure why this streetlight is coming out as one of the best prizes of the entire season. I’m not really a streetlight aficionado under normal circumstances. But it’s kind of stately looking, festive enough, is made of lightsabers, and doesn’t skeeve me out, so I guess it’s a winner.
