Lego Pirates Of The Caribbean Worst Pirate Ever

[Rosetta Ockman]

Myname is bricverson and I just registered on this forum yesterday. All I want to say about this place is AWESOME. I never know there are so many AFOLs around the world and could even gather in such a wonderful community like here. So with the beginning of my membership, I want to contribute with a little review of my latest purchase: 6289 Red Beard Runner.

I've just got out my decade long dark age and is in the process of collecting sets I've always dreamt of in my childhood(poor kid from a poor family). The Red Beard Runner, though being heavily criticized by many serious Lego fans, is not a set that I would afford to miss. As there is currently no other reviews on this set in this forum, I'll make it up by presenting to you my pictorial review.

Red Beard Runner is an official pirate ship set released back in 1996. The ship is a large pirate vessel featuring an unique red 16-stud wide hull, two mast and three sails. The ship is designed with "playability" at heart so that the front mast and stern could "collapse" once triggered by certain mechanism.

The next big thing about this set is its unique RED ship hull. It looks very elegant in real and makes it stand out among other brown-hull ships. Here I've added several other red pieces to give you an idea about how "red" they are.

The set comes with some nice animals such as monkey, shark and a parrot. The minifigures are not quite interesting except for Captain Red Beard. The print and color on the torsos looks extremely mediocre especially the one in the green vest. Anyway I don't care too much about minifigures so I can accept whatever I get as long as its genuine Lego.

One of the signatures of this set is probably white skull design at the stern. There are some great details with the skull head including the use of white stud as teeth and the red tongue(throat?) inside the mouth arc. There is also a string comes out through the eye of the skull head which the other end ties to a little landing boat.

This is the trigger mechanism that will cause the stern to "collapse". All you need to do is to pull the technic beam from both side and the cabin floor will be leveraged by the weight of the skull head in the back. It will also be used to topple the upper deck once the build is complete and we'll come to that in a second.

Here it is, the completed Red Beard Runner ready to sail the high sea! She is fully equipped with a working crane, fish net and a landing boat(safety boat) to ensure it's crew's survival on the sea. She's three cannon broadside also gives it enough fire power to gun down any imperial/armada vessels(before the year 2010).

A close-up on the trap door below the mast. Interestingly enough, the yellow flat pieces around the trap door serves both functional and aesthetic purposes. It helps stabilize the mast when its straight-up and does a good job keeping the bow consistent in color.

It took me 4 hours to build this ship and the process is generally interesting. Nothing is repetitive and the building of these "collapse" mechanisms do add a lot fun to build. Here are some Pros and Cons I found after the build:

I cannot say I particular like or dislike the tilting/collapsing designs of this ship as it seems to be a attempt for TLC to make breakthrough from its traditional ship designs. It compromised a lot of details and displayability in return of increased playability for kids.

As an AFOL, however, this ship is a must-have for every Pirate collector as it give you great many MOCing possibilities. You can use your imagination to "stabilize" the stern and masts, adding as many detail as you want, and even redesign the rigging to your liking.

I must say that I love this ship, even if it's obviously not as mighty as 6285 BSB and 6286 SES. It has a great color scheme (though not really realistic), the skull is fantastic, the black bandanas were very rare at this time, and the sails are beautiful. The rigging is also very smart.

I must disagree about the crew, captain Roger Redbeard is the least interesting figure, since he is in about a billion other sets. I like the other pirates for having new torsos, heads and black bandanas, which make the stand out a bit from most other pirates from the old theme.

I like the somewhat cartoonish piratey bits of the ship. While realism is fine, the cartoonish symbols also have its quality, even if it is a somewhat childish mindset. The skull on the back is quite well made. While the plank easily falls of, it is an ok addition.

Yes, I am also annoyed by the absence of the extra cannon. Perhaps TLC intentionally left it out to make it less powerful than 6285 or 6286. But that's no big deal as it's easy to add cannon to the empty slot.

As to the cannon rail, I'm totally fine with the design. I used to love the 6286 design but it kinda occupies too much space and implement it would probably need another mid-section to make it feel less crowded.

Anyway, I'm not satisfied as she is so I'll probably carry on with some MOCing. I'm thinking of removing the collapsing triggers of both the mast and stern and adding some real riggings to her. A string overhead for example. But I cannot find triangle sail with decent color pattern to go with her. Any suggestions besides DIY?

The problem with this set is that it has some very cool features, and some poor ones, and it does look like they were trying to cut down on piece count here. I for one think that the skull at the stern looks really good, and so do the big white arches at the base of the main mast. The blue walls of the sterncastle aren't bad either. But I think the tilting mast and falling-off stern were unnecessary - a proper captain's cabin would've been better. It also needs more sails. And the way the cannons are placed doesn't make much sense.

Actually, lately I've been thinking about leaving the best features of the set intact, and building a much better ship around them, improving the rest - kinda like Red Beard Runner ver. 2.0. I think a really good-looking ship can be achieved that way, because this set definitely has some potential.

I have actually built a refined version of this ship, or as you may say, the v2.0 RBR. I have removed both the tilting mast and falling skull-head. The cabin is now quite empty and can afford as many furniture as possible. I've also added a cellar below the cabin floor to address the space once occupied by the leverage. Besides these, the ship looks exactly the same as the original: opening stern walls, white arc below the mast, beautiful white skullhead.

I have the ship and I like it a lot, the sails with holes in it are awesome, too bad there isn't a jib, tricorner sail on the prow, I tried using one from my skull's eye schooner but the sails' color don't really match unfortunatly.

Other than the skull on the back (and even that isn't so bad), this is a very well designed and proportioned ship. 10x better than the tosh that's been put out for ships by the Lego company recently (with the exception of the Queen Anne's Revenge, kind of).

Great review! This set has nostalgic value for me: it was the first BIG LEGO Pirate ship we ever owned. Sure, it's easily the least well-executed (although I do like the action features), and I even knew that at the time...but for once all our Pirates could fit on one ship. ;)

I haven't got the RBR but i guess it has shooting cannons and you have put non shooting cannons in your photo. I think you should indicate in your reviews when you are changing original pieces and accesories.

I think there might be variations of the cannon types in some sets. I have seen it in the Peeron inventories rather often. Oddly enough Peeron only lists non-shooting cannons for either number that this ship has. The one I have, 6290 version judging from the plans, has shooting cannons though. It could be that the former owner switched them, I bought it secondhand, but out of the many cannons I own and have seen, there has never been any non-shooting among them.

Yes there are two types of cannons around: the U.S non-shooting cannon(with a cross-sword engrave on it) and the non-U.S shooting ones. I bought this set from a U.S seller on BL so it doesn't surprise me and these are my first nonshootings by the way.

As for the cannons, there was also a third type - non-shooting with no crossed cannons pattern - they appeared very briefly before the standard non-shooting ones were introduced, and they were basically shooting ones with the spring mechanism removed.

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