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)

"Omar comin'!": The Wire gets amazingly interpreted by artist Dennis Culver

For my forthcoming self-published compilation of my webcomic, I'm presently working on a section about The Wire, which will consist of "30 Reasons Why The Wire Is the Best Show Ever" and a piece of Wire-related artwork that was done by me.

I was Googling to see if there were any illustrators out there who ever interpreted The Wire in pencil and ink when I stumbled upon a fantastic Wire character gallery that True Tales of Roller Derby artist Dennis Culver recently posted on his Flickr. (*Exasperated sigh*) My drawings of the Wire characters will never look as dope as Culver's.

[Via ComicsAlliance]

"You happy now, bitch?": 100 great quotes from The Wire

This sweet 10-minute montage of classic and uncensored (and therefore, NSFW) lines from all five seasons of my favorite TV series of all time is strictly for Wire fans only. Everyone else should skip this montage because it makes no sense without prior viewing of the episodes the clips were culled from, and it contains spoilers.

I wish the montage included a clip from Bunny's speech to the troops during "All Due Respect" ("There's never been a paper bag for drugs. Until now."), but it does include one of my favorite exchanges in the entire series--Omar pwns the Barksdale crew's slimy lawyer while being cross-examined by him in court. The scene boils down the series' primary theme of broken institutions so well in that terse manner that was such a trademark of The Wire:

Levy: You are amoral, are you not? You are feeding off the violence and the despair of the drug trade. You're stealing from those who themselves are stealing the lifeblood from our city. You are a parasite who leeches off...

Omar: Just like you, mang.

Levy: ... the culture of drugs... Excuse me? What?

Omar: I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase. It's all in the game though, right?

Reason to Dig Aziz Ansari #2: Earlier this year, he amusingly pretended to tweet to (or retweet) characters from The Wire as if they were on Twitter.

[Via Entertainment Weekly]