I watched this Lego documentary recently, from 2016, and it's pretty fascinating. It follows a couple of stories, one being a guy applying to be a Lego Set Designer, which sounds like an awesome job to me. Another story is about a diehard, adult Lego enthusiast, who wants to start a print magazine about the Lego building culture. But he needs the official "OK" from Lego to do it properly. Nearly all of us built stuff with Legos as kids. This 45 minute video is a look into Lego, the company, and the many facets of Lego culture.
During the pandemic, in 2021, I was walking past a homeless hut built into the side of a hill, next to a freeway offramp. Every night, many of the homeless people in that area would wander the streets and alleys, looking for curb furniture and dumpster finds. They would take all these things back to their huts, and sort them out. There was a growing pile of discarded items by this fence. I found 4 or 5 of Chelsea Handler's books there, that the other homeless people tossed in the huge discard pile. One day, I found a full Lego set, the blocks to make a little van, and a small building. It had some tie to one of the Toy Story movies. I took it back to my storage unit, which was a second floor, indoor 5 by 5. Since the area around my unit was quiet most of the time, I could do artwork there in the hallway, or sit a read a book, during the day.
But that night, I opened up the Lego set, as a 55-year-old homeless guy, and got lost for 2 or 3 hours, building things with the Legos. I wound up with a funky hot rod pick-up truck, and another vehicle that looked like a mutant, souped up, corn combine (the big farmer's machines that harvest corn). I had a blast, and those two little vehicle creations sat on a shelf in my storage unit for over a year. Eventually I got behind on payments, and everything got auctioned off, including my Lego cars. I kept thinking that if I ever win the lottery, I'm going to buy about 100 pounds of Lego bricks on eBay, and have a room in my house just for building weird and cool stuff out of Legos. It's probably a good thing that I will never win the lottery.
Like most of you, I had a bunch of Legos as a kid, in the 1970's, when kits were just boxes of a few different kinds and colors of bricks. We had to make up our own ideas on what to build with them. I used to make little four wheeled motorcycles (quads hadn't been invented yet by the motorcycle companies), and my imaginary riders would ride them all over the bedroom or living room. I used to make other things, too, but the motorcycles with four tiny wheels were a favorite of mine.
Then I grew older, and I think my Legos got sold at a garage sale, most likely. I grew up, sort of, and went on with life. But on trips to big discount stores over the years, I'd wander the toy aisles, and see the different Lego sets that kept getting bigger, and morphing into cooler sets, year after year. It never occurred to me that there was an actual job that consisted of playing with Legos, and creating the sets that got tied to movies and comic characters, that came out year after year.
It turns out that Lego is a privately-owned company, headquartered in a small town in Denmark. The whole Lego brand worldwide is valued at $13 billion, as of 2023. It's a family business, already around for years, before their familiar plastic, interlocking bricks debuted in 1949. The business is still owned by the current generations of the family. There is incredible secrecy in the company about future products, and a very strong culture for those working there. This is a great video to just chill and watch, and will definitely bring back your own Lego memories from childhood.
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