Friday Fail: Motive Train

Every Friday at noon I showcase a real failure of a toy. And by "Failure" I mean "a cheap, crappy knockoff toy that should be destroyed before it infects humanity with some sort of degenerative disease".

But first: A reminder of some basic info. These posts are meant to showcase FAILURE, not to act as a catalog. I'm not selling these bootlegs, nor should you go out and look for them on your own. These are posts about what to AVOID buying. Go spend your money on real LEGO parts. You'll be glad you did.

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Today we continue with our run of Impulse-Sized Bootlegs. This time there's no mini-figure to scowl at, instead we have a mini-model of dubious quality....MOTIVE TRAIN.

As you can see from the box front above, this is another offering from our Bootleg-Buddies at "Brick". Like the Pirate Raider set, the logo is a near-match for the official LEGO branding. The box is full color, with glossy-stock printing on all sides.

I'm not sure if the "Motive Train" logo is a copy of someone else's work (although I wouldn't be surprised), but the name itself needs a bit of scrutiny. Motive train? As in "the reason something was done"?

Maybe they meant the lesser knowing "causing motion" secondary meaning. Or perhaps it's just short for "Locomotive". Although a better abbreviation would have been "LOCO".

The back of the box is pretty much the same as the front, minus the BRICK logo and part counts. Instead, we get a clip-art shot of a train (perhaps to help make sure you know what the toy is supposed to be) and some standard BRICK promotional copy:

Vivid Andgreat In Style, Handsome Appearance

The clip-art background is once again too fuzzed out to be sure where it was lifted from. The train does seem to be moving along at a quick pace, though, judging from those motion-blur lines.

This side of the box again has the Motive Train logo and the BRICK-Text. Note how "andgreat" continues to be one word.

This side panel offers some new text to decode:

chariots without rival
many colr a lot
selected freely by you

It's almost a haiku. But not. Note the missing "o" in "color". And notice the "selected freely by you" reminder. That means if you buy this piece of crap it's really only your own fault. You really should know better.

Speaking of knowing better, here's the safety warnings on the bottom of the package. Note the spelling on "color" this time - that's international English. So it seems they left out "ou" in on the side panel, not just the "o".

Opening the box we find a poly-bag of parts and a one-sided color print of assembly instructions.

Spreading out the parts, we find 17 of them. This matches the part count on the box front. For a change the colors almost match the box - except for the two round 2x2s changed from brown to black.

Once again the "LEGO" brand name has been removed from the parts and replaced with "HOLI".

Here's an interesting change. Rather than spring for the more expensive rubber tire and hub construction offered by LEGO, the people at BRICK recast the part into a single blob of plastic. (LEGO parts are on the right for comparison)

The instructions are fairly straight forward. Actually, it's not a bad bit of building - the use of the angle brackets is clever, anyway. Eh. There's probably a legit LEGO mini-kit somewhere with this design.

Finally, here's a side by-side of the BRICK bootleg on the right, and the same parts from my LEGO collection on the left. (No, I didn't bother to find the right color LEGO to match BRICK's choices. I picked colors that might actually look decent.)

While both models look very similar, you just need to pick them up to feel the lightweight construction of the BRICK knock-off. The parts are thin and brittle in places, thick and gloppy in others. And while the LEGO version rolls smoothly across the desk, the BRICK version sits there like...well....a brick.

All in all, this is a good example of why you need to be vigilant in avoiding knock-off brands. While they might fool the untrained eye, you really don't want this sort of crap to sneak into your collection.

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Once again, many thanks to Joe from The Undiscovered Playthings for sending me this set to review.