Lego just launched its first series of Minifigures, little plastic dolls that come in similar colors to the Lego bricks.  They look like a wackier version of Playmobil.

On the Minifigures site, there are bios for these characters.  Lego also rates them in terms of strength, creativity, and speed.  Seems like a set of performance-oriented traits.  Maybe a generation ago, these toys would also be ranked by intelligence, but that’s now dated/irrelevant.  Creativity might be a more positive, nurturing substitute for intelligence.

There are also a couple of online games; one features the street skater, and the other will star the cheerleader at some sort of dance challenge.  The street skater most resembles guys I’ve dated.  I have not tested this game.

It’s cute that kids would choose these Legos over violent alternatives.  Maybe I should be pissed that the females are represented as a compulsively cartwheeling cheerleader and a misguided, overworked nurse:

The Nurse thinks that every problem can be solved by expert medical care. If she sees a child crying because its balloon is stuck up in a tree, she’ll try everything from checking its temperature to taking X-rays, trying more and more complicated procedures when nothing seems to solve the problem. She doesn’t understand why the tears stop as soon as she gives the child a new balloon for being such a good patient, but she’s proud and delighted that her treatment worked anyway.

But I don’t.  I just love the robot:

With his powerful metal body and mighty claws, the Robot may look tough, but what he really loves to do is build, build, build! Constantly clanking, beeping, whirring and sending out jets of steam, he works tirelessly day and night, searching out spare bricks wherever he can find them and stacking them together to create the biggest, tallest and most incredible structures that you can possibly imagine.

Aw.

Check out the Lego Minifigures on their site

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Tags: Lego, toys