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Adventurers Time Period


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I was looking through old LEGO.com FAQs/tech support/etc on the web archives after Toa_Of_Justice posted a link to them in another topic, and came across this:

http://web.archive.org/web/20061210212224/http://www.lego.com/eng/service/faqs.asp?section=ConsumerService-FAQ-Products&catid=08D7FCAC-4136-467E-94CE-4FFB05A55B0E&faqid=1534#1534

 

Quote

What is the story line behind Orient Expedition?

The story starts in Venice, Italy in 1933, when Johnny Thunder, our adventure-seeking hero, and his friends, Professor Kilroy and Miss Pippin, come across part of a Silk Map left by the famous explorer Marco Polo. The map indicates that his legendary treasure, the magnificent Golden Dragon, is hidden somewhere in Asia, requiring a quest to find bits of the map and other treasures need to find and release the Dragon. The team has to solve clues and collect three golden treasures—a shield, sword and helmet—to release the dragon. There are challenges awaiting them in India, Mount Everest and finally China, where they eventually unlock the dragon.

Perhaps I'm just forgetting things, but I don't recall hearing that date before, and I've definitely seen debates on when the Adventurers/Orient Expedition themes are supposed to take place. Are there any other dates given by other sources? Books, audio dramas, comics, character bios, etc? Wasn't there some sort of Ask Kilroy thing on the old website as well?

(And yeah, there's that soon-to-be-released Scooby Doo set with a Johnny Thunder cameo and year given, but meh)

Edit: Sadie sent me her transcript of the Orient Expedition audio drama (as majhost, where her transcript was hosted, is currently down), and it says that the story begins "On a sunny June morning in the year nineteen hundred and twenty five", eight years before the date given on these LEGO.com FAQs. A bit contradictory, but I suppose that shouldn't be surprising.

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Orient Expedition stuff is definitely gonna be the best source for dates, because the earlier Adventurers stuff wasn't really concerned with hard continuity.

 

It's possible some of the LEGOLAND stuff had years attached to it, I'll look into it.

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  • 1 month later...

This is interesting--two dates I hadn't heard of before. I'd noted in my LEGO timeline:

 

The only exact date for the Adventurers theme comes from the German audio drama The Hunt for the Pharaoh’s Treasure, which puts the Egypt theme in 1910.   The LEGO Book indicates a 1920s setting, indicating that at least one of the subthemes takes place in that decade.  The Chinese city of Xi’an appears in the Orient Expedition online comics—this is a real city that was renamed in 1928.

 

The author of Curse of the Mummy doesn’t seem to have been aware that the Adventurers theme was set early in the 20th century, as the airport scene includes a modern-day helicopter and Kilroy’s coded message is sent via fax machine.

 

So now we have a couple of different exact dates for the Adventurers time period:

 

1910 - Hunt for the Pharoah's Treasure

1922 - 75900 Mummy Mystery set

1925 - Orient Expedition CD

1933 - LEGO FAQ

 

1925 is consistent with the Xi'an shoutout, though it's unlikely that everyone would have stopped calling the city that as soon as it was renamed, so 1933 is an outlier but still reasonable. Except for 1925/1933 (as those are two different dates for the same events), these dates aren't mutually exclusive--the Indiana Jones films spanned a longer period of time than this. (Even longer if you count the TV series.)

 

For comparison, Johnny's adventerous peers in other themes have some hard dates too. The Pharoah's Quest series is locked in at August, 1924 thanks to the "Adventure Journal of Professor Archibald Hale" on LEGO.com, which provides day-by-day entries for the events leading up to Pharoah's Quest. Dr. Artimus Rhodes from the Atlantis theme backstory made his expedition to the underwater kingdom from August-September 1919, according to the "Secret Journal of Dr. Artimus Rhodes", also on LEGO.com.  (Johnny Thunder had a similar diary in the "Minfigure Handbook: Adventurers" online feature, which had entries from April to October detailing non-theme related adventures, but no year was given. :( )

 

TC

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