This has to be the dream of millions of kids: lifesize replicas of superheroes and Star Wars characters, made out of Legos. Unfortunately, even the most advantaged kids wouldn’t be able to get their hands on the kit to build the Stormtrooper Jango Fett (sorry, I was tired) pictured above, nor the impressively-detailed Batman below the jump.
I talked to Vince Rubino of LEGO Americas last night at the Con, and he told me that LEGO couldn’t possibly sell such a kit directly to consumers, because they “don’t have the instructions” to put them together. There are apparently six LEGO builders in the entire world with the expertise to put such a thing together. Richie Riches and the parents who bankroll them can go to Lego.com, where there are bios and contact info for each of these “accredited Certified Professionals”, from whom one an commission a custom creation such as those documented above and below.
We will shortly have a bunch of photos from tonight’s Comic-Con show floor preview on our Flickr stream. Stay tuned for a number of detailed posts on various things (Toy porn! Star Wars porn! Lego porn! Vintage poster porn! Postal service porn! Hentai! A couple of things that aren’t porn at all!) that especially turned us on. Above: in a pretty typical example of Comic-Con commerce, a smart man finds a way to milk money from a stupid joke.
I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but I’m actually very excited about Robert Zemeckis’s motion-capture drool-fest, Beowulf, coming out tomorrow. I should probably know better. When dialog scenes are replaced with slick CG versions it’s a pretty safe indication that the movie will be little more than eye candy. Nevertheless, I’m dying to see an impossibly ripped Beowulf kick some Grendel ass.
My excitement about the movie has made me feel like a eleven year-old again, which has me thinking about two other passions from my younger years: stop-motion animation and Legos. I haven’t done much to nurture either of those loves in the last decade and a half, so I was unaware that there are a handful of hilarious videos on YouTube featuring stop-motion animated Lego mini-figs playing out scenes from movies. The best one I found was a the well-crafted short above, depicting the opening act of Beowulf, apparently “made for a school project.”
While Zemeckis pours millions into pushing CG animation to the next level, I’m glad there are still kids out there making movie magic in their basements, one frame at a time.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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