Set Review ➟ LEGO® 80009 Pigsy’s Food Truck
Pigsy’s Food Truck comes in an unnecessarily large—half-full or half-empty given one’s inclination—box. Inside are eight bags of parts and a bagged instruction book. As with other Monkie Kid sets, Pigsy’s Food Truck has lots of stickers.
Minifigures
The build starts with minifigures. First is Monkie Kid. He has a takeout box of Pigsy food and a cellphone. Monkie Kid looks a bit worried.
No wonder he’s worried! Monkie Kid has just discovered that the Pigsy’s Food Truck box lists two minifigures…named minifigures…Snort and Grunt. However the two minifigures contain exactly the same parts. This will undoubtedly cause much confusion over at BrickLink where a real-world frame of reference unfortunately doesn’t mesh with an outdated cataloging paradigm.
Snort and Grunt, named, on the box.
Snort and Grunt. Or Grunt and Snort. Who’s who?
Monkie Kid is clearly not worried about Grunt or Snort or whichever evil villain it is carrying those massive weapons, because reasons.
This is what happens when your evil weapons weigh more than you do.
The bull guys have motorcycles to ride. The two cycles are nice and villainous-looking; their design is identical except one has two 1 x 1 plates with clips on the tail and the other has one clip and a chain. The motorcycle headlamps are cleverly modeled with a bull-head motif. Then LEGO goes and obscures it with some wacky plates.
Cool bull’s head motif…
…which gets covered up! WTF LEGO?
The motorcycle with the chain has a box of assfruit attached to it. Inside the box is exactly one piece of assfruit. Presumably the assfruit box is nearly indestructible, able to withstand being tethered with a thick chain and being dragged along the asphalt by a motorcycle. Also assfruit has been genetically engineered to withstand tumultuous transport and still be tender enough to eat raw. There are also some jokes to be made about pressing ham, but I’ll leave those up to you.
Dragging the box of assfruit.
Assfruit! Highly nutritious, always delicious! Note how LEGO’s strategically placed and sensitive rendering of the modesty leaves covers the…um…delicate area.
If your Snort or Grunt is going to ride a motorcycle AND carry that axe weapon, then there is one and only one position he can take. That position is holding the axe straight up. Attempting to hold the axe in any other position results in the cycle becoming off-balanced…and in accordingly short order Snort or Grunt will develop a nasty road rash.
Hold that axe high!
Pigsy and Uncle Qiao are also here. Pigsy has a giant red fork. Uncle Qiao has a briefcase and, in the typical-yet-still-disturbing-way-of-food-packaging, two wieners but only one bun. This lack of the second bun is second only to the absence of knees on mechs in terms of outrage in the LEGO world.
If you run a food truck, you need a red pitchfork. Also, for the love of all that’s holy, get Uncle Qiao another bun!
The Food Truck
This is one big truck as far as minifigure-scale vehicles go. It measures a whopping 14 studs wide tire-to-tire. Add in the width of the red axle spikes and it is 19 studs wide. If the side panels are opened it goes to 25. Front-to-back the truck measures 32 studs long; extend the front fork and it goes up to 39. It is 20 bricks high.
Before getting into a description of the truck, I want to call out a note about the instruction manual. The manual is quite thick, and casually flipping the pages to build will often leave one of the elements for the page hidden behind the curl of the page. One has to forcibly flatten the book to see into the gutter where the detail may be hidden. This may end up cracking the binding. The short of it is that the book might be somewhat mangled by the time one finishes. I would like to think LEGO might be a wee bit more considerate of where information rests relative to the book gutter and how much paper gets consumed by a thick binding.
If one is gentle with the instructions, some step and part info may be hidden.
Forcible flattening of the book and folding back pages may be necessary to see everything.
Front of Truck
As I was building the truck, I was lamenting that often with these vehicle builds we don’t get much detail for the engine. As I snapped in a few nondescript bricks, I thought back to the Power Miners number 7 set where that rig had a big fancy exposed engine. Interesting build there, just the engine. A few bricks later on this set I realize that this “engine” is actually a grill for the wieners. So there was some humor at work here. Unfortunately the grill gets covered by the truck hood, and the truck cowl doesn’t easily swing open like the back of the truck. So this detail is a fun part of the build, but gets hidden when the assembly is complete. For play value it would have been nice if the grill engine could have been lifted out or otherwise more exposed, but I guess maybe that functionality had to take a back seat to the giant red fork front assembly.
Grilling wieners on the engine.
Engine wieners are hidden, but we keep the hood ornament.
The red fork assembly on the front of the truck is a Mad Max moment, great for some motorcycle spiking mayhem. It echoes the design of the red pitchfork that the Pigsy minifigure carries. The fork pivots up and down as a single unit.
Fork up.
Fork down.
It’s a bull-catcher.
The truck cab is similarly interesting as the engine with some but not a lot of detail. And again, once completely assembled, it is quite difficult to see any of it.
View through cab into back of truck.
Seats, steering wheel, and gear shift.
Decorated dashboard.
Opening cab doors.
Making the situation a bit worse is that even though the doors are functional, the roof of the cab needs to be removed if you want to place a figure in the cab. That’s not unusual for a LEGO vehicle, but this roof is particularly fussy to get on and secured. I found I had to kind of tip the windshields forward a bit, seat the front of the roof on the studs there, then pivot the whole thing down to attach the back side. It will go on, but because the top is wide and the attaching studs are not at the front edge of the plate, alignment is tricky.
Centered attachment points for the cab roof.
Front side attachment point is two studs back from the edge.
Back of Truck
Both sides of the back of the truck hinge up, creating makeshift awnings.
Right Side Counter
The right side of the truck is the counter area of the food truck. From here, proprietor Pigsy serves up delicious treats to his hungry customers. The counter is equipped with cleavers, a golden frog–no idea what’s up with that—condiments, sticky rice, frying pan, and wieners hanging from the ceiling. Wieners must be hanging there because the refrigerator is full. Also, just musing, these must be beef frankfurters, right? One would assume that Pigsy is getting his fresh meat from dispatching these pesky bulls that are stealing his assfruit and not, heaven forbid, Pigsy going all Sweeney Todd on fellow porcine. Also, no beverages are to be found in the truck.
Step right up and order your lunch!
Left Side Kitchen
The left side of the truck is the kitchen area of the food truck. It has a refrigerator, two ovens, and a griddle. There is no sink, so grease buildup, grime, and sanitary conditions are not things that concern proprietor Pigsy. The kitchen quickly transforms into a command post by rotating the griddle, dropping down a screen from the ceiling, and opening the refrigerator to reveal weapons: a saw and a blaster. The oven doors open, but nothing is stashed in there by design. One supposes extra ammo and assfruit could be stored in there, though.
An additional note: Pigsy’s Food Truck seems to have about six times the floor space of his brick-and-mortar establishment found in the Monkey King Warrior Mech set. Real estate taxes account for this, most likely.
Innocent kitchen…
…or tactical command post?
Griddle
There’s a cog which acts as a spin knob to rotate the griddle; flip it over and it becomes a control panel of sorts. On the plus side, it is a cool play element. On the minus side, the knob is positioned against the rear wall of the truck, making it a bit challenging to access. The griddle is more easily flipped by accessing it directly with one’s finger and just flipping it, versus needing to fat-finger a small target jammed into a corner. Were this a practical matter, I am glad I am not the one to have to clean the inside of the truck if a grease-filled griddle covered with wieners happened to be flipped…scattering wieners and smattering grease all over the place. Meh. This is probably Monkie Kid’s job. This situation may also account for the look on Monkie Kid’s face.
It’s a griddle…
…spin the knob…
…voilà, control panel.
Drop Down Screen
Pigsy’s concern with the bulls is clearly not the most clandestine of operations. His screen monitoring bullish activity would be clearly visible to any patron of his truck. Had the sticker been placed on the back of the door, and the door swapped to the other side of the mount, then the screen drop-down would be a secret revealed instead of a repositioning of a panel quite likely collecting grease from the griddle below. Getting the screen pulled down is somewhat of a challenge from the kitchen side of the truck. One has to hook a fingernail into the groove of the door handle and pull. It is more easily moved by accessing it from the counter side where a poke with a fat finger will suffice.
So, Pigsy, what exactly is that screen over the griddle…?
Pig Shooter
The pig rotates a complete 360 degrees on the top of the truck. The pig’s snout serves as a six-shooter which fires by spinning the pig’s butt. The studs travel airborne for about two meters before bouncing and becoming completely lost. The pig shooter is fun. Would have been nice if instead of a stub it had a curlique pig tail “handle” and fired by turning that instead of the whole butt, but that’s just me wanting even more pig aesthetic.
The pig shooter rotates on top of the truck.
The pig shooter ready to shoot.
Twist the pig’s butt to fire.
The Randolph T. Fielding Absolutely Administrivia Section
Here are some set detail notes intended to ameliorate any controversy that is undoubtedly going to arise in regards to the BrickLink catalog about ten minutes from tomorrow. Or yesterday.
Set 80009, my copy anyway, uses the 2780 friction pins throughout the build.
First and second from left are the 2780 center-slotted friction pins used in this model. Third from left is the newer 61332 pin without center slots. Fourth is the old 4459 pin without center slots and with a narrower throat.
At step 131, while the instructions clearly show the 92280 1 x 2 plate with split ring clip, and the parts list in the instructions give the part color code as 4598526, my kit actually contained the 44861 1 x 2 plate with rounded ring clip.
The seats have the round center sprue mark.
Below are the extra pieces. The 1 x 1 red and trans-neon-orange round plates may or may not technically be extra as they’re shooter ammo. But to answer the eagle-eyed viewer’s next question: Yes. Extra assfruit.
Summary
This is a great kit, good play value, good value for the money. A little disappointment in regards to some really nifty detail getting lost in the complexity of the build. Some points of assembly are a little tricky with the fit, so the age-appropriateness definitely skews a bit older. Some functional elements are also a little difficult to access. You will lose the round shooter tiles from the pig shooter almost immediately after shooting because that’s one massive hawg of a pig shooter.
Disclaimer
I spent my own money on this kit instead of buying groceries for the family this week. Eh, what’s a little forced fasting? There’s plenty of water. Also I absolve myself of any responsibility whatsoever if you happen to find missing stud shooter studs with your bare feet.
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