Minifigure Week! Day 5: Intergalactic Girl (series 6, 2012)

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.

 

 

Minifigure Week! Day 3: Fitness Instructor (series 5, 2011)

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 the Fitness Instructor from Series 5, all the way back in 2011.

“Don’t fall down now! We’re just getting warmed up!”

The Fitness Instructor has devoted herself to one thing and one thing only: getting people in great shape! With the help of a boom-box full of energetic workout tunes and a wall full of degrees in aerobics, yoga and more, she leads fitness sessions and promotes good health wherever she goes.
With her endless energy and enthusiasm, the Fitness Instructor makes exercise look like so much fun that you just can’t resist joining in. But if you do, be prepared for the workout of a lifetime, because she’ll keep going and going long after everybody else is ready to drop from exhaustion!

 

-- LEGO.com biography

The 1980s. An era that gave us Reaganomics, some of the best music the world has ever seen, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, RoboCop – and Jane Fonda’s workout tapes.

 

Pic from Amazon.com

I’m sure I’m generalising a bit here, but it seems that in the late 1970s and early 1980s gyms were largely for Arnie-esque muscle men, and women didn’t really have anywhere they could go to work out. But the release of Jane Fonda’s workout tapes changed all that, helping innovate the “home exercise” movement, alongside other pioneers like Richard Simmons. As far as I can tell, this isn't such a big thing these days, but it was HUGE in the 1980s and 1990s. You couldn't turn on the TV without seeing an ad for some new piece of exercise equipment or VHS that would "strip the fat away", "get those abs toned" or "give you magical powers" (advertising laws weren't as strict back then, and we didn't have the internet to fact check). There was even a TV show called Aerobics Oz Style that ran for YEARS on Channel Ten over here, and I'm sure most readers had their own local equivalents too.   

How does this relate to today’s review? Well, any of the more 1980s-savvy you will probably have clicked by now -- though the Gym Instructor isn’t specifically Jane Fonda, I think it’s a fairly safe bet to say she was the central inspiration. And of course, one can only assume that Olivia Newton-John’s Physical music video (hilarious but borderline NSFW) had a role to play too.

Released in 2011 as part of series 5, the Gym Instructor is a bit of an oddity in a Lego theme that has produced a lot of unusual figures. She doesn’t really fit with any of the other characters – maybe the Weightlifter from series 2 – or any other Lego sets that I’ve ever seen. Maybe you could slot her in with some of the really pink and girly sets from the 1990s, but I think she'd look like an anachronism there too.  

The slightly bouffant hair, pink patterned leotard, lime headband, lime belt, lime legwarmers and bright blue tights are all 1980s gold. It doesn't seem to be specifically based on a particular costume, but this one looks about right. 

She comes with one accessory – a lavender boom box – which boosts the whole thing from “pretty cool” to absolute winner.  The main thing that could really improve the whole ensemble is a Richard Simmons analogue to make a truly 80s-tastic display. Or at least an out-of-shape student or two. 
 

I’m a big fan of this minifigure. She’s very 1980s and very tacky, which tends to be a winning combo in my book. I've been watching The Goldbergs a lot lately, which has only increased my appreciation, and which I highly recommend to any fellow 80s-philes out there.  

Also, I decided to include her because I remember how disappointed my friend Boon (of TheBoonArmies fame) was when he bought something like four Minifigure blind bags and got her in about three of them. I wouldn’t have been thrilled myself, but I do remember it annoying him a whole lot, and I hoped to rekindle some of that irritation :)