 Quick question, what is the most influential and popular toy brand of all time? It's not Nerf, or Hot Wheels, or Barbie despite all of us being Knoffs. No more turtles, no more Hasbro, no more ponies, no more Funko, Weon Star Wars, we get Marvel, Trips 2, Legos connect like Legos. It's Lego, Lego my ego, Lego bricks, Legos even though that's not the right way to say it, but shut up Devin, this is why you have no friends. Lego is the powerhouse of modern influence, all of you staring at your screens eating your snacks have some form of nostalgia related to these stack them up rectangles that really hurt to step on. Either be following the instructions brick by brick or following no instructions like a wild west outlaw, dropping your hand into a bin of mixed bricks from a bunch of random sets that you use to build janky rockets or whatever the hell this is, or your nostalgia could be from stuff that has nothing to do with the physical bricks like the Lego Movie, Ninjago, Bionicle, video games with popular brands like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Marvel and all these little guys here. It can also be stop motion animations on YouTube that has halo decapitation and Darth Vader kistries. You got the funny TV commercials where lego city is getting destroyed every other week and some guy yells hey even got getting your lego license from lego land. How times have passed my friends we went from going in funny little circles in the world was always to having 10 buds in a row before letting loose in the town. Rocket fetch me my keys. Lego has been a massive part of my life and it's one of the only things that has not just followed me to adulthood but has even been strengthened in adulthood. I buy lego set after lego set in minifigure after minifigure. Look I even have all them up it's including beaker who's the best one and as I talk to friends and see the world around me I start to realize that lego is huge and is still insanely relevant in comparison to a lot of other toy brands and it made me think why is lego not falling off and how has it kept its mainstream relevancy. So I started to dig around and there's a clear answer to why lego is still around despite even having recent problems. So come with me on this lego nostalgia trip as we see why lego is the powerhouse it is today and why it hasn't fallen off yet. Also subscribe I really need this. It's the year 1932 a man in dead mark named Ole Kirk Christiansen has a profession where he likes to go into the woods and chop down trees to make toys for children and then the postman comes up wrong guy. Ole had a struggling carpenter business that was making no money due to a fun little time in history called the Great Depression. So he had to lay off everyone then his wife fit the dust. It wasn't a great year for Ole but since Ole was a good carpenter and is now recently widowed with children he made wooden toys for the little guys to lift up their spirits. Then he got a little white ball by 3M that said yo I can make some cash off these wooden duckies so he began cooking and why I made a joke earlier this time it actually was for Christmas because a business guy heard all about the cool toys and made a big ass order. So with this order Ole decided to make this toy pipe dream a reality so now he had to give it a name. He came up with Legott which means play well in Danish and in Latin also means put together. That was a coincidence. Ole didn't see that far ahead trust me but since four letter words are easier to remember he dropped the T and it became the Lego. And then Justin Timberlake came in and said to drop the and that's how Facebook was created. New face filters on Instagram today. Oh yeah and that business guy we talked about earlier who commissioned all the toys yeah he went bankrupt so Ole had to sell ducks for food instead of cash uh they still ate that Christmas because instead of getting cheddar uh they got cheddar. Ratatouille. Fast forward it's World War II and the man with the funny moustaches going ham on the world. And while Indiana Jones is fighting off the moustache man's army while also getting his autograph uh Ole's company was doing okay and then Germany invaded Denmark which was awkward for business but Ole was still making a profit through the war and then uh oh someone left the stove on and his workshop burnt to the ground and he almost lost his company. Fast forward again it's 1946 they rebuilt the factory then Ole goes to Copenhagen but not to pack a lip like a New York Yankee but instead to see a plastic molding machine. Ole bought the molding machine and made toys and rattles then he made little plastic bricks that could stack and they did good at first and then fell off after Christmas. Many years later the bricks were abandoned but then Ole's son Godfrey got a little lightball by 3 a.m. just like his father did at some point. Toys have always been stationary so what if a kid could not only have control of play but also control of assembly. So in 1955 you get the first modern Lego set ever named Lego System of Play and it sold like hotcakes all around the world but the pieces were The old Lego bricks could only stack together they couldn't hold together so to make them better tubes were installed so that they could stick together. Then Ole croaked the factory burnt down again so Godfrey said fuck the wooden ducks and put all of his chips down on these plastic bricks. He also made a Lego land and an airport then it was off to the races. Spaceships, hospitals, towns, fire trucks, motorcycles. Lego from the 60s to late 80s was super basic. All the sets are based on real-life concepts and many other things with funny yellow Lego people. Classes as fuck by the way we never got a Lego hood or a trap house. What the hell? Lego was new and fresh and nobody knew how much greater it was gonna get so they enjoyed what they had. The Lego bricks suction also had a patent on them so Lego itself at one beard was the by factor. You could get Barbie Transformers GI Joe or you could get the 324 set house with a garage. Okay that's kind of lame but you could get the 335 transport truck. At least it wasn't $300 like now. Kids in the 70s were losing their shit on Christmas because they got the Lego road crane or the 575 Canadian Coast Guard station. Things were cool and nice and then we get to the 90s and early 2000s. Lego was running into a problem where they were making a ton of products with little interest. They made so many pirates and knights and sets without brand power that they began to lose money. So Lego shifted focus and got new designers that wanted to sacrifice Lego's architecture to focus more on play. So they axed all the old stuff including the pirate money but in 1998 Lego still lost 23 million dollars and had to lay off 1,000 employees. So with everything going downhill Lego needed some money so they began to do license deals. It's the year 1999. The last year of the 1900s a new decade three years before greatness and the embodiment of victory entered this world. But more importantly it's a year of a new Star Wars. It was 16 years since the original trilogy concluded. Everyone was excited and Lucasfilm was ready. They were licensing Star Wars to everyone. If it existed in 1999 the Phantom Menace was getting slapped onto it. Toys, food, soda, gaming machines, you couldn't escape it. And Lego being in a really bad position held on for dear life during this aggressive advertisement period. Also another brand to be licensed was Winnie the Pooh to then be followed by Harry Potter in 2000. But no other collaboration has had as much of an impact on Lego than the Star Wars brand. In 1994 to 2004 Lego was still drowning. Lego Star Wars was selling but whenever there was gaps between the film's releases hype would die down. Also a lot of people didn't really enjoy the first two movies so selling toys for them was kind of hard. But Lego was also releasing original trilogy stuff next to it and people liked the Clone Wars. But Star Wars still wasn't enough to get Lego out of their massive hole yet. 2003 and 2004 were the worst years for Lego in its history. The company lost $217 million and almost went bankrupt. And this was because Lego wasn't fully adapting to the child market. And they were also running multiple theme parks while the Lego brand was not only drowning in debt but the brand was also losing popularity which made these theme parks just cause more debt. But then the CEO quit, the company stole the four external theme parks, the 80% of outsourcing came back to home base, then the next year Revenge of the Sith released. Which was the best of the prequel trilogy and to some the best Star Wars movie in general. 2005 was a comeback for Lego and the change is why Lego is still successful today. Lego's licensing got stronger and stronger and in 2008 Lego sales increased by 32% because of Lego licensed video games becoming popular in the console market. Like Lego Indiana Jones, Lego Batman, Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga and from here you have a spiral. Original Lego stuff got cooler like Ninjago that also had a TV audience. More brands kept collaborating, Clone Wars was huge so the Lego market was huge as well. You got the Lego movie, the Lego Batman movie and when you look at the graph of Lego's revenue they were having great years. Which brings us to Modern Lego. 2017 was the first time Lego saw a decline in revenue where they had to lay off people and adapt again. If anything though it's been proven that Lego is really good at adapting. You see in the early 2000s the problem was that Lego were too focused on architecture and engineering which made it hard for kids to have stupid fun. So they reversed that. It's no coincidence that in 2017 you saw a decline in Lego and that's because Fortnite was becoming popular. From 2017 to 2020 kids were entering a digital age of content. Gaming was becoming more mainstream and accessible since the free to play models being copied and pasted everywhere. Which made kids want to grind online fun with each other so why the hell would you want a Lego city set for your 10th birthday when you can instead get the battle pass that has the omega where you never get to finish the lights and you regret it all these years later. 2018 and 2019 you had Avengers and some other cool Lego theme sets come out but then boom pandemic. Lego stayed normal through 2020. It was still on the same track but this is now when Lego made a change that has made it the strongest it's ever been. Lego said fuck them kids. Everyone who grew up with Lego still likes Lego and that all those Lego kids got money since they're grown up now unless you're the whole my garden who has no money so Lego got mature. They aged up with their audience and have now made Lego a decoration piece instead of a toy. From 2021 and forward how many of you guys have bought Lego not for the intention of fantasy and fun but for the intention of filling your room with little fun wacky knickknacks. Since 2021 Lego has made some cool ass shit that adults are buying. The botanical set was released in 2021 and has Lego flower bouquets, bonsai tree orchids and a bunch of other kind of flowers. You have a client with Adidas to make the original superstars and I even have this set because it's awesome. You have the friend set, the Lego office that my sister got me for my birthday. Thank you. You had the Titanic which overtook the Millennium Falcon as the largest set ever and then the next year Lego kept it up with some more cool stuff. Real Madrid Stadium, Optimus Prime which I also have Jesus Christ. Just look at the set list and you can see all the cool shit that you could get and for the popular licensing stuff Star Wars has really cool head statues. I got one for Boba Fett, Darth Vader and Mando. Marvel has them too. I got this really cool Star Lord mask. You could build the Infinity Gauntlets and Groot Venom. Okay. You have cool diorama set pieces from Star Wars to Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park and many others. And like I mentioned in the intro of this video, we have a bunch of knickknack collaborations from many figures all the time. Lego has been the most successful ever because of these recent practices. Adults are childish at heart. No child is buying this big ass Bowser. That's exclusively for dad. And by doing this, Lego has managed to be at its peak success while other toy companies are fighting the tides of this recent digital culture change of people not caring about action figures, dolls or toys like they used to. Even the stuff intended for children in Lego has a quality that still makes it a cool set piece for Lego. Look at this no way home set I bought. It's a great set piece and has a bunch of mini figures. Look at Minecraft Lego or Super Mario Lego. I built a massive ATTE with Commander Cody. I got a whole clone army while we're at it. People love Lego because it's not just a toy. It could be a toy, but it could also be a collectible, or a shelf display, or a decoration. Lego has such a variety that it could be accessible to anyone unless you're poor. Which brings us to the problem of modern Lego. I asked you guys, the audience of the Dr. Skipper channel on my community tab, about your thoughts on Lego. And everyone has pretty much been saying the same answer. That they love Lego and their good moral ethics, but also that they're just so expensive now. Look I know the world isn't in the greatest spot economically and because of that Lego is becoming less and less accessible to the demographic it was originally made for, alongside some of the average income people who like it. If you have a car payment, rent, and children to take care of, paying $150 for a good Lego set is absurd. Lego just released this really cool gunship with a couple of really good mini figures and it's $140. UCS stuff and dioramas I get being really expensive. Supply and demand, it's made for the audience of people who have money, but for average income families, who's gonna drop insane cash on something that will eventually go into a bucket of random pieces? Like this comment from Nick Casey just made me so sad. I wish my son could have a giant container of it like me and my siblings did growing up, but it's unaffordable to buy for kids to just play with. It's become a collector's item. And this made me reflect on my life a bit. I complain about video games and movies and make some money to buy these cool things to just sit on a shelf or stay in a drawer. But when I was a kid I wanted to have space battles and a war on geonosis and my cousin had so many cool ass Legos that we could just play with and create our own stories and campaigns and because of that I'm convinced it's one of the reasons I am who I am today. Tablets are to shut kids up. Toys are to fill them with imagination, passion, and dreams. And you just can't buy Legos anymore like you once could. And because of this sets are getting smaller and more expensive. And people are not buying them because why pay a hundred dollars for a Minecraft set when you can just buy or play Minecraft itself that serves the same exact purpose that Lego does to the kids mind. And this hurts me personally because I don't see Lego as just a toy. I see it as so much more. All the Lego I have now I intend to keep until the day I have children. Where I can then take apart every single brick of my creations so that I can rebuild it again with someone that I love and they can be filled with joy and creativity and amazing memories because that's what Lego is about. You can buy the Fender and the DeLorean but Spider-Man, the X-Wing, the Slave One are always going to be more valuable because it's going to be the sets that actually do their job. And that job is to fill kids up with imagination. I love adult Lego, but Kid Lego is so much more important. And Lego as a company is so important for the future generation of children so they need to find a middle ground where you can make high profits and still have all this cool ass shit. But also have little rascals play and make memories at an affordable price. Or else what's the point of all this? Lego isn't a morally fucked company. Their biggest crime is sometimes cutting corners and being a little too expensive, but that's due to the modern climate and being a business. And because of this, I love Lego. There's no company that has done what Lego has done. Be sleek, cool, creative, inspiring, and fun at the same time. Lego appeals to all demographics, ages, and people. And because of this, Lego has stayed on top and is still on top while so many other companies that were rooted in the exact same principles fall to greed and lust. Lego is important and more than just a toy. Thanks for watching. Follow me on this horrible website and click here if you want to see a video about the recent downfall of Disney.