Lego System Pirates

Aaaaargh!!

Loved this when I was younger! I think I prefer Classic Castle now though!

Awww, memories! I think the pirates and knights were my favourite.

Does anyone remember the strange 'Aquazone' Lego sets?

Yeah. And the windows in the bad guys submarines were orange, and had shark mouth and shark eyes on the sides.

I didn't like Aquazone much because the vehicles were just vehicles -- the pirate ships were huge and open, so you could arrange little scenes on the deck, as well as moving the ships around.

I guess I'm just people-oriented.

I also loved -- and continue to love, to this day -- that pirates were clearly marketed as the protagonists in the set, and bad guys were very obviously the British Navy. Kind of subversive, really.

Because I had bits of every Lego theme, I usually put them together in a weird culture and timescale clash. So I used the few Aquazone bits I had to meet the pirates in the sea. And my pirates were often at war with the knights, who were protecting their castles from sea attacks. :)

Strangely, the samurai/ninja theme didn't seem to gain much popularity, did it? Did anyone have any?

I too tried to make the themes co-exist. When I was younger I always pretended that the Castle theme was somewhere on land, away from the sea and the coast that the Pirates lived in. I used to have the Aquazone sets too. For some unknown reason, they were the underwater part of Lego City.

I had some Ninja sets, but they were shortlived- I think it only lasted a year. They're worth a lot of money now though as a result.

The castle and pirate themes went well together, really. They were definitely close enough to each other on the timeline for me to rationalize their coexistence when I was eight. Which is maybe not saying much, but there it is.

Every now and then, I'd try to do the right thing and play with the castle sets by themselves, as they were intended, with the knights as good guys. Invariably, when things got dull, someone would defect and become a pirate at a critical moment, leaving his comrades in arms in a less than ideal strategic position, probably because he was the lynchpin in some sort of ambitious military undertaking on the part of the knights that was ill-advised in the first place.

Hubrice was the tragic flaw of a lot of my lego people.