A Classic Castle Homage?
Whilst in preparation for work on building a new major castle MOC I was going through and organizing my trove of castle-specific parts. One of my favorites is the panel part #30101 "Dark Gray Door Frame 2 x 8 x 6 Swivel with Bottom Notches" which includes the door panel part #30102px2 "Door 2 x 5 x 5 Swivel, Flat Base with Stained Glass Knight Pattern". Which came in set 6091 "King Leo's Castle" (where mine originate) as well as another Jousting set, both in the Knight's Kingdom I series.
While this part is somewhat..."odd"...in design and is tricky to build aesthetically into a MOC, I do find it makes a nice backdrop to a throne room or other chamber in a castle. However upon inspecting the couple of these parts that I do have, something caught my eye... The shield the knight in the stained glass panel is wielding.
Specifically the pattern of the shield which is divided up into three partitions with blue red and yellow-orange filling each subdivision respectively. Whereupon I examined a certain minifigure from the original first "classic" castle sets, that is the knight with a shield pattern on his torso with three partitions of dark red, blue, and peach (which to be fair to LEGO is likely just Red, Blue, Yellow for the primary colors of LEGO bricks, which besides green, gray, black, and white were the primary LEGO colors of the time).
Consider the picture below:
Notice that even the thirds of the shield and the torso pattern are divided up the same way and the colors go in the same order! Also the set from which many of the tri-colour shield minifigs come from is the set 383-2/6083-1 "Knights Tournament" in which a prince and princess are watching two knights on horseback joust. The knight on the stained glass is on hoseback and is carrying a large spear, the type used in a classic joust.
Now is this a lucky coincidence? Perhaps but it is just as likely someone at LEGO would have done this on purpose in my opinion.
Which begs the question, is it really a classic castle homage? Well I'd like to think so, and it makes the part even more interesting in my collection of castle parts.
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About Paladin
Well...here's the brief rundown...
Like many people who end up with the AFOL disorder...I began my addiction to Lego ABS at a young age. At first it was a casual pastime among other things like matchbox cars, construx, drawing, and pretending sticks were magical weapons against imaginary evils.
By the time I was 10, around 1990, my parents made the decision to build their "dream house" and we moved. After the move I made new friends with some of the guys in the new neighborhood. Three of which were really into military history, science fiction, and Lego. This was a recipie for many weekends building models and having fake wars (in which you destroy models, scream at eachother, and then build better ones again later). Primarily I was building Pirate/Castle blended theme models when we got on historic military role play kicks. Other times we did Space/Sci-Fi models when we got on Sci-Fi role play kicks. Therefore most of my teen years until the dark ages of high school (Freshman Year - 1995) when I built models they were of these type of themes.
We moved once again in 2000 as I began college. Many of my oldest models survived the "dark ages". Upon moving I found myself fixing the old ones up or perhaps building a little this or that now and then, nothing serious.
Up to about 2005 I had no idea that the AFOL community even existed. I stumbled on BrickLink but never made any connection. I still thought "Building with lego past age 20? Silly!". I figured I would keep the toy for when I were to have children. However I took some pictures of my old models and posted them on my web site, just for the hell of it
Then I was contacted. One day I got a message in my inbox. It was from a guy named Jeramy, who found my BrickLink account and my photo gallery of old models. His message informed me that there was a club of adult Lego model builders and that I was invited to come to their next club meeting.
The rest as they say is...history.
Currently I am a fairly eclectic builder. I still like the Castle/Pirate themes probably the best. I also enjoy Space/Sci-Fi themes as well. However, many of the club members are into the 9v model railroading portion of the hobby pretty serious. Since that aspect of the hobby tends to bring alot of AFOLs together and the them is a fun one to get into I've been gravitating ever more towards that side of the hobby as well.