Category Archives: Feature

The Brothers Brick is not just about showcasing the best fan builds and bringing you the latest LEGO News, we also love to investigate, interview and discuss! These featured articles are all interesting articles that you can look back and enjoy reading.

Toys ‘R’ Us, looking back and moving forward for LEGO fans [Feature]

It’s been a few weeks since the news of Toys R Us making its exit from the industry in the most unfortunate way—total bankruptcy—after 70 years of operations, and even more heartbreaking to know that founder Charles Lazarus passed a mere week later, knowing that his legacy ended. We’re not here to debate or speculate what went wrong or what could have been done better, as there’s enough of that news out there to feed on. Instead, we wanted to hear from our fans on what it means to us as LEGO hobbyists, and how this may impact us moving forward. Toys R Us (TRU) is remaining open for business in several countries around the world, including Australia and Canada, so we’ve asked a diverse group of readers to join us in providing commentary that’s part retrospective, and part insight into how TRU affects the LEGO hobby, whether closing or continuing operations.

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LEGO 2017 Financial Results – Simplified and made easy! [Feature]

Last week LEGO released its annual financial results for 2017, and to some of us, it may have seemed like it was written in a foreign language. You know what it means to have a profit and loss, but to help cut through all the accounting jargon, we’ve simplified things a bit further for you. Note that we’re taking a huge amount of liberty with the complex details to keep it simple, but it should give you the right general idea.

LEGO 2017 Financial Results Simplified Breakdown

Read our simplified break-down of LEGO’s 2017 financial results

When Life Imitates LEGO – The Octan Gas Company [Feature]

Every city needs fuel to run, and prior to 1992, real-life oil companies like Shell, Esso, and Exxon provided the energy to keep brick-built LEGO cities running. Then, a new competitor entered the market — a Danish oil company that went by the name Octan. Soon, all the other players couldn’t keep up with Octan and that led to the dominance of a single supplier monopolizing the brick fuel market. Octan were not satisfied with just the ABS market, and it seems like the fictional gas company grew into a real-life company supplying gasoline to real-world vehicles… (HOLD ON RIGHT THERE!) Yes, you read that right… How did a fictional company become real?

Well, we’re not going to give you false hopes that we know exactly how a fictional oil brand came to exist in real life, but we just wanted to share a mysterious incident that popped up on the web. A screen capture appearing to show an Octan-branded gas station in the real world went viral within the LEGO fan community recently, and we decided to find out what we could. We may not have all the answers, at least for now, but we do hope that someone will step forward to give us some background and context.

Click here to read more about our investigation into the real life Octan oil company

Minifigure hairstyles – which styles were a cut above the rest in 2017? [Feature]

Looking back, it felt as though 2017 was a year full of minifigures sporting cool hairstyles. I imagine the release of The LEGO Ninjago Movie Collectible Minifigure Series had a key role in supplying these modern hairstyles, along with Batman and the odd Star Wars eclectic hairstyle. I thought it would be interesting to step inside LEGO’s minifigure hair salon to take a look back at some of the more interesting styles that LEGO introduced for our little friends last year.

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Case Closed: The investigation on Mulder and Scully and their LEGO minifigures [Feature]

This iconic photo of two top-billing Hollywood stars holding their minifigs has been making the rounds in the LEGO-sphere, re-shared and re-surfacing regularly over the past couple of years. Our curiosity got the better of us… Was it a conspiracy from the LEGO Group? Was it a tease of an upcoming X-Files theme? So much mystery from this single photo. So many questions. We know the TRUTH IS OUT THERE, so we decided to do some digging.

An investigation into the origins of the LEGO Foot Soldier comic [Feature]

LEGO memes are in abundance, but not many of them surface more often that the idea that stepping on a LEGO brick is painful. One of the best-known iterations of this meme is a comic that’s been making the rounds on the internet for years featuring a brick-general giving training to other brick-soldiers gathered around a plan of attack diagramming the human foot.

If you’re a fan of LEGO, chances are good that you’ve seen it at some point in time and probably even had it shared with you more than once. But did you ever stop to think, who created this? Well, perhaps I’m more inquisitive than most, but that’s what piqued my interest. So let me share with you the journey of discovery that I took…

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EXCLUSIVE: LEGO-made gingerbread houses decorate the White House, plus an interview with the design team [Feature]

Each year during the holiday season, the White House transforms into a veritable forest of glittering Christmas trees with festive decorations as far as the eye can see. But this year, the highlight of the White House holiday décor began in Enfield, Connecticut, with seven LEGO Master Builders.

They were fast at work like Santa’s elves, designing and building 56 unique gingerbread-style houses representing each U.S. state and territory. The team also created two massive gingerbread men and a first-of-its-kind 18-foot long interlocking brick-built paper chain. 500 hours and more than 200,000 pieces later, the LEGO-built decorations are on display in the White House State Dining Room.

The LEGO gingerbread houses were built “studs out” in order to reduce the weight on each tree while still maintaining detailed exteriors customized to each U.S. territory and state. (SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

In this exclusive interview with The Brothers Brick, Amanda Santoro, Senior Manager of Brand Relations for LEGO Systems, tells us more about building a display for the White House which has been seen by nearly 70,000 people this holiday season.

The Brothers Brick: From the Winter Village product line to advent calendars, Lego has become a holiday tradition in many homes. How did the opportunity arise to create such an impressive display for “The People’s House”?

Amanda Santoro: We were contacted by the amazing events group that works directly with the White House to develop the holiday décor theme. There were some exciting discussions about potential opportunities and ultimately, we were asked to provide the decorations for the State Dining Room.

56 LEGO-built gingerbread houses representing each U.S. territory and state adorn the trees in the White House State Dining Room, along with two massive “ginger-friends” and an interlocking brick-built paper chain. (ALEX WONG/Getty Images)

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