The Hegemon
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 Posted: Dec 16th, 2009 at 09:03 pm
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Tandem Bricks
| SET# | SET NAME | PIECES | FIGURES | YEAR | INSTRUCTIONS? | | ? | Pre-School 15 Piece Bucket | 15 | 0 | 1987 | No | | ? | Pre-School 30 Piece Bucket | 30 | 0 | 1987 | No | | ? | Pre-School 60 Piece Bucket | 60 | 0 | 1987 | No | | ? | Pre-School 73 Piece Bucket | 73 | 0 | 1987 | No | | ? | Standard 150 Piece Bucket | 150 | 0 | 1987 | No | | ? | Standard 300 Piece Bucket | 300 | 0 | 1987 | No | | ? | Standard 500 Piece Bucket | 500 | 0 | 1987 | No | | ? | Standard 365 Piece Bucket | 365 | 0 | 1987 | No | | ? | 42 Pre-School "Extra Bricks" | 42 | 0 | 1987 | No | | ? | 112 Pre-School "Extra Bricks" | 112 | 0 | 1987 | No | | ? | Zoo Animals | ? | 0 | 1987 | No | | ? | Dinosaur Assortment | ? | 0 | 1987 | No |
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The Hegemon
Dec 16th, 2009 at 09:11 pm »
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The Hegemon
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Posted: Dec 16th, 2009 at 09:12 pm
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Intelli-Blox
| SET # | SET NAME | PIECES | FIGURES | YEAR | | 140901 | Battle at Weathertop | 98 | 2 | 2001 | | 140903 | Buckleberry Ferry Escape | 116 | 2 | 2001 | | 140904 | Orc Attack at Amon Hen | 79 | 2 | 2001 | | 140911 | Isengard Caverns | 187 | 3 | 2001 | | 140913 | Encounter at the Prancing Pony Inn | 225 | 3 | 2001 | | ? | The Mines of Moria | 361 | 4 | 2001 | | ? | Trollshaw Forest Clearing | 85 | 2 | N/A | | ? | Uruk-Hai Breeding Chamber | 180 | 3 | N/A | | ? | Bag End | 180 | 3 | N/A | | ? | Basic Block Bucket | 250 | 7 | N/A | | ? | Rivendell | N/A | 5 | N/A | | ? | Fortress of Isengard | N/A | 6 | N/A |
The only series released under the Intelli-blox name was a line of licensed sets produced for Peter Jackson's film The Fellowship of the Ring. The license was held by Playmates (curiously titilating name for a manufacturer of children's action figures), and the blocks themselves were produced by Tandem bricks, a brand seldom seen and little available in North America. The Intelli-blox line therefore represents an oddly concentric product: a property licensed to a brand owned by a company that contracts brick production through a separate manufacturer!
All in all, the LotR sets were a mixed bag. The quality of the plastic and consistency of the colors were quite good, and numerous specialized pieces add nice detail to one's constructions, but more on this below.
The sets all included at least two figures on a base about the size of a 2x4 brick and containing a voice-recording on a computer chip. The voices could be activated by placing the figure into one of several special slots in the Mines of Moria playset, but to be honest I found the voices garbled and difficult to understand. Further, the figures are only semi-posable, with moving arms and heads. To be frank, it seems that Playmates sacrificed playability for the sake of electronic novelty, and in the end it appears to have helped to doom the line.
From the beginning the sets were a questionable piece:price value, with the small sets costing between $10 and $20 and the aforementioned Mines set originally retailing for $79.99! It's possible that the electronic components inflated the price, but if so then this was a poor marketing strategy indeed. Worse, the scale of the figures was larger than a standard minifig, and the accessories (swords, shields, bows, etc.) were too thin to fit in a minifig's hands. As a result, few of the architectural elements and none of the weapons were well suited for use in conventional minifig-scale constructions.
Some of the nicer elements include: sculpted trees and shrubs (which are, actually, not far removed from minifig scale and could easily be incorporated); extra-wide 2x2 round bricks, for making columns; statues of robed figures and of paired raptors; a heavy vault door; rocks (analagous to those seen Mega Bloks' Dragons line); and the windows mentioned above.
The last six entries in the listing appear not to have been released and I've been unable to track down the set numbers. However, from the instruction booklet that came with The Mines of Moria, it's clear that other sets were planned for production. The booklet included a listing of the phrases that the various figures could utter, and some of the named figures were identified as coming from sets not yet released. From this I conclude that the line was canceled mid-stride, likely owing to dismal sales at pretty much every store that carried them.
The line was discontinued after the initial release of six sets.
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Tandem Bricks: 1987(?) through 2001(?) - (Read 2,984 Times)
