LEGO Wants These Bricks Destroyed
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- Äas pĆidĂĄn 5. 07. 2024
- Discover the scandalous history behind these marbled LEGO bricks!
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These special LEGO bricks may be beautiful but their history is quite the opposite. Behind these LEGO bricks is a rich history and countless stories of scandal, curiosity, and rebellion. LEGO absolutely despises these bricks but why? What caused their incredible marbling? And most notably, what does a tiny town in Scotland have to do with it? Well, settle in because itâs time to uncover the truth behind these marbled Grangemouth bricks, and why LEGO wants them destroyed.
Special thanks to Nathan Francis, Fantastic Brick, and Tom Gill on Flickr for sharing images of their Grangemouth brick collections.
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This is one of my favorite video topics that Iâve ever worked on. An extensive amount of time went into researching, scripting, and editing this mini-documentary. If you enjoy, please support this video with a Like and consider Subscribing!
woah!
Please, please do more of these types of videos. Its so interesting as a history nerd to see where Lego was during the context of the 20th century.
An interesting topic to cover would definitely be the history of the Lego Bootleg. Try to find why they happen, what were the earliest bootlegs, what were some Lego equivalents in former Communist nations like the Soviet Union, Lego's legal action, and Lepin.
And I mean knock-offs, not competitors like MacFarlane or Mega Constructs, since they're owned by a much larger company that, although may obtain a license, are otherwise distinct from Lego. The bootlegs I refer to are those that infringe on Lego's Minifigure trademark.
EXCELLENT WORK. SPITBRIX LEGO BIRCK CONTROVERSY,
The funniest part of this to me is that Mega Construx (formerly Mega Blox) actually used these marbled bricks as an additional marketing ploy for their Halo sets as "exclusive camouflage bricks"
I used to work for Courtaulds at the time and there was an official project to develop marble effect bricks by dispersing coloured short chopped fibres in white plastic. My involvement was to characterise the properties of standard bricks and I was presented with large box of Lego bricks to test. Most of the bricks never got used and I kept them. Courtaulds also made the cellulose acetate in Derby UK that Lego bricks were made of before they switched to ABS.
Those red and yellow marbled bricks would be SO GOOD for lava
blue/white looks amazing for aquariums and classic space. black/white is perfect for including a marble pattern into MOCs
yeah those few that were a mix of black, yellow, orange and red would make cool pieces for a volcano setting
@@JamesTDGmarble looking bricks either accurate colour would be amazing
Or the red and white bricks can be like for a pepper mint swirl bricks for a candy theme Lego set or the gray and white bricks for a stormy sky
And Lego countertops lol
"Mid to late 1900s"
Just have to go out of your way to make us feel ancient.
Hit me like a ton of bricks.
@@DingusMingus-ug3iwmarbled?
@@Qwerty-zj3rk lol
@@DingusMingus-ug3iw a bag of lego bricks
late 1900's is like the stupidest way you can say that
Someone needs to teach LEGO the old gamedev addage, "It's not a bug, it's a feature."
They work with Mojang for Minecraft lego sets, they probably already know that.
Iphone lego: You're building it wrong! đ
As the adage says: âYou give a poor man a fish, and you feed, him for a day. You teach him to have fish, you give him⊠you give him.. i dont know manâŠâ
And they can make MONEY from it, seems like they'd like that
Skill issue. Lego needs to git gud
We need to petition LEGO to acknowledge that people like these marbled bricks
It's probably because there's no quality control on them, marbling is cool, but if certain materials are mixed, then they might fall apart or crumble
â@@SuperSuperSporkindeed
Mega has been doing marbled bricks for decades now. They are so cool!
You do? Okay 100⏠a piece, buddy. They're 500$ on the resale market but making them on purpose is cheap and easy, but you will pay.
We need lego to acknowledge that people have opinions
You know what this could be an entire lego line called error bricks and all it IS just the same premise as how the Jelly Belly corporation gathers up all of the defect jelly bellies and then rebrands them as something else
Yeah, been to their Fairfield Plant, Belly Flops!
I've always wondered how big the pile would be if I could collect together every misshapen piece of candy I've ever found.
This kind of solution requires a though process that alot of corporate drones have had ironed out of them
Man snacking on Belly Flops were my fuckin childhood man
There is also Dum Dum's mystery flavor. It is the run when switching flavors. It could be 1 or the other, but it could also be mixed.
Lego should make marbled brick separators
They should make METAL ones with a hole through the end for people to put on a keyring
@@Superabound2 I've had that exact thought for a while!
@@Superabound2 Metal ones would be nice, but you can't exactly injection mold them...
Metal ones are a bad idea, they'd be hard and much less ductile than plastic, which is a perfect recipe for scratching bricks really badly.
@@JamesTDGi mean you kinda can
When you mentioned that company had a brick mold, I think thatâs the reason why they now bury molds
Quick, let's all grave rob the LEGO cemetery!
_LEGO City theme music plays_
also, the molds that are the most sensitive (in the sense that they are sought after), like the 2x4 bricks are handled with extra care, preferably not leaving the factory location in Billund
@@Chicky_Lumps Build the excavator!
_Make the LEGO factory strucuturely unsafe by destroying their foundation!_
HEY!
That's mostly mythology nowadays I feel, companies like Cobi make even better bricks than Lego.
And just like Lego manufacturs in china today, Chinese manufacturers have gotten good at making their own bricks as well which in many cases are as good as Lego bricks.
They always did, that wasn't a recent change. In fact they don't even need to do it anymore because they no longer have factories all over the world now that their main production is centralized to one complex.
You seem to have misunderstood the explanation, they used to bury the old molds in the new factories as they were expanded and replaced. Their current factory has already replaced all the old ones with centralized distribution.
"Lego has some serious control what comes out of their factories" HAHAHAHAH
The mexico factory does whatever they want. You want "prototype" transparent star wars figs? Sure why not? You want the exclusive UCS Minifigure in the hundreds? Please be my guest! You fancy 2000 pieces of a rare retired lego piece? Welcome at us!
Very based
Mexico and china love to ignore copyright laws and everyone else gets to benefit from mexico doing it
So if i went to the mexico factory and paid the right people i could get marbled lego bricks?
@@TheRealRusDaddy yes but mostly JosĂš benefits from his US/EU sales...
@@TheRealRusDaddyhonestly I donât really care if someone is breaking copyright laws as long as itâs against a bigger company and theyâve already made more than their fair share off of it
Destroying the inevitable marbled bricks is a waste of plastic and it goes against the claims that they are trying to become more environmentally friendly.
Especially when they could just re-sell them, particularly if they decide to, instead of cleaning between colors, just run the new color through and bag the remnants.
Lego will never be an environmentally friendly hobby so long as they use plastic for their toys. Heck even their rubber use to create toy tires is extreme.
Yup, iirc Lego is technically the largest tire manufacturer in the world because of how many they produce, granted they are small and for a toy, they are still tires
@@Bionickpunk LEGO is the most environmentally friendly use of plastic, perhaps the only environmentally friendly use of plastic, because LEGO is never intended to be thrown away. Half the point is that a box of LEGO can be passed down from generation to generation and all the pieces will work with modern LEGO as well. You have to be an idiot to throw away LEGO instead of donating it or passing it down, so unlike most plastic toys, LEGO rarely ends up in a landfill or dumped in nature (outside of that one time a container ship full of LEGO sank).
I still have a ton of LEGO from the 70s and 80s that my parents gave me, and all the pieces are perfectly usable. We'll eventually see a day when kids are playing with 100 year-old LEGO passed down from their great grandparents. It's the polar opposite of planned obsolescence/consumerism/throw-away culture, and likely the longest-usably-lasting toy of all time. LEGO is the one time where using plastic is okay IMO, it's the perfect material for the official toy of longevity.
Yes, get rid of all plastic in packaging, appliances, consumer electronics, vehicles, cutlery, cups, etc, anything made to be thrown away is bad when made of plastic. But if one product and company should be allowed to use plastic responsibly, it's LEGO. A toy that lasts forever and can be anything you want it to be? How is that not the one thing worth using plastic for?
@@Thinginator Look at you defending big corpo. đ€ Plastic toys get damages, Lego is no exception, they make ton of waste during production that will ever be sold. They constantly make more and more toys, increasing the plastic in the world, and you are naive to think that most of it will be safe and secure in someones collection.
Man, I am not into lego that much anymore, but if Lego decided to release a marbled set of nothing but marbled legos, I would buy them in a heartbeat.
Id take out the mortgage necessary
Regular person: Ooh pretty bricks
Lego employee: *vietnam war flashbacks*
War.
@@moonlightdawn7249 thank you
lol. Happy Tree Friends reference.
@@Damien.Dno?????
@@Damien.Dyâknow the vietnam war was a real thing right?
If Lego doesn't want these bricks in sets, one thing they could do is just turn any and all of the ones they find into keychains and sell them for quadruple the price.
Lol. Great idea
I love the look of marble bricks, Lego really needs to realize that other people love them too. Lego sees them as mistakes, we see them as happy little accidents.
Also, I find it so weird that lego often buries their old molds. They could just be kept in a vault or storage room. That way, you could reuse the old models when needed.
Apparently, those molds are very sensitive to the elements and need to be stored in special climate controlled warehouses, or else they become unusable. This is very expensive, which is why Lego gets rid of old molds that haven't been used in many years, so they can use the storage space for other molds.
From what the video said, i was more under the impression that they did that with the molds once they weren't usable anymore, ie they were too damaged or worn
I saw this comment and imagined a parent calling their kid their "happy little accident" đ
These need to be made official. They would be perfect for the see like Ninjago and Dreamzzz!
*sets
Would go really good in dreamzzz
LEGO should embrace these bricks and release special polybags of specific color combinations as either LEGO store exclusives or gifts with purchase. Imagine every month or two you could go into a LEGO store and get a little bag of beautiful marbled bricks along with your Star Wars or City set.
This is like the mystery flavor from Dum Dum.
They sell the suckers produced when changing flavors as mystery. It could be wholly the first or second flavor, or it could be some mix of the 2.
They have marketed what might have went to waste.
They should sell them as a 100 pack set or something
Or as bonus pieces like the golden ninja in Ninjago
Scottish here! Its crazy that local news is this well known in the global Lego community
"Scottish here"
Aren't you Scottish everywhere?
@@Whurlpuulplease stfu unless you meant this comment in a playful way
On a similar note, the mystery flavored dumdum suckers are a result of the same thing. When they change flavors on the production line, a certain amount of the batch mixes between the flavors, and they know which section of the candy is the mixed flavor. Those get separated out and wrapped as the mystery flavor.
Thanks!
Changing out the material is also where mystery flavored candy comes from. You can usually guess what two flavors were being swapped.
Oh that makes sense, I never thought about that lol that's really cool
Maybe lego can learn something here from this lmao
Well that's fascinating.
Thatâs so smart!
Holy guacamole there's one of these at my grandparents house! I thought it was from some weird 80s set my parents had.
Time to find it!
Time to get some of Grandmas cooking
Keep us posted!
If I got my hands on one of those old molds I would not become a competitor, I would probably just make funny looking marbled pricks and mini figures because funny :)
Bricks my bad*
Honestly, same. I would rather just offer up an ideal source for made to order marbled bricks.
â@@JamesTDGMaking made to order bricks sounds like competing against Lego...
Marbled pricks certainly would be funny looking. Not sure how you would do that with a Lego mold, but it sounds like it would be painful. đ
@@Kelly_Jane Not really competition if they refuse to sell it themselves :>
I lived in Maddiston, a couple miles away from Grangemouth. My best mate when I was a kid had a massive bucket of these. Core memory unlocked when I seen this picture.
LEGO: "What do we do with all those thousands of "error" beautiful marbled bricks, we create every day?"
A: Give them away for free?
B: Sell them as special editions?
"No! Destroy them and waste energy and create even more plastic waste for our planet, because we're LEGO!"
The video pretty clearly states that these bricks were experiments made by rebellious employee in the 70s, not common defective bricks made every day.
Injection molding facilities that large aren't creating extra plastic waste when they destroy "bad" pieces.
They grind them up, and throw it into the mix being used for black pieces. Once the black dye is added, all of the "waste" plastic that was put through the grinder is treated the same as new bulk plastic going into the presses
â@@ricomock2they aren't going to do that for off-colour bricks as that would ruin the next batch
â@@ThePlayerOfGameshe meant black bricks
Mega blocks:I am already four parallel universes ahead of you
For them non-marbled bricks are rare lol
I love Mega's marbled and metallic bricks. From my experience, there is also little colour puke in the sets. Bought a Halo Pelican that was solid metallic green for the most part.
@@planetenwanderer5329 I will say they are pretty cool looking ngl
i just got their big buildable energy sword on Ebay and the marbeling with trasnblue plastic makes thjem look so cool.
@@AbyssEyes02facts
What gets me about this is that special factory only bricks get sold om bricklink and lego doesn't seem to care, I literally have trans orange visors for mars mission mocs. Those pieces dont exist
They should bring these back as marbled meat slabs. They could put them in a "butcher shop" set for Lego City
Never let bro cook again đ
Can't wait for the LEGO City slaughterhouse set (ages 16+). đ
Lego waygu!
You are kidding with this one arent you
They still wouldn't like it because it's not a consistent product. The business model is based off of a highly malleable product (it's easy to be successful when you can make whatever you want), the way people enjoy Legos is that they're so perfectly uniform that they inspire creativity (it's easy to build with a simple object that can only connect to itself in one particular way).
they could make some realistically looking flame or water bricks with this tho
I have a yellow/blue marbled brick that must have slipped through QC in the '80s, nowhere near as dramatic as these though, there's just a little blue swirl near the mold mark.
Still a cool misprint
I grew up in Edinburgh, just a short distance away from Grangemouth, and it really wasnât that unusual when I was a kid to find various of these bricks in kidsâ lego collections (especially when they had inherited older bricks from their parents). I remember one guy had about 20 or 30 different types. Crazy to think how much they are worth now - they just seemed like cool curiosities back then.
When I was a teenager, one of our school trips was to visit Grangemouth (which is a massive oil refinery, with lots of associated industries on site), and we saw where all the ABS pellets were produced. I never made the link so kind of cool to know the connection.
The best thing lego could do to kill the market for marbled bricks would be to simply sell them in small packs for a reasonable price. That would immediately wipe out their insane collector value.
These remind me of something my mom made when I was a kid called "scribble cookies": She'd take all the ends of my crayons, peel off the wrappers, put them in cupcake wrappers, and baked them in the oven until all the wax melted together. When they cooled off you'd have really cool rainbow crayons!
You can buy your own crayon melter nowadays thankfully
Oh I didn't know that those existed
Those marbled patterns can make really nice camouflage
I was thinking that too!
I work with injection molding machines, we used to make clothes hangers and would sometimes take the multicolored error hangers if we needed any (company ran by my dad, so we were allowd to do it)
I literally live 5 minutes away from Grangemouth and I somehow didnât know about these bricks. This is the kind of stuff they should teach in schools.
Why would anyone teach in schools how someone stole a mold from a private company?
Yeah I live about 20-30 minutes away from there depending on traffic
â@@Anty_Praza in this case I think it would be fair to include it in the curriculum as local history.
if i was you i would go there and look for these bricks lol
Even without their scarcity, I bet Lego could make a very easy profit of selling sets with a bunch of these bricks
they look so cool, it's such a wasted opportunity
watch 10:29
@@kezif that was a april fools joke
A good handful of these bricks were once mine; some of them are my actual photos (the flame bricks were mine and the underside of 5 bricks is my pic)
Did you sell or trade them? If so how much did you make? :)
I played a football (soccer) game in Grangemouth once. Very surreal place, though it was hard to breathe at times lol
Reminds me of minting errors in coins. Doubled lettering and images (known as double dies) can make even a penny worth up to a quarter million dollars.
Ive noticed megablocks does this marbling intentionally when i got some lf their pokemon sets
They do it A LOT. Their Halo line has almost exclusively marbled bricks, itâs really cool. Just look at their big energy sword set!
"Mid to late 1900's" Oof that made me feel unconscionably old.
Fr, dude literally had to do OUT OF HIS WAY TO SAY THAT
I'm from Scotland and I never knew this
im from america and never knew this.
these bricks look so cool! the fact that people have multiple marbled bricks
Once, long ago, as a kid, I got a couple marbled bricks, like these, from a few old lego sets, and I put them in a box somewhere, completely forgetting about them. One was white with an ugly red mix and black spots. The other was yellow with some other color in a couple corners. I remember how outstandingly gross they were, at the time, and I had no clue that they were rare ; I guess that I assumed Lego improved and quit making these defects.
honestly the orange and black are really cool, like hot coals, and the orange and yellow is like a molten color
What a shame, those leggo bricks are awesome.
But they're so beautiful... Such a shame to have to toss them. đ
YESSSS MY COUNTRY GETS A MENTION IN A SPITBRIX VIDEO!!!!!! HELLO FROM WALES!!!!!! đŽó §ó ąó ·ó Źó łó ż
It would be really cool if they could make a multicolored brick look like the Welsh Flag đŽó §ó ąó ·ó Źó łó ż
@Abdega YES!!!! THAT WOULD BE SO COOL!!!!!
There are also Welsh test bricks out there...
Marble bricks are so cool, especially when used right, like the Halo Mega Plasma Sword set, or their dirt pieces
They should package those in "marbled brick kits" and sell them separately
I have 2 rockpanel pieces in marble colors. Found it in some bulk lot I bought. Can't find any set it belongs to.
I have some marbled light gray to dark green from 2006 era Castle sets. Part 47847pb003
why did i just imagine that one image of mr krabs burning a pretty patty but it's the lego company and these grangemouth bricks
bruh my grandad has like 50 of these in the lego box i used to play with as a kid
I want someone to build a house out of theseđ
they should make these into little polybags of marble bricks for people to buy
Those look so cool
So it's similar to the mystery "flavor" of Dum Dum lollipops. đ
We deal with a similar thing in 3D printing, when changing colors you have to purge the last color out before starting the next print or you'll get an effect like this.
Those bricks look cool
These bricks are beautiful! IDC what they say
So much misinformation and misunderstanding. Thereâs good documents floating about on line by actual experts. Also, Grangemouth owner right here :)
Tell us! Tell us!
Care to elaborate? At least point to where we can find more information?
I just love it when people make statements like this and then proceed to offer no sources or explanation. Itâs the best way in the world to look like a prevaricator pining for attention.
For some reason both links and descriptions on where find information seem to go missing...
And now you released this video so everyone knows about these special bricks
been a long time fan, keep the grind up my friend! you the goat :)
Thanks for convincing me not to use Lego bricks on my train layout.
You have to wonder if there's any bootleg brands that took further advantage of marbled bricks. I know Mega Blox did this often with some of their sets. I do wish there was at least one company out there intentionally selling made to order marbled lego-compatible bricks for MOCs. Just imagine using em in like gigantic mansion mocs, or aquarium mocs.
Life is so cool when it adds in mini games like this, all those steps you listed had to happen, and for them to be distributed to people without their knowledge of how rare, unique and just fun and funky those bricks are, thank you for your interest in this, glad you shared have a wonderful day!
i wish i could get one
They look so cool
i feel like lego doesn't think these bricks are "clean" enough, to fit their brand
I mean, yeah. Thats how QC works. Good job understanding it...?
But shitty prints and horrible colour mismatches are okay? But no they draw the line at cool looking bricks lol
@@rereertege7571 "horrible colour mismatches are ok but horrible colour mismatches aren't?"
Seriously...?
@@sophieprime4669 I'm talking about mismatches between batches of bricks ending up in the same set obviously, that's quite a different situation than marbled bricks, no?
@@sophieprime4669 You can have marbled bricks and have very high QC though? The two arenât exclusive to eachother.
They could absolutely sell these in mystery bags at the Lego stores. They'd sell like hotcakes.
I have one of these in a bowl mold instead of a 2x4 brick
"precise colour requirement" damn if only Lego was any good with colour consistency lol
Also lol at "incredible quality control"
I wish , they would make those "waste" bricks into keychains
I live in a town literally a couple of miles away from Grangemouth, these bricks are floating around at car bootsales in Scotland because workers would take the reject products and give them to their kids to play with.
These marble bricks are totally awesome and I would love to have some!! I love the uniqueness of them and how no two are alike!!
I think itâs so interesting how much worldwide effort LEGO puts into making their bricks. Itâs very impressive!
beautiful explanation.
Case hardened blue gem Lego parrot 4:29. Dont show that to the CS community.
Randomly stumbled upon this video and I am not kidding, i remember seeing a bunch of those in a lego box at my aunts place. She ran a home for troubled kids and got loads of lego donated. There must be at least 30-50 pieces, since i vividly remember building a house using just those bricks. I wonder if she still has them.
i like the 2nd ones. I actually got 1 haha
gasp! a mold that literally anyone can make using just a single brick made its way to a factory without our permission!
Uhm... no. You can't make a hardened steel mold, ports, ejector pins and all from a plastic brick. At least not without as much effort as it is to completely redesign the mold.
@@gubx42 fair
@@gubx42 Sure but you absolutely can redesign mold for something as simple as a brick with a pair of calipers and an hour or twos work.
They should actually make these marbled bricks a thing.
Evil how they had it just be an april fools joke lol
As someone who did offset print press operations, with tacky old-style ink cans, and being a 3D print machine guy, I immediately knew what the cause was when I saw the picture
"Stop having fun!" -Lego
One of the times where Lego is just wrong. How up their own ass does a TOY company have to be to want to destroy it's toys people want to have fun with.
Part of Lego's success has been their rigorous dedication to quality control. Not surprising they would see something like this as an undesirable defect.
Did you even watch the video? Their property was being used without their permission. This isn't about fun at all.
@@HammerStudioGames Yes, I did. And yes, that was part of it but the bricks already exist, now. They aren't hurting anyone and people love and want them. If it were some random PoS corporation doing this, I wouldn't think twice, but this is LEGO, a TOY COMPANY! Just let people have fun, ffs.
4 minutes group!
6:37 I had to chuckle when "the incredible quality control lego is famous for" was mentioned. You'd think with all that quality control they would be able to ship sets where there's no difference in colour in bricks that should be the same colour, or wouldn't have clearly visible molding points on many bricks used on highly visible parts of a set...
Lego had great quality control many years ago, but today, not so much.
Fantastic Brick! Best Pictures c:
This would seem like people are going to make them now in protest
Itâs a shame these pricks arenât available, they look so cool!
Bricks.
I love that every lego parrot is unique, so kids know their parrot, like encryption
Imagine being so precise that people collect and seek your errors because they're so rare
Way TLDR... It's got the Lego trademark on it, and the factory is producing them with without permission.
There is a bit more info, but it is surely a lot oif talk about not much info.
As an American, I love multicolored marbled clay objects and plastics. Such as the multi colored extruded fake wood tile floors in some fast food places. An artist's eye loves such things, its almost like Rembrandt browns versus chocolate fudge color. There is a depth and a special interest. The whole idea of recycling plastic into multi-colored objects is also fascinating. I know children like primary colors, but I think everyone also likes variegated colors. And if that makes recycling easier, all the better.
Great video!
Honestly, I hope that the country Lego operates in ends up forcing them to officially release these error bricks
Why tho...?
0:28 Pride brick.
No.
the april fools joke is downright diabolical
Ah Lego. Loved it as a child, feared it as an adult who occasionally walked barefoot to the toilet at night.
Donât destroy the legos itâs not good for the company