LEGO Life on Mars

LEGO Life on Mars was a short-lived LEGO theme from 2001, and a subtheme of LEGO Space. Basically, a small group of human astronauts crash-landed on Mars, discovered Martians, and sat down and observed them for a while. It is unusual among LEGO Space themes for its stronger focus on exploration and discovery over combat - unlike its successor LEGO Mars Mission, the human astronauts had no interest in conquering the martians and instead preferred to observe their lives.

This was the last true LEGO Space theme for several years, until its Spiritual Successor LEGO Mars Mission turned up in 2007. Unrelated to the TV show Life On Mars, though that would be awesome in its own right. Provides the Martians for Irregular Webcomic.

This toy line provides examples of

 * Combining Mecha: A more unconventional example: all sets were designed to be consistently segmented and modular, and all instruction manuals point out that the modular segments are interchangeable between sets. Also, most of the sets are mecha.
 * Cool Starship: The Solar Explorer, the humans' ship.
 * Humongous Mecha: Most of the Martians' vehicles are mecha, and almost all of them have some mechalike traits.
 * Inferred Holocaust: The friendly Martians' absence from the Mars Mission theme certainly doesn't imply anything good...
 * Keep Circulating the Tapes: The comics.
 * Little Green Men
 * Power Crystal: The Martians were searching Mars for a green type of crystal required to power their vehicles.
 * Slice of Life
 * Spiritual Successor: To the 1999 "Space Port" sub-theme.
 * Theme Naming: All the Martians were named after stars.
 * Twenty Minutes Into the Future