The line between toy and advertisement has long  been blurry. From Howdy Doody to He-Man to Paw Patrol, children’s programming is often a thinly veiled commercial for products. Over the past few decades, fandom has morphed from a community-driven passion into corporate cultivation and exploitation of IP. Now fandom has evolved from selling products to selling a “lifestyle,” something you can see in LEGO’s growing focus on display over play.

There are few brands that understand how to sell a lifestyle as well as Nike, which makes LEGO’s partnership with the athletic company a perfect match for this moment. With one product on their shelf, a young person can express both their creative spirit and their drive for athletic performance. It’s a no-compromise explosion of excellence for ages 10+.

When LEGO first revealed the Nike Dunk set with a promise of more sets to follow, I assumed that after that overt exercise in display-focused branding, that the follow up sets would bring play back to the fore. Perhaps we’d see a return of springy legs from the LEGO Sports line of 2001. Or maybe more wacky sports-flavored minifigs like Basketball guy from the Dunk Set, like a Nike version of Fortnite (Oh, wait… Nike and Fortnite already had their synergy fling last year). Now that the sets have been revealed, the focus is again on display over play.

The larger set at $70 for 809 pieces, LEGO Nike 43010 Slam Dunk, features a buildable Basketball player at a scale similar to to past Constraction figures in scale, but using all system parts. This is no Eero Okkonen character (although it shares the trademark pointy chin), but it’s not a bad design, poseable with some customization options, and paired with a stylized hoop,  scoreboard and court.

The second set, LEGO Nike 43021 Dunk Trickshot, retails for $40 and contains 454 parts. It mixes a low-top trainer shoe, exclusive minifig, and a play function to catapult a ball into the hoop.

Tabling the lifestyle branding for a moment, there’s a lot to like about the sets. They feature an interesting mix of parts and techniques that blend interactivity and customization with the display focus. The parts-to-price ratio is reasonable (thankfully there’s no “Nike tax” like we have with Star Wars prices). They’re surprising and creative models that show the range of what can be done with LEGO bricks.

Which makes it all the more frustrating that these kid-focused sets are effectively desk-top billboards for a corporation.

It would be hypocritical to call out these sets in particular as cynical brand exercises. LEGO is at the forefront of the IP-everywhere ecosystem – channeling adult nostalgia into luxury display sets and investing in the Fortnite ecosystem where you can wear Nike dunks to  a virtual Sabrina Carpenter concert before visiting your Star Wars-themed village in LEGO Odyssey. Like countless other 80s kids, I gushed over the new LEGO Transformers Soundwave set, which will no doubt remain on a shelf as proof of tribal loyalty to my childhood and not sourced for parts. We live in a society.

And yet I can’t help but feel sad that the toy and creativity platform that let’s kids discover ways to express their own weird and unique fantasies is being used to sell a commercial for another brand’s lifestyle to children. 8.8 cents per part, in this economy, seems like a fair deal. But when the product is an ad, shouldn’t they be paying us?

What do you think about the new LEGO x Nike sets? Has LEGO’s lifestyle focus gone too far?