Speed Racer and Snake Oiler

Some of us are old enough to remember Speed Racer. Some of us remember the sleek, speedy Mach 5, with its gadgets and its technologically advanced engine, and while the car was always far more advanced than the method of animation that depicted it, the show has gained a worldwide following and been kept alive by fans through various revivals, comic books, cartoon series, DVD collections and the like. Now a new film that looks incredibly flashy may revive it again to a new worldwide audience.

Some of us are old enough to remember Lego blocks as Lego blocks. They were all sharp rectangles, and you could build anything you wanted out of the basic shapes, from a pea (one green 1x1 block) to a pumpkin (a cube). Those days are long, long gone as Lego has created pieces custom-fit for various models, and such is the case with this pair of cars: the Mach 5 and Hydr-A-Cell.

Lego is on board with the new film, with several construction kits planned, and the first of its kits is the pair of cars driven by Speed Racer and Snake Oiler.

With 242 pieces, this box is intended for kids ages 7 to 12. I asked my 12-year-old daughter to put the cars together as I observed.

This set is packaged in a box that measures about 11 inches square and is covered with photos of the completed cars, as well as the Speed Racer logo, and images of the two small Lego people inside that represent Speed Racer and Snake Oiler.

Perhaps the days are gone of making big square blocks that represent whatever our imaginations allowed. While you can still buy standard Lego blocks, what you see inside the two bags inside this box are hardly recognizable as the old Lego blocks that some of us remember. But you'd be hard pressed to make a wheeled Mach 5 that measures about 7 inches long with the old-style blocks.

Included in this packaging are axles, wheel hubs, rubber wheels, hubcaps, a steering column, car seats and pieces that have been introduced, over time, to facilitate the job of producing small, complex models that actually look like what you intended.

Lego Speed Racer, Lego!

So my 12-year-old daughter set to work with a brilliantly colored instruction booklet that had no words in it at all. This is to ensure that the omni-lingual model builders worldwide can all be served with the same booklet. The beginning stages went rather well, with simple diagrams showing how the pieces fit together. In later stages, however, it is highly difficult to see what pieces are to be added to the models, and only a very careful scan shows what new pieces are added in each step.

Note to Lego: Take this advice, please, if you take no other advice again: Distinguish the new pieces by desaturating the existing, constructed parts or by otherwise highlighting any new pieces that must be added at each step. Most kids ages 7 to 12 aren't going to spend minutes to discern that a 1x2 thin block is added in step 12 if there is nothing on the diagram to point it out.

After several times having to go back and figure out what she missed in previous steps, my daughter successfully pieced together her first car, applied the stickers, and had herself a very nice Mach 5 to play with. (Amusingly, she chose to make the Mach 5 a British-drive, and purposely put the steering wheel on the right side of the car, and she did the same for the Hydr-a-Cell. And, thankfully, being such a versatile building system, this kit permitted that.)

One minor complaint I have about the kits is that while on the Hydr-a-Cell each sticker is individually applied to a single Lego piece, a part of the Mach 5's main M symbol on the hood covers three separate Lego pieces, while remaining one single sticker, which means that those pieces are not meant to be separable, which seems counter to the Lego design paradigm.

But despite the myriad customized pieces that one might think were created specifically for them (and I'm sure the windshields were, at least), these kits were fun to build and drive nicely across a floor. And I think one of the funnest parts is that if they ever have an accident, they'll go to pieces and offer just as much fun in rebuilding.