#6642 Police Helicopter

We’ve now covered all but one of my childhood space sets, my only pirates set and my sister’s only western set, all released 1988 or later. That year seems to be a theme-wise breaking point in my collection and we’ll now turn our attention to a series of LEGO Town sets, starting with #6642 Police Helicopter. In October ’88 this was the last Town set I ever got, although I can’t recall from whom.

I like the hinged search-light under the cockpit, and I believe this is the first LEGO police helicopter released with that feature, it being fairly common in sets after this one.

The helmet with trans light-blue visor was new for me in this set, and I remember thinking it was really cool looking and a big improvement over the visor-less LEGO helmets found in earlier sets.

The narrow tail is attached using a rather clever technique with jumpers below to center it, and a 3x2 plate with a centered hole above to lock it in place. My other LEGO helicopters had a 2-stud wide tail, making them much less elegant in comparison. This method for attaching and securing a sub build one half-stud off has really stuck with me since I first built this helicopter. I actually used this very technique last autumn when building together with my nephew, some 33 years later, although I don’t think he appreciated the ingenuity of it as much as I did…

The 1x1 tiles in transparent red and green were also a novelty to me back in ’88. Combined with the twin 1x8 tile rotor blades they give this helicopter a much sleeker appearance than what I was used to. With so few exposed studs in the main part of the build, I guess this set somehow represented a new era of LEGO for me, yet at the same time it was the last to be added to my Town collection before my interest turned completely to Space.

But here for the Hyggebygge blog we’re building the sets in reverse order, so you can expect many more LEGO Town sets, and especially Police sets in the coming posts.