*By professionally put together, I'm referring to how the company had the intention to produce a professional-looking set and how it was designed, molded, packaged, and sold with that intention, even if the final product was lacking. I'm not referring to my "professional" putting it together since, as was made painfully obvious in the video, there was no professionalism to be found.
...Today, we visit the other side of that spectrum. Today, we dive into the cesspool that is... Lego bootlegs...
I think it's fair to say that there has been a pretty large amount of Lego knock-offs and straight-up bootlegs since Lego started producing bricks in 1947. Obviously, I can't pinpoint the date when smaller companies saw financial opportunities in producing similar plastic bricks, but the Lego brick patent expiring in 1989 definitely helped open the floodgates for companies wanting to cash in on the craze. And despite Lego continually filing lawsuits against said companies for "trademark infringement", even going so far as to try to trademark the Lego Indicia, aka "studded bricks", in 2003, I highly doubt the gates are going to be closed any time soon.
Today, the market is mostly dominated by Lego, Mega Bloks, Kre-O, and, to a lesser extent, K'Nex, but other companies have also thrown their hats in the ring and tried to grab a share. Just to name a few lines that have at some point introduced their own building bricks into the mainstream market, we have Best Lock, Block Tech, Built to Rule, Cobi, C3 Toys, CoCo, EXIN Castles, BanBao, Oxford, Lite Brix, Tyco Super Blocks, Loc Blocs, Mis Ladrillos, Nanoblocks, Pico Crickets, Rasti, Super City, and Tente. And those are just the ones that have produced building bricks similar to Lego, leaving out Tinker Toys, Meccano, Magnetix, etc.
But let's leave the high-to-decent quality production and fairly original ideas behind and sink lower into the market, arriving at the point where quality and originality is forgotten and making a quick buck is the name of the game. Let's go to China!
Now while there are official building brick companies in China churning out their own lines of licensed and generic building sets, and the knock-off industry of course isn't solely based there, it's the companies that like to straight up copy and/or emulate Lego designs that we usually remember. Companies like Decool, LOZ, Daron, Lele, Bela, SLC Toys, Enlighten, Kazi, and Jia Li Bo are all well known for either producing unlicensed lines of building bricks in a style similar to Lego, or straight-up copying minifigures and even entire sets. And those are just the "name" companies, the ones who have the resources to directly replicate and produce copies of official lines and that are so proud of their thievery, they slap their own company logo on the box.
Sometimes that means new lines produced in the style of Lego that, for one reason or another, haven't been officially produced by Lego.
Sometimes that means entire mold copies of official sets available at a fraction of the cost(and quality.)
And sometimes... it means today's hunkajunk.
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Racing II
Unbranded
0000
21 pcs
So I gave you that brief overview of knock-offs and bootlegs to show you that, even by bootleg standards, this is pretty low on the totem pole...
I bought this a couple months ago at a swap meet near my house, which features a lot of stalls selling questionably produced and licensed toys, including Lego knock-offs like this. This is the generically named "Racing II." Insert obligatory joke about "I'd hate to see what Racing I looked like..."
By the font they copied, it's pretty obvious that they were trying to fool customers into thinking it has something to do with the Mario series, mainly the Mario Kart games.
Except for some reason, they decided to copy the letters in the Super Mario World title as opposed to one of the Mario Kart games. You can pretty clearly see that the R, A, and I letters are copied directly from the cover, while they made a C by cutting off the right side of an O, and the N, G, and Roman numeral "I" are only loose approximations of what they would look like in this title.
And the "3" in marker is how much I paid for this. I think I was overcharged by about $28.
This might be the laziest packing job I've ever seen. Not only does it look like they grabbed a few bags from different sets and threw them into a generic plastic case...
But the bubble is attached to the card backing with SCOTCH TAPE! With just enough applied to keep the plastic from falling off! If you can't afford glue or even staples for your product, just leave the market...
So because of the slapdash, no crap given way this was packaged, I thought this might just be a collection of parts thrown together by someone in their garage for a quick sale, but the multilingual warnings on the back of the card do suggest it's been distributed in countries like France, Italy, and Germany. Of course, we're never given a company name, so I can't be sure.
But maybe they left a name off the packaging to have room to deliver the important warning that this is "Not for children under 14 years." ...Yes, not months, but years!
Strange, because that's usually past the age most kids STOP playing with building bricks, according to some companies*.
*Of course, I don't agree in the slightest. Who are you to tell me I'm too old to play with plastic bricks?! I'll play with my toys when and where I want! Fascists!
And when we take the plastic off, we see a 5-year-old's MS Painting of... the Super Mario Bros. 3 bushes with a road pasted in front of them...?
And here's the final product! ...And somehow, it looks worse put together than in pieces...
So this is pretty obviously a copy of the K'Nex Mario Kart line, more specifically Mario's Kart, only much lower quality and with a few things added or removed.
I do have the official kart, so we can do some comparison.
The Racing II kart is a bit smaller than the official thing, not as long or thick, though the wheels are about the same size.
This is especially noticeable with the battery compartment, which the knock-off obviously doesn't have since this toy is completely hollow.. But they were nice enough to give us four taillights!
...Which fall off at the slightest touch since there's nothing keeping them in...
The steering wheel on the official one has a small connector that locks inside the hole when you put it together, while the knock-off is just a round piece of plastic that fits onto a small peg... which also doesn't have anything holding it on and it can also easily fall off.
The wheels can come off too, but they're pretty securely fastened on with a connector and take a bit of effort to pull off, so that's something, I guess. And since there's no battery-operated or pull-back motor that joins the back two wheels, all wheels freely spin.
While the official one has a relatively good paint job, except for the "M" sticker decal at the top, the "paint job" on the knock-off is all a sticker with a very generic "R." For "Race." ...I guess...
The only detail both versions share are the swoosh-and-checker stickers on the sides, with the knock-off being an obvious copy of the original, just with the top part cut down and the checker board compressed for space. And the copying is so inept, they put the stickers on the wrong sides of the kart, so the image is reversed! Just... wow guys...
And obviously, while the Mario Kart has an interchangeable faceplate, the Racing II kart doesn't come apart. ...Willingly.
I did manage to separate the top and bottom halves of the Racing II kart, which basically just confirms that the bottom is a black piece of plastic that attaches to the top through pegs and that the body is completely hollow.
Though the back of the kart does look like it has a lot of room where the motor should be. I guess we could put something else there...
Oh, Brick Miser. Always sticking your head in where it doesn't belong. ...Though admittedly, this isn't the strangest thing he's stuck his head into...*
*His head also explored the inside of an air vent when I dropped a piece of him down a grate by accident. Luckily, with the aid of scissors and a screwdriver, he was rescued from joining the numerous popcorn kernels down there. ...Seriously though, where did you think the strangest place his head had ended up? HE'S A LEGO FIGURE! Get your mind out of the gutter!
And the black plate wants you to know its name is "Madein China", which sounds like a sequel to Goodnight Saigon...
 |
| Changed to Princess Peach since I don't have the figure for the other kart. |
But now we get to the most damning aspect of the knock-off. As you can see with the kart above, the figures attach onto a peg in front of the steering wheel. It's inconvenient and limits the universal compatibility the toy can have, but it's at least built for a figure to fit onto.
Though if you want to use regular Lego and other building bricks with them, you can stick them onto the studs on the back of the car, or take off the faceplate and let the figures sit on the studs underneath.
But, and I can't emphasize this enough, NOTHING is compatible with the knock-off!
Not only does the front of the steering wheel not have a peg for K'Nex figures to pop onto
But they actually managed to space the studs on the back TOO CLOSE TOGETHER!
Yes, seriously, the back is too compressed to fit any size brick on it! It's strictly for decoration and to fool you into thinking you're getting some sort of Lego model when you're actually just getting a cheap race car they probably offer at Chuckie Cheese for 10 tickets!
Though I guess you could stick some single stud pieces on there. They don't actually attach to anything and they'll fall off as soon as you move the car though...
The only way I found to get bricks with more than one stud to fit on the car is to put them on this weird raised portion on the back. ...Though again, the studs are too small for a brick to actually fit and they'll fall off with the slightest movement.
Though the Brick Miser's back pockets fit on the front studs, I guess...
So, if you haven't guessed yet, this racer is absolute garbage and barely even counts as Lego... Let's see what minifigure came with this.
So right off the bat, you can probably guess that this isn't an original figure made for the Racing II set and that it's actually Rocket Raccoon from the Guardians of the Galaxy Lego line. ...And you'd be right on both counts.
There were multiple Racing II sets at the place I bought this one and each had a random Guardians of the Galaxy figure packaged with the kart. They stopped me from taking pictures, so I can't show you the others, but I had to pick the Rocket Raccoon one just for the surrealism of him riding a go-kart.
Which, as I've shown, is impossible without a lot of poster putty...
The Rocket minifig is quite clearly the best part of this set... though that's not saying anything, especially since one of the bricks on the base fell off in between shots just by me picking it up and it rolled under a shelf to probably never be found again...
The minifigure was produced by Lego knock-off company LEBQ(Lay-Buh-Que?), or Le Bao Quan according to the base plate, which makes a lot of bootleg copies of existing minifigures, including a bunch of Minecraft figures I'll probably show off in the near future. ...Though strangely, it misses a few things that even other bootlegs have gotten right.
I don't have an official figure to compare this one to--I just found the franchise underwhelming--but you can see from this picture that even knock-offs of the original figure match the real thing pretty well. At the very least, they give the character "Hobbit" legs instead of the tall, articulated legs this one has...
The ear detail is also missing from this copy, but my favorite change is that the white around the eyes is more pronounced while the white inside is less, giving Rocket a much more surprised look. Perhaps he realized he's finally been put in a prison truly inescapable...
MY COLLECTION!
Other knock-offs also have a much more stylized and less unwieldy gun than this one.
And while the plastic is considerably better on the minifigure than the kart, it has a few articulation fails, especially with the legs, where the left leg moves just fine, but the right one require the force of a hundred Hulks to move even the slightest...
Still, if you ever buy this set, because you were either stupid or the store clerk had a gun to your head, at least you'll get a halfway decent figure with it. ...Though, if you just want the figure, I'd recommend bypassing this combination and getting a complete set of knock-off GotG figures for around the same price. ...Or better yet, buying the real thing and getting high quality figures from the people who actually make them and who could REALLY use your patronage since some idiot went and bought a crappy kart and minifigure instead of their product. Who that idiot is, I have no idea...
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Quality: The quality is horrendous on nearly every level. The plastic feels really cheap and bendable and the only detailing the car gets is a couple of stickers. The wheels are also made out of cheap plastic instead of rubber, which means they almost never turn. The studs are so close together that stacking bricks on the kart is impossible, and even if you find a way to stick them on, the connection is so loose, they'll fall off at the slightest touch. The only positive I can give it is that the wheels do stay on, even if they don't turn, and they feel solid enough to drive over different surfaces without cracking. The minifigure is also of relatively good quality, but since it was made by a different company, I'm not counting it here.
Design: What was this even designed for? It's incompatible with all known forms of building brick because of its lack of space between studs and the peg for K'Nex figures is missing. The overall physical design is a bare bones racing kart and since they just grabbed a minifigure at random for it, that illusion is completely ruined. Nothing on it serves a practical purpose and it's more likely to make you angry than provide any fun.
Creativity: It's a straight-up copy of one of the Mario Karts from K'Nex with a minifigure from Guardians of the Galaxy thrown in from a completely different source. The dumbed down design only serves to take away any creativity that went into the original product, leaving little more than a basic mold. I guess it's interesting that they went to the trouble of putting headlights/rockets on the back, even if they don't stick, but since I'm so confused as to what they even are, that's not exactly much of a creative venture...
Readability: There were no instructions included with this set. Automatic zero.
Packaging: The packaging contains the only thought they gave to this junk, and that's not saying anything. I find it amusing that the title is made almost solely out of Super Mario World letters when this is a Mario Kart rip-off... The picture is bland and confusing, but it's colorful and it's an original image as opposed to pasting a photo from a game or movie as most bootlegs do. And yes, the fact that you have to be well into puberty and at the age when you're probably no longer interested in Lego in order to play with this set does make me chuckle. A little. Other than that, it's just your basic cheap card back bubble packaging.
Overall:
And that's just because you get a decent quality figure with it. If I worked with smaller increments, the rating brick would only be a pixel wide. It's cheap, it's unusable, it's a lazy knock-off of a fun and vastly superior product, and its cheapness actually makes it hard to look at after a while. There are a lot of cheap Lego-like toys out there, buy any one of them instead of this!
Oh, and I found the brick that popped off earlier. Truly the greatest victory for mankind...
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