And the Winner is...

I went to Toys'R'Us today, to look for the new Honda racer concept thing from Hot Wheels. I couldn't find it, but I did wander past the back wall, and remembered that I was going to right about the winner of a hypothetical 'Best toy ever for people who like science and stuff' competition, judged solely by me. The nominees are:

1. LEGO

2. My talking Einstein action figure with the flat batteries.

The winner is LEGO! Oh my, what a surprise. Consider, the entire LEGO range- from Duplo to mindstorm- is interconnectable. Blocks from 1968 will connect to blocks from last Friday. This is a level of standardisation that is higher than NASA's. Starting with Episode 1 in 1998/9, LEGO has used licenced characters, instead of in-house ranges. This gives it a huge marketing advantage (have you heard of K*NEX lately?), but since its kept the modularity, it hasn't sold out. There was a time there when the licenced kits had a lot of big specialty pieces that weren't "proper" LEGO, but the Indiana Jones and Batman lines seem to have reversed that. What all this means is that kids can make Batman and Han Solo fight the sorting hat, and isn't that the point of childhood?
The thing, the big thing, though, is the brickiness. Its all just some bricks you put together. You start with Duplo bricks the size of your fist, work up through pirates and space ships, build race cars in technic, and build robots with mindstorm as a final year project. And all the space ships and pirates and race cars and Batmen can be pulled apart and put together again to make some sort of racing space bat pirate.
So LEGO is basically a mashup of all the other toys. It truly is the best thing ever.