LEGO, Comedy And A Shite Dancer
Another nostalgic LEGO review. The Seinfeld #21328 Ideas Set.
If there is a show as classic and as deeply engraved into pop culture as Friends, then Seinfeld is definitely it. There is at least one technical reason — the Hollywood recipe is very similar. Look at many of the famous sitcoms like Friends, The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother and a good few others, they’re all baked by the same recipe. Get a bunch of folks in New York into a couple of apartments and make them hang out.
Now, you’d think that after decades of repeated reuse of the simple formula, viewers would have gotten bored by it by now. But no, one after another these types of sitcoms tend to work. The reason? They’re relatable, and they’re simple stories. A mix of just enough recognisable mundane and funny situations, and you have yourself a hit series. Of course, it works. Secretly, we kind of all wish we had those kinds of friends and neighbours, but we don’t, so we watch the shows that make us all forget what we’re missing. That until you see Elaine dance… Nobody needs that!
I was a massive Seinfeld fan. Binged the whole show in just a couple of months, but I do remember feeling underwhelmed, heck, downright disappointed by the final episode. It just felt like a very low effort somehow for an otherwise fantastic show. Interestingly enough, most viewers then moved over to Curb Your Enthusiasm. I however, never got into it. I am not sure why. Maybe I should give it another try.
Brickstalgia at its best
While I would really love to see Jerry, Elaine, Kramer, and the rest of the gang again for at least a miniseries, I have to say, seeing them come alive in LEGO form, is certainly the next best thing. When the Ideas set launched in 2021, I was aware of its launch, but for whatever reason I wasn’t instantly drawn to it. There was nothing wrong with the set, the design of it or the LEGO execution of the idea, it was more the fact that I never really built TV set LEGO sets before. What piqued my curiosity and excitement finally in 2022 was actually getting the Friends Central Perk Café set.
Having had the experience of building that, convinced me, I really did want the Seinfeld apartment, and having bought it and built it, I am chuffed to bits that I did.
Maybe not the most interesting set for LEGO fans, but any true Seinfeld fan should definitely consider getting this while still available.
As it often happens with Ideas sets, this one is also marked as 18+, but don’t let that deter you in any way. That only means the target audience is adults, but not because of difficulty or building complexity, but simply the age-group that might be interested in paying for it.
This is not a difficult set to build, and while it has nine major stages, only the first two require a tad more attention than normal. Even I made a mistake when setting down the floor panels. There are so many of them, it’s easy to miss a couple, and if you find yourself making a mistake, you might have to pull most of them up like I did, to reset them. Having said that, this also means you get a crap-ton of tiles. I, for one, love tiles of all sizes and colours. The more of them I have, the more I want. They just make LEGO surfaces nice and smooth.
I think where this set truly excels, apart from the minifigs to which I’ll get back to in a hot minute, is the interior of the apartment, namely the decor and the building techniques and clever parts usage for the various bits and bobs in the room. The round table and the chairs in the main room and the kitchen area made me go “OMG!” more than a few times. The walls of the apartment are also nothing to sneeze at, and by that, I mean less the walls themselves, but rather the shape that the designer managed to align just right on the base to make it have the fairly complex shape it does.
The set comes with five minifigs — the main characters of the show: Jerry Seinfeld, Elaine Marie Benes, George Louis Costanza, Cosmo Kramer and Newman — the guy that nobody really liked, but was an integral part of the show. Somehow, don’t ask me how, I feel that these characters are better represented in LEGO form than the Friends cast. Looking at them, I think they’re more recognisable than our friends from Central Perk Café.
The LEGO Seinfeld set is probably one of the best value nostalgia sets out there. You definitely get your money’s worth both in revived memories and building experience.
Building stages
As stated before, the set comes with nine major building stages, some actually very short, particularly the 9th stage, which, I felt, could have easily been merged into the 8th. Nevertheless, a fun build overall. You can also watch the entire speed build on my TikTok!
Set stats
- 1326 total pieces
- set size: medium
- age-rating: 18+
- average build-time: 2.4 hours
- display set: yes
- new/interesting parts: a few
- playability: yes
- design: great
- height: 14 cm
- width: 33 cm
- depth: 18 cm
- average price: below 80 euro
Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, Lego fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer!