Why Minifigures Have Neck Printing
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- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
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In this video, I will show you why those interesting black or white markings exist on Lego's torsos.
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why your pfp looking liike caseoh?
interesting video, but it has a weird vibe when you get to the knockoff part
Lego has become a horrible company, overpricing sets, suing content creators, etc
these "knockoff" sets also often have a higher quality and lower price
@@mo-s- It's still massive company that can afford super precise assembly machines
Even if other manufacturers now do a much better jobs
I was litterally like
So you know the front with no warms or obvious front back painting
This mark also makes better friction worth heads.
The internet once again answering a question I forgot I had 20 years ago
I have always wondered what it was for so I thought I’d research it and make a video on it so other people would know what it’s for!
@@HalfBreadOrder spagueti
@@HalfBreadOrderspagueti
@@HalfBreadOrderspagueti
@@HalfBreadOrderspagueti
when I was a kid I theorized that the neck printing was to maybe give the head a little extra grip so you could yank hats and stuff off easier.
Me too!
As an adult, that's what I thought too!
When I was a kid I just thought they were mini hazmat heads
I think the funniest consequence of it was that, sometimes, the offbrand manufacturers or bulk resellers sometimes include two of the same arm in the figurine bag. A small toy store in the city I used to live when I was a child once bought a shipment of Star Wars ones back in the day and had to manually sort them back in the bags because of that. Me, the nephew of the store owner and a few other kids got tasked to do it and received a pretty penny over a few summer days back then for the job and the owner never sold those off brand, Chinese import figurines ever again.
I just thought every Lego minifig was secretly an emo and wore a choker.
Yeah, I bought a set from a Lego-like brand for a friend a year or two ago and it came with the arms facing the wrong way. She fixed the issue though.
I had always assumed that it was to make the headpiece a slightly tighter fit. lol
I did assume that it was related somehow to the Minifigure being authentical, but it never crossed my mind that it was there mainly for factory assembling reasons, cool.
I thought it was so you would know which way the head should be facing, since some torso pieces are confusing to know where the front part is without the neck print
Me clicking on this knowing I'm gonna be reccomended nothing except Lego stuff for the next week
I had no idea, thank you so much for sharing!
I actually never thought anything of it until now
Short, to the point, and very educational, very good video.
Minifigure series does not have this so i assumed them to be a mark for differentiating "minifigures" minifigures from rest
I always thought it was some way to let kids know which way the head faces. I was kinda close, but it's for the arms lolz
Oh thank you for making this video. I've always wondered what those were for.
i thought that it was to prevent the machines for printing on the wrong way
"Sophisticated technology" It's a camera
Guess before watching:
It's so the computers or manual checkers on the assembly line know which side is which and thus can print/check the print is on the right side.
Edit: Ah okay, so sorta right! My second guess was the arms but I was more sure about the printing. That's really cool and a clever way of doing it!
I always just pretended that it was. Screen for a much tinier person controlling the minifig. 😂😅
I always thought it was so you could remove the head and have your mini-fig turn into a robot. The white or black mark functioning as the robot's face. I wrote this comment before watching. Let's see if I'm right!
*edit: Well, my answer works for the mind of a 5 year old. But that is fascinating
Seems there's no effort to put the torsos the right way round, just flip a coin and try again. Interesting that this 50% success rate works better than trying to turn the torsos
I thought it was a wear guage
The minifigure's "head" is merely a mask. That square is its true face.
just like SpongeBob…
skin theory anyone?
jesus christ get out of my head
sus
So like Bionicle.
I never thought of LEGO minifigs being manufactured. I always figured they were just born
….
...
When a mommy minifigure and a daddy minifigure love each other very much...
AYOOO
@@early4thegameNOW Everything is awesome
I never really thought about why they were there, I just accepted them as part of living.
Same here until I saw the video. I work in a factory and some of the automation equipment we have is insane either for tracking part/serial numbers or alignment of parts.
That's why religion still exists.
What’s also interesting is the Shark head from Lego Atlantis for the Shark Guardians used that print on the neck to provide the illusion of a throat for the open mouth of the Shark head, as the front of the neck was visible inside the mouth.
Same with space police III alien with orange head.
I miss the guardians, they always had such alien torso prints, they were amazing
Kranx? I think that was his name
The minifig is atl004 on bricklink btw.
I had some of those shark heads as a kid so I always assumed that was why the printing was there.
Interesting… I always assumed it was to add some extra friction so the heads don’t wobble.
Me to
Don't you think they might have improved the part instead in the meantime if this was the case?
That's what I thought, too 😂
@@gegessen159old figures get very loose heads (after a lot of moving the head around an taking it off / putting it on. So it does help to retain more play life.
I was just thinking about this the other day and yes, I thought it was to provide some kind of friction to keep the heads on straight.
And I remember thinking they were like weird space astronaut visors so I would have some headless mini figures as weird space aliens with my space police sets
Kinda sus.
Lmao that’s epic 🤣
Wait... among us?
same
I sincerely and greatly appreciate that you answered the question in under 2 minutes and did not have any excessive filler or unnecessarily repetitive dialogue; 10/10 content
Fr, the number of videos where it's like "oh that's a cool question - oh, it's 6 minutes. Nah." and I just Google it instead.
But this one got the click!
Portal master studio is going to complain “nO NECK PRINTING 😡😡”
Fr tho
So true.
Portal masters is a joke to the community
@@MasterCollector248I imagine if he ever made a video about himself, he would still somehow get his own name wrong.
Pretty sure he only says that stuff solely to rile folks like you up.
The bootleg figures provide the arms separately as the equipment to assemble them cost money, NOT because they might accidentally assemble them back to front...
It can be both of those reasons and more.
That makes so much sense and I've always thought about them and when I saw this video I almost immediately clicked on it, so thanks!
Thanks! And no problem, I'm really glad you enjoyed.
That's the best captioning I've ever seen in a video. Text highlight adjusts to what you're (/the youtuber is) saying.
Props for all the extra work that went into that.
Thank you!
I always thought of it as their voice box.
That can be the Watsonian/In-Universe explanation
Dude yes same!
I feel like this was in my face forever and I just never thought about it
Kinda like an aglet...
What’s that?
Went in assuming that the marking was just for humans to understand how to face the head... should've realized there was also a mechanical reason for it, and it's genius!
"sophisticated technology"
Its literally just a camera that detects whether the neck has a black spot or not
I mean it is pretty complicated if you think about it. Cameras are the only thing that can detect color. If they made a small dimple they could use a depth gauge to check if the dimple is there, but that would add a more complicated mechanical step to the manufacturing process. Also it most likely is not just a camera but a light that reflects off the paint or body depending on what's lighter, and the camera is programmed to detect the difference between the two. It can be more complicated such as using a camera to detect numbers or letters to track and record product information or more complicated alignment procedures like pressing parts together, but even this simple sounding idea is way more complicated than you might think.
Coming from someone wh's never taken a robotics course in high school. Testing a Lego robot with both a pressure and light sensor essentially makes it the only thing to either keep it from constantly bumping into a wall or driving itself off a table, this is basically the same principle but on a manufcturing scale; Black torso with a white mark on the neck, visible: pass! Black torso with no visible white mark; Fail, go back to sorting
@@spazmaticaa7989 A simple photoelectric sensor is probably used, most likely a diffuse-reflective type. It does not need to detect colour, just the difference in reflectivity. A "camera" would be unnecessarily complicated for this application, and in an industrial context, the simplest solution is usually the most reliable.
The Rest of the Machine to attach the arms is more complicated-
@@KimStennabbCaesarThey actually use a camera, because of the micro composition of the abs plastic
I thought it's so you can tell which part the front is if both sides look similar
Thanks for commenting this, I was surprised nobody above mentioned it, what the heck!
@@offroaders123it's literally what he says in the video
@@bufar different reasons for the same obstacle
Haven't watched it yet, I’m calling it so the factory workers know which way to attach the arms.
Factory machines, but yes.
Good job
this trend is so silly to me... no one can prove that you haven't watched it yet, at the same time no one cares whether or not you had before commenting
@@fourohsevenfishing you care enough to comment and reply to them
@@LuckyOwI777They had something they wanted to to say, they said it. It takes like no effort
when i was younger i thought it was just a neat way to make them hazmat suit people if you lost their heads or something
ME TO
A big pet peeve of mine is when people put the words they're saying in the video itself. RUclips has a built in captions system for a reason. If I wanted captions on I would just turn them on there
Yt captions are rly bad also it's a 2 min video get over it
3 seconds in, i'm guessing it's so the printing machines can recognize which way is "up"
close, it's so the arms are the facing the right way when attached.
@@danieln5041Both could easily be true. If the black or white patch is visible, the torso is facing forward (respective to the camera) and if the camera catches part of the torso pattern it could easily be rejected as being upside-down
Back in 1987, my earliest mini figures would have their eyes rubbed off or whatever. I figured out that it's less likely to happen if you don't leave the heads off the torso. So I had this hypothesis that the black ink on the neck somehow kept the faces from fading away.
Interesting!
Part of the reason that Lego is so expensive is that each set is perfect 99.999% of the time.
I've heard that but I've had so many errors in the last two years. Missing piece on boutique hotel, missing piece in pirate ship (but came with an extra giant long plate), missing piece in eldorado, etc. Big pieces, not just easy to miss 1x1's. No big deal though, Lego always sends it if you notify them.
@@roz1281 Hmm.. you must buy a lot of sets. I've been buying lego since the 1980s, and never had any missing parts. I was referring more to the parts being precisely molded and without flaws.
@@drewlovelyhell4892no flaws might have been a thing back then. But nowadays Lego sets are full of flaws. Their quality dropped extremely.
Find me a glass pane that isn't scratched up. A print that isn't misaligned.
Or build a wall out of a single color (with all blocks out of the same package). That wall will look like you used five different colors with bricks from three different manufacturers.
And then there are also the clearly visible injection molding marks. Most manufacturers try to hide them, but Lego puts them in the most visible spots on many parts.
The main reason LEGO is so expensive is because of the name and that’s pretty much it. They know people will continue to buy their products, so they continue to raise the prices. It’s the same with almost every niche market. Certain things become the household name or the “luxury” name, and the creators start hiking the prices up as much as they can over time.
LEGO also doesn’t have much legitimate competition, so they feel like they can get away with it. At the store I work at, LEGO is the *only* construction block toy sold there, so they face essentially zero competition. Your kids want to play with construction block toys?-LEGO says you pay their prices or your kid just doesn’t get any.
@@Jehty_ Strange.
I've never noticed any of those issues.
I literally had this shower thought TODAY. I did not even search for this video.
I knew what the mark was for but I didn't know a machine is actually involved in the process, i thought they would just assemble them by hand but then that would be tiresome and inefficient
Some series 11 minifigures don't have this neck printing, or at least the ones I got didn't. Any reason why?
✅️ No yapping version:
They are made so the machine knows if the torso is facing the right way, so the arms are attached the right way.
I always thought it was a method of adding friction honestly.
Me too!
I always thought that it was supposed to be like a mini spaceman head on the neck
Ah yes. A single Boolean is sophisticated technology.
Technically its more of an If Statement
@@Christoph5782 if statements are a staple of Boolean logic.
But how do you get a camera to return a simple Boolean statement? I know it's possible (it's shown in the video), but it's not something I could go out and set up on my own without researching it more extensively tahn other things, like wiring the camera up or the system that ejects the parts.
@@spazmaticaa7989 if (colors >= 2)
{ return “front”}
else
{return “back”}
For a Bootleg operation, laziness is the name of the game.
Their market share is much more fraught than the original IP, so the methods of production must be cheaper.
Consider that someone who runs such a scheme is absolutely in it for Lots of Money Now and just like that, the most basic things become unnecessary expenses.
I thought they were to show what side is the front, if you remove the arms you can't tell
I actually never pondered this but makes sense. As a manufacturing engineering student, I can safely say that machine vision is becoming much more common and for good reason. The way it appears that Lego has theirs set up is by prompting the ai in control of the camera with a pass/fail condition where the printed patch means the torso can pass to the next phase of the assembly and no patch means it is either incomplete or was loaded in the tube incorrectly.
Those have been around way before AI was a thing! I'm guessing it's simply a brightness test on a photosensor.
not every phsyical machine is AI, oh my god.
@@BrooksMoses that’s a good point.
@@StarHorder I’ve been learning a bit about machine vision lately and there are advanced setups with ai controllers. It’s quite cool. The application of such setups are also for the exact same parameters as the minifigure check.
@@BrooksMoses I assume a Worker turned them in the Past.
Loved the included footage of the factory! That kinda stuff is always interesting to me.
Thanks for answering my eternal question
I always figured it was something to do with increasing friction with heads. Definitely cool.
Thanks for actually explaining it and not making a 10 minute video oit of it you are the best🙏
No problem 👍
Portalmasterstudios will be angry at minifgures who dont have neck prints
Okay, but why? Like, we can just assemble the minifigure ourselves. All that work for something so silly.
i used to think they were there to look like a space man if you lost the head
i was a strange child
Someone else in the comments thought that as well, so you’re not alone. xD
@@Sanguivore really?
@@TiggerTheTiger112 To my surprise, yep! xD
I always thought it was so the minifigure of kranxx (from space police) would have a black mouth😊
This is interesting but I do have a question. I have at least two minifigures with no neck printing that came out of the box the correct way, why don’t they have it?
Whenever I see things like this, I always assume that it's some sort of marking that allows for a machine of some sort to know if something is lined up properly/facing the correct way, and this is no exception. 9/10, seemingly useless markings are added to allow for another step of the manufacturing process to work properly.
I never understood why the arms came attached. Whats the deal with having to attaching them ourselves?
to save you a minute and a half of your life: it's there to make sure the arms are facing the correct direction. it's only printed on the front and if the scanner doesn't detect it, it assumes the torso is flipped the wrong way, and doesn't attach arms.
i absolutely can't stand people padding out videos and over-editing it to the point where it's unwatchable.
Padding out videos? It’s a minute and a half long 🤯
@@BrickCritic a 10 second youtube short would have been plenty of time to get across the important information.
you spent a tenth of this video actually explaining why minifigures have neck printing, and the rest is you saying literally nothing of value.
I honestly can't tell if this video is meant to be a parody of video essays or not.
I actually thought you were joking when you commented because most people would make this an 8-10 min video.
@@BrickCritic still though. you spend 90% of the video on the intro and outro, with the other 10% being the actual meat of the video. is that not absurd?
As expensive as some lego sets are, you really are paying for the quality that comes with it. Something as simple as making sure the arms are facing the right way every single time really makes Lego stand out against any other brick-building type of toys.
So you know which way is the front of the torso.
There, I saved you a minute of pandering.
I KNEW IT!!! Because there are no neck printings on torsos that don’t have anything on them.
That’s cool, I wouldn’t mind them just separating the arms though if it brought the price down a bit 😂
This is so interesting, I have genuinely never wondered about the printing because I've been taking it for granted after being a Lego fan all my life, but this just makes so much sense!
Same
Let me guess, it's to be sure it's attached correctly ?
Edit: yes and nice video btw
I never knew why, but when you mentioned the printing everything just clicked together (pun intended)
I’ve wondered this for two decades and now I can die satisfied
I never thought too much about it but im glad I know the reason now
This is honestly incredible information and the visual aid was also very nice
If you cut out all the times you say that the thing you just said is important, the video would be half as long.
Dude ALL THESE YEARS, and I NEVER KNEW! 😂 That is SO COOL!
Yeah, but CMF minifigures dont have the marking
makes sense, I always thought it was to give a little resistance so the heads stayed in place better during play.
This is explained so well that you sort of led me to the answer before actually stating it outright, well done
Thank you for getting to the point and not making it a 15-minute video where the answer is somewhere in the middle
I can't believe it ❤!
I thought it was becuase it made the head stay on better becuase some of my figs had that fade away and the heads were so loose the just came off when i tred to remove the hair then i sharpeed theneck some and put the head on and it was nice and snug again
i thought that neck printing is to verify if it is real lego or a knockoff brand
I used them as like robot heads or smth
I never thought about this before I saw this video.
I thought it was so we could tell which way the front was
It looks like an Amongus character with a shrunken head.
I used to think they were little hazmat suits 😂
Now what I’m curious about is why the machine is putting the heads on…
I just assumed it was so the printer would line up properly.
Now I want to know why some minifigures dont have it
Pleasantly surprised see a video like this that doesn’t beat around the bush to answer the question the title is presenting, simply just offering the information plain and clear.
Awesome video, straight to the point and no filler
I accidentally tapped on this but am glad i did
I thought it was for children to put the head on the right way
Short and straight to the point. Love it, earned a sub.
The highlighting subtitles are bugging me a bit. It's like I'm doing karaoke or something.
Anyway, very interesting trivia. Good video.
lol Thanks!
I can't believe this video is 1:45 instead of 14:50.