Sadly for those whose star sign is not Sagittarius, this awesome six-limbed archer by French builder Nicolas Picot is not to be part of a series, but was built for a Zodiac themed round in a contest underway on BrickPirate.net. But I’m ok with that because I’m a Pisces (…you know, thoughtful, impulsive, outgoing, shy, pragmatic, dreamy, hard working, lazy, always calm, and quick to anger).
Proving that there is life after building a monumentally large Star Destroyer, Polish builder Jerac put together this stylish little Auriga Mk III speeder in just a couple of hours. With its concept-car curves and wraparound canopy, this design would not look out of place in some futuristic thriller (…so I’m assuming that’s a Tom Cruise mini-fig!).
Unless you’ve been living on the nerd equivalent of Mars for the past few weeks, you’ve probably heard about Exploding Kittens, a new card game featuring artwork and character designs from Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal. It has already become the largest Kickstarter campaign ever, at this point just shy of $6M in funding from 150,000 backers.
To unlock project stretch goals, the game’s creators have challenged backers to post photos of themselves accomplishing certain “achievements”, such as posing with goats or cramming five spidermans into a Kayak. Nick Della Mora decided to do his part by contributing photos of a taco cat, magical enchilada and potato cat built from LEGO. Which meant he could follow the artwork on the cards, rather than torturing actual household pets!
If anyone feels like creating “weaponized back hair” out of LEGO next, we’d love to see it…
In what we hope is to become the start of a series, Chris Adams has chosen to follow up his brick-built JAWS movie poster with a similarly 3D-ified version of the iconic Ghostbusters movie poster:
Can’t wait to see which movie he chooses next! My money’s on The Breakfast Club.
While many here in Seattle spent the last week getting over our last-minute defeat at Super Bowl XLIX, the rest of the country seems to have been focused on Katy Perry’s half time show – in particular the fabulously unsynchronized “left shark”.
Several of you were puzzled that I didn’t jump on this viral image with one of my trademark LEGO parodies. That’s because I decided to experiment with a different format on this occasion. So hats off to Conrado PLG for stepping in and creating the LEGO version that we were all dying to see!
I’m crossing my fingers that this will inspire our friends at the LEGOLAND theme parks to add a left shark “easter egg” into one of their Miniland displays. I think he’d look perfect next to sad Keanu ;-)
To many of you, this may look like just another building created in the popular “Café Corner” style. But to those of us that were creatures of the Eighties, it’s immediately recognizable as Flynn’s, the videogame arcade featured in the 1982 pre-cyberspace pre-Matrix movie TRON.
Using fluorescent bricks and black light, Joel Baker has managed to impart his creation with the neon look and feel of the original. It has a complete interior featuring all manner of vintage arcade machines, and even the secret doorway that appeared in the 2010 follow-up TRON Legacy.
We know you all just *loved* the Zeus vs Thor brick film we recently featured, by the potty-mouthed YouTubers Epic Rap Battles of History. Well, like a bad penny, they’re back! This time providing a rap segment for this irreverent (PG rated) take on the The LEGO Movie by Honest Trailers.
[WARNING: Contains satire]
Conveying action in a microscale LEGO scene is impossible unless it’s action on an epic scale. Pascal Schmidt demonstrates this perfectly with his model of a volcano raining fiery death on what I assume is some poorly-situated Roman era town. Note the NPU (“nice part usage”) of white ray guns in the pyroclastic cloud.
For some reason this reminded me of a build from last year that we kinda overlooked, a microscale tornado by Jimmy Fortel, created during a round of Iron Builder, and featuring some more NPU (the seed part for the contest was Mixel ball and socket joints).
While Mario may be one of Nintendo’s most enduring videogame characters, Kirby has been around almost as long. And this lovable ball of fun has some pretty cool powers too, like inhaling his enemies to steal their abilities, and not being a ridiculous cultural stereotype. Heck, he even had his own cartoon show once …suck on that Mario!
Fun fact #1: During development of the first Dream Land game in 1992, Kirkby was intended merely as a simple placeholder graphic for the real character, but the designers loved him so much they used him in the final game. Fun fact #2: This LEGO version of Kirby by Swan Dutchman uses the Bram Sphere technique, which is anything but simple.
For its Season 4 bout between the Greek god Zeus and the Norse god Thor, the hugely popular YouTube channel Epic Rap Battles of History turned to Forrest Whaley and his team of stop-motion animators to give it the LEGO treatment. And the result is hilarious! Make sure to check out the entertaining behind the scenes video too.
[WARNING: Some profanity]
The printed micro-figs introduced with LEGO’s new SHIELD Helicarrier set seem to be generally well received by fans. Our Facebook poll suggests 2 out of 3 of you are in favor of them! So I expect before too long we’ll see people customizing them. Customization of classic mini-figs is nothing new, but customization of the newer Friends mini-dolls is way less common….
And that’s a shame, because I for one find them more aesthetically pleasing. If LEGO could just fix their rather limited range of motion, I think it’d be great to see them used in future Movie or TV based LEGO themes. Flickr user JustJon obviously agrees, and has been repainting one Friends fig every week along those very lines:
Pictured above, as if they needed any introduction: Luke Skywalker; Sailor Moon; Ghostbuster; Deadpool; Catniss Everdeen; Red Sonja.
UPDATE: The creator just pointed out that he previously created an entire set of superhero Friends customs, which are equally awesome and can be seen here.
As the current Iron Builder contest nears its conclusion, both teams continue to churn out amazing builds. But after many rounds of being cut to length for one purpose or another, the ribbed flex-tube seed parts seem to be getting progressively shorter and shorter. That doesn’t seem to be hampering their efforts though, judging by these two wonderful scenes by Tyler Clites:
Long-in-the-tooth readers might even notice that the old lady in the scene above is actually a reprise of a character that Tyler built for a previous Iron Builder contest – right down to the use of the blue seed part from that round!