6765 - Gold City Junction

Rating:
Pros: A great set with lots of variety and enough blocks for jillions of your own combinations
Cons: I wanted my bank wall to blow clear across town!
Contents: 337 pieces including 3 horses and 6 mini-figs
Price: $49.99 - Discontinued
Reviewed: 02-Jul-1996
Reviewed by: Joseph Gonzalez

Artemis Gordon is a serene and peaceful man. He often dreams of the rough and tumble lives of Wild Bill or Doc Holiday that he reads about in the dime store novels, but he knows that his lot in life is that of a banker. Day in and day out counting colored paper and shiny coins, at times he fears that the time for any excitement or adventure in his life has passed him by. The mail comes in, people go out, deposits are transferred and the hours slip by like bored sheep in a tired dream. His is a life where the daily thrill is deciding if the morning break will be accompanied by yellow or pink lemonade (someday he'll be truly daring and try a small dose of wicked sarsparilla). A silent man, a tranquil man, a pillar of the community and so his time passes. Surely there is more to life he wistfully sighs to himself, but the lazy glass of pink lemonade on his desk tells him some things never change.
Flatfoot Thomsen and fifteen pounds of TNT are about to change all that.

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Ooh! I was so mad when I got this set! If you look closely at the cannon on the front of the box, you can see it is one of the old "shooter" cannons. I thought "cool, they're bringing them back!" But alas, no, it must just be that they shot photos of the set in Europe (heavy sigh). This is an excellent introduction set to the Wild West theme. We're given two buildings, a mixture of town minifigs, a cannon, and a coach.
The buildings are a fair beginning for building a town: a bank and a general store. The store is made with the new "log" wall sections plus 1x2 and 1x4 molded "log" bricks. There are lots of supplies to go with the store including a shovel, pick, frying pan, and dynamite, one of the new large barrels and two small barrels (sorry folks, no lids). On the roof of the store, there is a place for the store marquee and this has a little 1x1 2-brick-high shutter on each side of the marquee (perfect for peeking out or ambushing the unsuspecting cowpoke). I'm not usually a sticker person, but the store window comes with a neat add-on sticker and the bank comes with two for the windows and one for the door. The bank also comes with some neat stuff including some hundred dollar 1x2 flats, 2x2 2-brick-high boxes with a new "safe/vault" print on the door of the box, a small room/vault to hold one of the safes and a blow-away wall (discussed below).
There is also a stage coach included with the set, although it is more of a cargo stage coach than for passengers. The rear section of the coach holds the strong boxes/safes from the bank and the interior of the coach includes one of the ejector pins for "blowing" the boxes out of the car (you'll have to buy a set to see how these ejectors are activated). My instructions came with an additional sheet of reprinted instructions for assembling the coach which includes an extra 1x1 flat stud to raise the ejector just the slightest bit. I'm guessing that the set was almost rushed out before they realized the ejector didn't quite blow out well enough without this extra flat stud. As assembled with the extra piece, the box blows out nicely (what, never heard of something blowing up nicely?). But the bank wall also includes one of these ejector pins and it doesn't blow out as well (the ejector knocks the wall out of place, but because of the size of the wall or for some other reason, the wall just lodges in place and never quite leaves the building). Now I'm wondering if there should have been an extra brick or two added to the assembly of the bank structure to make it work as well. As it is, I'm still trying some different combinations to see what will work (just called Shop at Home Consumer Affairs and they said they got the same results, I guess the diagrams themselves are what is misleading).
Minifigs include a bandit, a sheriff, two cowboys, a banker, and a soldier. I gotta say right here that I really like these new body prints; the sheriff has a big shiny star (so does his hat), the bandit looks good with or without his kerchief, and the banker has this nifty gold watch in his vest pocket, a pencil behind his ear, and hundred dollar bills stuffed in his other vest pocket (is this guy just asking for trouble or what?). There are plenty of the new rifles and six-shooters to go around for everybody.
Nifty/unique pieces include the 1x2 flat wanted poster for Flatfoot Thomsen, the window decals (high praise from a guy who usually tosses any and all stickers) and the new spring-loaded ejector pins.
Besides the flaw in the bank wall which I mentioned above, I was very pleased with this set (and would have given it five stars, which I wouldn't normally give a great medium set).