"As someone who just finished spending the majority of his life in prison, what happened with Legos? They used to be simple... Something happened out here while I was inside. Harry Potter
Legos, Star Wars
Legos, complicated kits, tiny little blocks. I mean, I'm not saying it's bad. I just wanna know what happened."
--Professor Marshall Kane (Michael Kenneth Williams), Community
When I was either seven or eight years old--back in a simpler time before the days when Lego started selling those licensed
Potter or
Star Wars playsets that currently baffle Greendale's biology teacher--I got bored with constructing vehicles or buildings with whatever remaining Lego bricks were lying around the house (God, those pieces are so easy to lose). So I tried recreating with those same Legos the set of
The $25,000 Pyramid, right down to Dick Clark's podium. When I couldn't get it to look enough like
Pyramid, I shuffled several bricks around and tried to convert it into the set of
Jeopardy!
"Ooh, I know this one," says you the reader. "'What are things that look like shit?'"
Correct.
Ding-ding.
My attempts to make Lego replicas of the
Pyramid and
Jeopardy! sets never looked as good as the work of Matt De Lanoy, a Lego master and
Arrested Development fan whose remarkable Lego diorama of the Mitch Hurwitz creation's central setting, the Bluth family's model home, was the subject of
an A.V. Club Chicago post that I recently stumbled into. De Lanoy's replica of the Bluths' crib is on display at a Lego Store in Schaumburg, Illinois all through April. It comes complete with the Bluths' stair car,
the frozen banana stand (is there any money in this banana stand?) and even a tiny Gob figure with both his Segway and wooden black BFF Franklin.
De Lanoy's diorama has slightly raised my interest in Netflix's in-the-works revival of the hilarious
Arrested Development, even though I'm kind of skeptical about how it'll turn out because so many reunion projects for TV have been such duds. However, I'm relieved that
Arrested Development will return as a 10-to-13-episode series instead of as a two-hour feature film where
it would have been impossible for every Bluth to receive substantial screen time.
While I have the patience to watch 10-to-13 nonstop episodes that I assume Netflix Instant will unveil all at once (that was how Netflix posted its eight-episode original series
Lilyhammer) instead of week-by-week, I don't have the patience to play architect like De Lanoy does. But if I were more patient with Legos, I'd recreate
the Chevy that a drunk McNulty crashed into an overpass column (and then crashed into the same column again to figure out why it happened--McNulty's always a detective, even when plastered) right before he banged that waitress at the beginning of the "Duck and Cover" episode from season 2 of
The Wire. That smashed-up Chevy is overdue for a Lego replica.
Here are some other impressive Lego dioramas of shows and films that, like
The Wire or
Arrested Development, aren't as popular with Lego's juice box-sipping consumers as say,
Potter or
Star Wars:
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| Mad Men's "Nixon vs. Kennedy" episode by Devon Wilkop (Photo source: MOCpages) |
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