While looking for ways to stay awake at work until midnight, I got to perusing around the Lego website. I've adored them since I was a child, and remember vividly playing with both the "boy" themed sets, and their line of pink horse ranches for girls. Admissably, I probably didn't play with them the way the Lego pople intended. The little horse whip that came with the riders had a loop at the end so it could double over itself. I realized that the hole was the perfect size to slip over around one of the Lego guy's heads, so my girls would ride around on their horses, dragging the boys around by their necks.
Needless to say, when I was looking on their website by category, I clicked on the girls section of the website. While I wasn't necessarily looking for something girly, I remembered there was a good number of cute horse farm sets when I was a child, and I figured with all the girl geeks nowadays, there would have been a push to make more girl-friendly Legos.
Hrm... well, that's not a whole heck of a lot of different sets (for reference, Lego has about 40+ different "themes" right now). And there was only one set listed under the "Belville" set of Horse Stables! Of course, the one set there was was geared for girls around the age of 6. I remember the sets that I had as a child were fun to play with even at 10-12, and had a lot of pieces, similar to the "less girly" sets available at the time. The other sets are likewise aimed for younger girls - around the age of preschool girls.
I've seen several instances where parents have contacted Lego, and Lego has basically said that a large percentage of their sales in the US is for boys, and that due to the amount of countries/ethnicities they market to Internationally, it's not practical for them to market to absolutely every demographic in every country they're sold in.
Ok. That's fine. While I think it would be super awesome for them to have huge horse ranch sets for girls of all ages, pink robots, and pink race cars, that's just what I like. I understand that a set that's specifically geared for girls probably isn't going to have the sort of market that a "Star Wars" set would.
I decided to start searching outside of the "girls" category, to see what sets are out there that might appeal to a girl. Having a specific category for girls is kind of silly, as different children have different likes and interests. Although there will be some parents that only look at that one category, I'd like to think that most would be inclined to search the other categories as well.
For those of you who aren't "in the know" regarding Lego, they have rights to produce toys for a ton of different popular franchises - Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Indiana Jones, Prince of Persia, Cars, and Spongebob Squarepants to name just a few.
I started with the Pirates of the Caribbean playsets. Elizabeth Swann is a pretty strong female character, who becomes more and more independent as the three movies progress. I was really disappointed to see that there was only one playset featuring Elizabeth. Surely it's something cool, like celebrating how Elizabeth was a Pirate Captain in the third movie? I mean, that was pretty fricking cool, wasn't it?
Oh... well... that's a missed opportunity I guess. There's mermaids in the set for the newest movie, but the only thing that they are there for is so they can be captured by a net flinger. Ho hum.
Let's move on to Star Wars. I mean, Padme Amidala wasn't a character of Leia proportions, but she was pretty major in the first three movies. I mean, she had a cool space ship, I'm sure that warranted a set?
Oh... I guess it didn't. In fact, I looked on their site for a playset that actually included Padme and I couldn't find one. And there were only two that I saw that included Leia, the hard-to-find Tantive IV ship that Darth Vader pursued before capturing her, and the Death Star that includes like 24 different minifigs.
Their Kingdoms sets at least come with female minifigs from time to time, although some of them are milkmaids.... who you get to protect from the evil Dragon Knights! While there is a Princess minifig... she doesn't come with the Castle! It's just the King and his Knights! Where's the Princess? Oh, she is in the Prison Tower, waiting to be rescued.
Alright, alright. Medieval times weren't exactly known for being empowering to women. Let's check out Harry Potter. Hermione was a pretty empowered girl, I'm sure that there's a playset where she's making a potion or something, right? Well she doesn't get her own set, but at least she's included in a good majority of the sets. And Ron didn't get his own sets either, so I guess that's fair.
I dunno. It's alright that they don't make a bunch of pretty princess sets, but it would be really nice to see Lego step up and try to present more of the female characters in their pop culture sets in more empowering scenarios.
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