Back then the Lego men (there were no women) came in city characters or space men (they may have just started to do a limited range of knights as well). They ALL had the same yellow heads with the same smiley faces, and that wasn't really a bad thing. It was just they way Lego men were.
Somebody at Lego finally came up with the idea of updating the figures. They now have awesome facial features. No more boring smiley face, lol.
Last year I was waiting in a checkout line at Target and saw a box full of packets of individual Lego figures in what appeared to be a “lucky dip” type arrangement. I bought one just to see which one I would get. That was Series 1 of the Minifigures. Had I known that in Series 1 each of the 16 different figures had individual barcodes, I probably would have gone back the next day to find the ones I wanted. I didn’t. I never saw another box of that series again.
Earlier this year I noticed a box or two of what turned out to be Series 3. (Not sure why I never saw any Series 2 figures.) This time I was determined to get several of them. I guess you could say I became obsessed, lol.
I spent a lot of time, in various stores, squeezing foil packets to try and figure out which figure might be inside. Random shoppers would give me odd looks (naturally) but several were intrigued enough to actually stand there and help me squeeze packets! (Lego had wised up that the identifying barcodes reduced sales because people only bought the ones they wanted, and they now had no obvious identifying marks). After many wasted hours a nice lady told me that, although they all looked the same, there were apparently some Braille-like dots on the back of the packs which would help. Five minutes on Google and I had the code breaker, so I managed to get the Fisherman, Biggles, Snowboarder and several others.
Series 4 has been harder to find. They were released in April but don’t seem to be stocked at the usual places. The Braille dots are a wash this time round (damn you Lego), so I have gone back to squeezing packets again. sigh...
At long last I have FINALLY found the Hazmat Guy that I’ve been searching for. The expression on his face is priceless.
Now I just have to find the urban skateboarder…
...sigh.
This could take a while.
