Bringing this week’s little LEGO-centered magazines sprint run to a close, it’s time to have a look at the LEGO Explorer November issue. Usually this is not as big a problem, but with four different mags in one week it’s really not easy keeping up.
This one is about “the desert”, but in my view in a rather weird way. It actually starts out okay by listing a number of animals and plants that inhabit the dry lands of this world, but than strangely enough veers away from that by presenting chameleons and geckos, which with a few exceptions are tree-dwelling creatures more typically found in rain forests or the transition zones at the edge of forests where they can hide in bushes or under dead trees and rocks.
This oddness continues with the Egyptian pyramids making an appearance, which factually is also questionable. They may be surrounded by sand now, but it is assumed that once the riversides of the Nile were lush and green and those areas at least had grass and palm trees.
The poster picks up on this as well. at least it doesn’t add more confusion by throwing even more topics in the same pot and it’s executed well enough to deserve being pinned to a wall of your little nerd’s study.
The extra is one of the already mentioned geckos and while thematically not at all correct, it is at least cute enough to make up for it. A skink, a thorny dragon or a tumbling wheel spider might have been more appropriate and just as much fun, though. Also if they had gone for a blue or yellow gecko it might have been even cooler already.
The sum of the parts is okay, but one really must view each of them individually. There’s no recognizable stringency in this edition. I don’t know why it seems so hard for the editors to come up with consistent content. I don’t even need to think that hard and could probably fill an issue with double the number of pages just on the subject of actual goings-ons in the desert…
Mylenium's Brick Corner 