Spray-On Authenticity

I observed something depressing about modern toy culture via Lego the other day. We were killing time in Times Square between eating and the Lyceum Theatre's opening. We wandered around the flagship Toys'r'us snarklng. When we got to the Lego, which I've not seen close-up for nigh on thirty-five years, it struck me that the vast majority of the items on sale were kits, not bricks. There were (branded) Star Wars kits, aircraft kits, car kits and so on. Each of these was made up of a small number of large preformed parts, which presumably snap together. On about a fifth of the parts, some of the surfaces were covered with the lego nubbles; all the rest were smooth and featureless. The nubbles had no constructional function - they were on things like wing surfaces where nothing should be attached. They were clearly nothing but elements of “spray-on authenticity” - intended to give the illusion that the object had been constructed out of Lego bricks, without any of the preliminary visualization or actual construction that really building a large model out of Lego would require. It was as depressing an example as I've yet seen how things that were educational and challenging in my youth have been dumbed down to fuck and franchised to buggery.