After a few hitches at my end, Minifigure Week is back on. Sorry for the delay guys!
Minifigures are one of my favourite things about Lego – and
series 12 is on the way (possibly even out in your country by the time you read
this). So to celebrate this upcoming release, every day this week, we’ll be
looking at a different minifigure from the series that have come before. This
is by no means a comprehensive overview – nor even necessarily a look at my
favourites – but it’s an example of some of the unusual figures the line has
produced since it debuted back in 2010. Today, we look at Intergalactic Girl from series 6.
“No thanks needed. I’m just doing my part to make the spaceways safe!” The name of the Intergalactic Girl is cheered by life forms on every inhabited planet, moon, space station and asteroid in the cosmos. As an interstellar adventurer, she and her daring outer-space exploits are the stuff of legend throughout the known universe, and even a few of the unknown bits, too.
With nothing but a quasar zapper, a pair of antigravity boots and a can-do attitude, the Intergalactic Girl has single-handedly saved solar systems from black holes, rescued civilizations from cosmic conquerors and captured entire fleets of Blacktron battle cruisers. She never has time to stay for the celebrations afterwards, though, because there’s always another space crisis waiting just around the next nebula!
Since the blind-bagged minifigures debuted, there have been quite a few Space Police-esque and Blacktron figures released. Starting with the Spaceman in Series 1, similar characters have popped
up every few series, just quietly lurking in the background.
While the Space theme
yielded many great sets in the 1980s and 1990s, there hasn't been a lot going on in
the last few years – a Space Police theme in 2009 and Galaxy Squad in 2013 seem to have been about it. Galaxy Squad had some cool ideas and some
exceptional higher-end sets, but I can’t help but feel that it never quite lived
up to its full potential. Intergalactic Girl wears a pink spacesuit and helmet. I’ve got mixed feelings about this; I probably would have liked her a lot more if she was wearing a more generic colour such as grey or blue, but I can appreciate that realistically this figure is being pushed at little girls more than it is at 29-year old male toy collectors.
Paint is minimal -- she's got all of the standard modern Space trappings, like the logo and little detailings on her suit. Her face has been done with the standard "sassy" expression, with the main difference being that she has silver lipstick rather than the traditional red. Her sleeves are both cast in slightly darker colours than the torso piece, matching the printed detailing on edges of the torso and legs.
Her ray gun ("quasar zapper") is the same as the Classic Alien, but with a
blue laser blast instead of a green one. This accessory has been reused
multiple times throughout the minifigure sets, and I’m sure we’ll see it again
in future series too.
Her main distinguishing feature from other Space figures is her hair – while all of the
male figures have removable helmets, she is the only one with an
interchangeable hair piece. So I think we can safely conclude that all men in Space Police are bald, or shave
their heads. I didn’t plan to turn this into “Jane
Fonda week” in addition to “Minifigure Week", but though Intergalactic Girl is sufficiently generic
that you could probably point to a few different sources, she becomes a bit of a toned-down Barbarella once her helmet is removed and hair attached.
I probably don't sound all that enthused about this figure, and I think that would be fair -- I’m not really over the moon about Intergalactic Girl (HA!),
but she’s not bad by any means. Her value for me is not really as part of the Space theme itself, but as some kind of conscious retro-futuristic throwback to 60s or 70s sci-fi. A fun, if non-essential addition to the collection.
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