Very early on in the timeline of LEGO's life, they decided pretty strongly that they didn't want to make any sort of product that glorifies or fantasizes war and conflict, and that lasted all of 45 seconds before things like knights and pirates came about. Even today, there is some sort of moral grandstanding done where the company does not dare thcomhop on modern military, and weapons and violence of any sort, nay nay. The excuse of historical sci-fi ways to kill a man don't count in this context because it just doesn't, but it does make you wonder how deep does it really not count. And that's what got me looking into Duplo and how it's pretty darn dangerous. I guess I'll start with what got me going on this tangent, and this was a picture that I was sent of a bomb. This is a Duplo bomb, it's a print of a bomb on a brick, not like a historically accurate TNT stick or print, or even like a metal bomb that pirates used. No, this is a modern day, pretty sophisticated, with timer and wires bomb. After Lauren sent me this picture, it got me going on the thought process of there's actually a lot of really kind of dangerous stuff for the age demographics of 1 to 4 years old. Not that I care at all, and as you're about to see, these sets are pretty cool. It's still a little bit funny that Tathers, well before preschool, would be playing with these. Starting with the classic Castle Duplo theme, we have about 13 sets plus a couple of extra from the Dact Align that make up our night to round table of Duplo du-goody-ness. Just to get these out of the way, those are some wicked mean-looking dragons. And they're not just dragons dragons. These are battle, hardcore, death-blowing dragons that they go to take down and seize castles, or to run jousting tournaments. Speaking of sieging, that's a siege tower. One of the most sophisticated pieces of medieval technology that the world ever saw at that time. These towers came in to rein death over walls that protected innocent civilians. And those aren't the only things that were used to get over the walls of the enemy castle. They also had things like catapult slob, giant boulders at them. Fun fact, as you know, some groups of individuals decided to launch rotting cow carcasses and other things of the like to spread disease on the guests on the inside of the walls. Fun catapults are so nice century. We have technology now like gunpowder. With gunpowder, we have cannons. No longer other walls here to protect us, but now they adjust our stone tombs to encase us in our doom. It's starting to look pretty bad for those defending their home, but they have a few tricks up their sleeves, such as boiling oil. Now I'm aware it looks just like an empty pot, but for those in the know, when castles were being invaded, they had several means to defend themselves. And when a pot of boiling something was on top of a wall, that was usually oil that they used to pour over the side of the wall to prevent invaders from getting into their home. And even with the revamp of some of the newer duplo castle sets, when the colors were more bright and vivid and not this dark dingy, pretty cool castle coloring scheme that they had, they still had pot of boiling oil plus all of the weaponry. Need to chop off a man's head? You have an axe. Need to cut a man and a half. You have some swords. You need a way to prevent them from getting across the wall, but you don't really want to go on the ground. Shoot them with a crossbow. Now if you're really going to get down on the ground level and get some pretty dirty action going on, hearing your screaming victims dying and praying for their mama to save them, you have two options. A lance that you can take from horseback or even cooler, yet dragging back or flail. A lance is pretty straightforward. It's just a long spear-like object that you have from the back of a mount that used to poke people with something fierce. Flails on the other hand. Now that one's fun. Follow along now. You have a stick, right? Just a plain old stick. But at the end of the stick, a chain. That's kind of neat, but not too impressive. At the end of the chain, a big metal ball. But, eh, what is a big metal ball? That's a... Come on. Let's add some spikes to it. That's some pretty gruesome stuff, but not everything that's adult-oriented in the Duplo world has to be related around some sort of medieval weaponry. It could also just be some mixed drinks. So now you can play like mommy and daddy, dude, and have some stiff ones. You might be familiar with the normal layer of lasso piece that looks like someone's currently swinging her up in the air to try to reel something in. This lasso piece, however, is most certainly a news. That's not the only thing in the Western Duplo theme that causes some concern. What about the bone arrow print now? It looks like it's just maybe... Maybe it's for decoration somewhere above a wall or in a museum in the Duplo world. Or it's on the front of a war canoe when the Indians are going to war with the caboids. This is getting exciting. There are also the cavemen that used them against dinosaurs, and I don't really want to talk about dinosaurs too much, because they're just... They're for most part fun toys that kids play with. But the spears that the cavemen are hucking at the dinosaurs, a little bit of a different issue. You have no idea how hard the designers for the Duplo Pirates went, because they went hard. There were only four sets made for the Pirates Duplo sub-theme. There were six for Jake and the Neverland Pirates, but that was based on the TV show with the same name based on Neverland with Peter Panning Captain Hook. And those really are way more child-friendly, even the swords look wooden. Although this is a nice image having a giant cannon pointed out his head and just smiling, waiting for his fate. And as he knows, there's nothing to be done. But those sets from 2006 are probably some of the most gruesome sets Lego has ever produced. I never paid enough attention to these things, because like most other Duplo themes, I just wrote them off, but after spending some... A little bit more time looking at them, wow. Just from a quick glance of the sets, we see so many red flags. This Flintlock pistol, for example. I know the only is it comically huge. Look at the grin on the man that's carrying it. And this doesn't stop at just this pirate. All of the pirates and the knights for that matter, they're mean-looking dudes. You're gonna need a giant muzzle loader to take down an undead living glow in the dark skeleton with a sword. Or more importantly, you're gonna need a sword to take down what would seem like an even harder thing to kill, a giant man-eating shark. This jaw action-chomping fish is not only a Duplo Doomsday device, but it's also really mean-looking, like really angry. When you compare it to other Duplo creatures with these big, soft baby eyes, and you have this mean anime shark, it's a night-day difference. The smaller of the two pirate ships aren't anything too spectacular that we haven't seen already. There's a cannon, there's a Flintlock handheld cannon, some swords, some skulls, but really nothing too crazy. But the bigger pirate ship has some lore backing in. This ship is packing swords, guns, cannons, scary pirates, skulls, a giant cleaver that only came in a set that on the side of it in Chinese says, big knife. They're all preparing to do quite a bit of damage. The dark color schemes don't already make it look infinitely more menacing and honestly kind of better than the black pearl. But the designer behind it wanted it to be even crazier. One of the product designers for this theme has a gallery of images online, sharing it for his resume. And on it, he shares the background for a lot of these pirates and just how in-depth and scary they really are. It seemed like the pirate captain leader of this crew didn't want to hook on the arm of the figure because then the figure would only ever be there and they couldn't reuse the hook. So instead they decided to make a removable one that's really a whale hook with four additional spikes on it that could cut a shark, which makes sense because that's a mean look and shark. You're gonna need something even meaner. One of the other crew members took notice of some of the firearms and weaponry on the ship and kind of felt left out so they grabbed another bomb. My favorite pirate that you can see a design concept of. This is the Chinese man that carries around big knife and those green stains on his torso were actually meant to be blood stains, but I guess they couldn't go that far. They can have all the other things. They can have some of the cruelest looking pirates period, but the blood, the blood prints a little bit too far. The thing that makes this even more interesting at the front of the big pirate ship, we now have information that shows that these pirates are even more scary than the scary nights from earlier in the video. Because they have the same dragon's head mold at the very front of the ship leading them into battle. There are a few other duplofigs, prints, and parts out there that with a closer magnifying glass might seem a bit too much for a two-year-old, but I didn't really want to talk about those today because they're not as blatantly obviously cool as duplopirats killing knights dragons and mounting it to the front of their ship.