The Arrested Development model home gets immortalized in Lego form (while somewhere, some other Lego maniac must be working on his recreation of the house from Spaced or the mansion from Fresh Prince)

(Photo source: Matt De Lanoy)

"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:

Mad Men's "Nixon vs. Kennedy" episode by Devon Wilkop (Photo source: MOCpages)

(Photo source: Orion Pax)

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: The Pogues, "The Body of an American"

"On its surface The Wire is a cop show, the most stereotype-ridden of TV genres, yet nowhere in The Wire do stereotypes exist. There are no good guys and bad guys, merely men and women who work on opposites sides of the socially acceptable. The Wire treats both as people caught up in the same racial, class, and political tensions that afflict any American, and dramatizes them in manners that feel natural. It's why you're not surprised that African-American detective Lester Freamon knows the words to the Pogues' 'Body of an American' when it's played at a cop wake in an Irish bar."

--Bret McCabe, Baltimore City Paper, January 12, 2005

Song: "The Body of an American" by The Pogues
Released: 1986
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: When Robert F. Colesberry, a co-executive producer of my favorite TV series of all time, The Wire (as well as an occasional actor who appeared on The Wire as homicide detective Ray Cole), died of complications from heart surgery in 2004, series creator David Simon had Colesberry's character die off-screen, and in the "Dead Soldiers" episode, he paid tribute to his mentor and friend through a heartfelt and rousing scene in which a bar full of white and African American Baltimore cops holds an Irish wake for Detective Cole.

"I started listening to a lot of different music for this scene, and The Pogues just naturally came into it, and 'Body of an American,' which seems to tell its own story in its own way about life and about loss, just became this thematically perfect thing," said Simon during his "Dead Soldiers" audio commentary. "The idea that [Baltimore detectives] would lay a guy out on the pool table and do a detective's wake and then sing this song seems entirely reasonable. They don't have this tradition, but they should."



The Shane MacGowan-penned gem, which is about a wake for an Irish boxer-turned-soldier, a real-life prizefighter named Jim Dwyer, "the man of wire," was reprised twice more on The Wire: when the "Corner Boys" episode paid tribute to another deceased Wire cast member, Richard DeAngelis, by giving his cop character Raymond Foerster a sendoff similar to Cole's and when a fake wake was held for Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), a comedic highlight of the series finale "-30-."

The eulogy that Sergeant Jay Landsman (Delaney Williams) gave for Cole was filled with references to past Colesberry projects like Mississippi Burning, After Hours and Simon's HBO miniseries adaptation of his own book The Corner. When Landsman delivered his fake eulogy for McNulty, his lines about McNulty's disregard for rules and authority could double as a comment on what The Wire itself accomplished as a TV series and an exploration of "a dark corner of the American experiment" during its extraordinary five-season run: "He was the black sheep, a permanent pariah... He did what he wanted to do, and he said what he wanted to say, and in the end, he gave me the clearances."

All the other "Rock Box" Tracks of the Day from this week:
The Heavy, "Short Change Hero"
Death from Above 1979, "Romantic Rights"
Geto Boys, "Still"
The Bar-Kays, "Too Hot to Stop"

This is the final "'Rock Box' Track of the Day" post. The "Rock Box" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks airs 4-6am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Mondays and 5-7am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Fridays.