Wanna scoot?
December 8: Scoot-scoot
This is a scooter. For scootin’ around. It is fire-engine red and has an impressive kickstand. Its wheels could be used as sheaves in a block if mechanical advantage should be required.
Rating
Fun ★★★★★
This seems like so much fun. The wheels spin, the handlebars are adjustable, and a Lego person can stand on it in a novel way (to me, anyway), having their body face forward on a structure that’s only one Lego pip wide.
Ease of Build ★★★★★
This went together pretty easily, mostly because of one specialty piece: there is apparently a Lego part that is a nearly self-contained scooter deck. I don’t love that parts this level of specificity exist, on similar grounds as Alton Brown’s contempt for “unitaskers” in the kitchen, and this piece would likely be pretty unhelpful in most non-scooter contexts. But also, it’s a really cool piece, and makes it easy to build a scooter that is also fun to play with, in a way that wouldn’t be possible with 1980s Legos.
Comprehensibility ★★★★☆
It’s clearly a scooter. I’m not 100% sure whether it’s supposed to be a kick scooter (the unmotorized kind with roller blade wheels) or a scoot-scoot1. It’s a little chonky, so I’m leaning scoot-scoot, although a fully-accurate scale model of a kick scooter would likely be incredibly fragile and fail all sorts of basic toy safety standards. Either way, I’m sticking with full-electric scoot-scoot.
1 I’m not sure if the term “scoot-scoot” has fully caught on yet, but it should soon, so be prepared. It was coined by my coworker, Hector, many years ago, after attending a conference in a city that had motorized electric scooters that you could rent (or possibly just borrow?), in a time before anyone had ever seen such a thing. He talked about them a lot, and referred to them only as scoot-scoots, which, as far as I’m concerned, is their correct and proper name.
Extra Parts ★★★☆☆
I could have sworn that I heard the Lego kids holler “YAH!” when this prize was revealed, and assumed it was due to their enthusiasm for scoot-scoots, but it turns out that YAH is an acronym for “Yet Another Helmet.” This is probably not intended to be an “extra part,” and is more of a subtle bludgeoning about safety, but we’re chock full of helmets at this point. I will say that it’s a pinkish/magenta color, which is cool.
Overall ★★★★★
Building it wasn’t like standing up the Colossus of Rhodes, but at least there was some building required, and it resulted in a cool toy that the Lego folks will certainly enjoy. Safely.
