Happy Boxing Day! We all know what a LEGO product box looks like, right? If you are anything like me, you can recognize a LEGO box even if it’s wrapped up because the dimensions are iconic (not to mention the graphic design). And hopefully, you were lucky enough to unwrap a few on Christmas Day.
But not all sets are shaped like a cuboid. (And people even use packaging in their MOCs like we showed in this article and this article.) Polybags are a popular format for tiny sets, foil packs were used until recently with the Collectable Minifigure Series, and plastic canisters have been made famous by Bionicle. These have been all pretty common to see, but what about less common shapes? Let’s dive into the wild world of wacky LEGO product packaging!
In the Can – Canisters
Ok, you just said canisters were common, why the heck is the first category in this collection? Well fortunately for us, LEGO didn’t just makes simple canisters all the time.
8703 Sir Kentis
Let’s head back to the land of Knights Kingdom II where Sir Kentis is waiting. This seemingly ordinary canister is hiding a secret in plain sight. It’s actually fully metal! The entire series of four knights came in aluminum cans, each with a different colored lid.
6720 Tyrannosaurus Rex
We have to venture even further back in time to find our next canister, all the way back to the dinosaurs, in fact! This line came in a moulded plastic canister. It even had studs on the top that could be used to display the terrifying beast (or gentile giant, depending on the set) right on top.
6742 Mini Off roader
Even Creator got in on the canister bandwagon with a small line of mini vehicles
2989 Pooh’s Honeypot
I can’t leave out the wildest canister of them all, Duplo set 2989 Pooh’s Honeypot. The entire packaging is just a huge honeypot with Winnie the Pooh on top!
My personal favorite is our last stop in the canisters category. The LEGO Racers subtheme, Tiny Turbos, is the theme that first got me hooked on LEGO and started me on this whole nerdy journey! Throughout its run, there were two different styles of boxes for the individual vehicle sets: the original style with a rounded top that looked like a tire and the later style with a small car molded as the top lid. Road Hero, the semi-truck, lives on my desk at work.
How Do I Wrap This? – Cardboard
The beauty of a cardboard box is that, with a little ingenuity, they can be created in almost any shape you could want. And LEGO’s box department did not disappoint over the years!
3061 City Park Cafe
Let’s start with some of the more recent ones. Upon its debut in 2012, the Friends lineup had a very interesting box design. It was almost the standard cuboid but with two indentations along both sides of the box face that gave the front a subtle curve to it. Simple but very effective!
Super Mario dove headfirst into odd box shapes with the Mario and Luigi starter sets. These are some of the weirdest-shaped boxes LEGO has ever produced. Only two of the faces are even parallel to each other. At least they can still be stacked. But imagine having to wrap this up with paper!
4759 Three Christmas Decorations
Let’s head back to the early 2000s now. Set 4759 Three Christmas Decorations comes in a simple yet elegant box with octagonal top and bottom faces.
3426 Team Transport Bus Adidas Edition
Set 3426 Team Transport Bus Adidas Edition is almost a normal set but with a beveled angle revealing a football included with the normal set!
Our Editor in Chief, Dave Schefcik, recently went on a tour of the LEGO Vault in Billund, Denmark and shared some photos of the funky boxes he found there.
The Star Wars mini ships have a fun curve to them with a plastic moulded 2×4 brick on the face.
I especially like the pirate treasure chest and the Clikits trapezoidal boxes.
Is This LEGO? – Plastic Packaging
Sometimes LEGO has gotten extra fancy and used part of the set itself as the packaging!
Star Wars had a series of mini planet sets where the planet doubles as the storage for the parts inside. And the Christmas baubles serve the same purpose. If you want to read about how the baubles have been used by the community, check out this BrickNerd article!
LEGO Racers are back once again with their series of sets in which the box folds out to become a road for the Tiny Turbos to drive on!
This last one we are calling out is quite possibly the greatest useable packaging of any LEGO set to date. The Hockey subtheme of Sports released a series of small players that came in canisters that doubled as water bottles!
Wacky Wrap-Up
Most of the sets we get are traditional-looking rectangular boxes, which just makes the odd ones that much more special. I had a lot of fun diving into the archives to find this selection of fun shapes. I’m sure this is not every set that came in a non-box, but it is a fun, high-level look at what has been. Personally, I hope we will get more creative packaging like this in the future.
Merry Christmas and happy Boxing Day to all the weird boxes out there! (Oh, that’s not what Boxing Day is celebrating? Oops.)
Best of BrickNerd – Article originally published December 26, 2024.
What’s your favorite wacky shaped LEGO set? Let us know in the comments below.
Do you want to help BrickNerd continue publishing articles like this one? Become a top patron like Marc & Liz Puleo, Paige Mueller, Rob Klingberg from Brickstuff, John & Joshua Hanlon from Beyond the Brick, Megan Lum, Andy Price, Lukas Kurth from StoneWars, Wayne Tyler, LeAnna Taylor, Monica Innis, Dan Church, Roxanne Baxter, and Steven Laughlin to show your support, get early access, exclusive swag and more.
