Friday, November 21, 2008

Lego Minifigures at 30

It was August 25, 1978 that the Danish Lego company first jazzed up their building blocks by including a little yellow man. They had been in development for at least four years, however: it was this year that they reached their final form.




There is a great amount of history and trivia on Lego’s website–such as that there are three times as many Lego men as there are people in China—and here’s another blog from Wired magazine. For the truly obsessed there’s a photographic timeline. There’s always Wikipedia, but my favorite is the Minifig Generator, where you can mix and match to create your own minifigures (almost like the real thing!).

Of course, without Minifigures there really wouldn’t be any point to phenomena like YouTube either, as Lego men are really the site’s raison d’etre, if you ask me. Since I’m equally into Chaplin, Lang, Murnau, et al as Indiana Jones, here are a couple of my personal favorites. Enjoy!

Metropolis:




Chaplin:




Accordingly, by the way, this page on the website The Bioscope is one of my favorite pages on the entire web. 

2 comments:

Alyssa Rock said...

Sorry... I'm a little behind on my feeds. I wanted to ask you about the Elmo's World script. So, is that where you work in NY? For the Children's Television Workshop?

Randy Astle said...

Well, thanks for reading at all--hope you're still finding it useful! I did the new Elmo's World script as another sample to send to producers and put on my website. (http://www.randyastle.com/assets/astle_elmosworld.pdf) I've been in contact with Sesame Workshop, though, and other co.s here and elsewhere in the big wide world. I'll keep you posted...