I watched My Neighbour Totoro for the first time just after Christmas. I wish I had seen it years ago, because it was absolutely wonderful. So seeing legorobo:waka’s model of the iconic Catbus was right up my alley! I love the somewhat simplified/blocky style…and that smile is just spot on!
But the coolest feature is definitely the movement:
Check out the full photoset for all the views.
As we return to our regular programming, Mike Crowley is being laid to rest in his hometown of Melrose, Massachusetts today. I have so many more favorites I want to share that I’ll be interspersing a few more among the new LEGO models we’ll begin posting again.
One of Mike’s most ambitious LEGO projects was to build a larger-than-Miniland-scale version of the Mos Eisley Cantina and all its denizens. Josh blogged Ponda Baba back in 2008, and this wonderful sculpture of the infamous Aqualish pirate has certainly stood the test of time.
You can almost hear jaunty music when you see all the Bith musicians of the Cantina Band.
Mike’s scale and building style are particularly well-suited to alien creatures like Muftak & Kabe.
You can see all of the characters Mike finished in his photoset on Flickr.
One of the things I’ll always remember Mike Crowley for was his ability to put LEGO elements together in new and interesting ways. One of Mike’s ideas was the BrickFA, or Brick Figure Articulation (sort of a LEGO version of Stikfas).
As with all of his other innovations, Mike shared his techniques without expectation of reward or even recognition — true open source LEGO.
One of Mike‘s talents included making anything he wanted at all from anything LEGO produced. He’d find the most fabulous ways to integrated some of the strangest pieces and produce something wonderful.
Shottle was one of those things, finding a way to integrate the lid from packaging and create something fantastic!
I don’t think he ever found a piece he couldn’t use. Yes, even Galidor.
In January 2007, Mike Crowley began building all the major characters from Nintendo’s Mario Kart games, starting with King Koopa himself, Bowser.
Mike soon followed with Mario and Toad:
Yoshi & Donkey Kong:
Mike brought all of these to BrickFest PDX 2007 in Portland, where he had them all in karts that I don’t think ever ended up online (if I remember correctly, Mike hadn’t taken pictures of them in their karts yet before the con, and the figures broke on their way home to Boston). Convention photos are never as good as a builder’s own, but I did manage to snag a shot of all of them together:
BrickFest PDX was of course the LEGO convention where Mike, Caylin, Josh, and I all went out for Chinese at a place called “House of Louie.” We all piled into Portland’s light rail system (MAX), crossed the Willamette River, and got off somewhere that we thought would have better restaurants than the ones around the Oregon Convention Center (remember, smartphones with Yelp and local search weren’t as ubiquitous as they are five years later).
Appropriately and strangely, a white LEGO horse stood on a counter near our booth.
One of the last major models Mike Crowley posted online was a new type of brick-built figure, the “BigFig.” BigFigs are built from bricks, but look like large minifigs. Mike showed off his new idea with a recreation of the classic LEGO Pirates captain minifig:
In March 2009, Mike wrote:
Basic features include:
– head can rotate
– face / hairpiece can be customized
– arms are connected with Technic axles to prevent “drooping” when holding objects
– hands can rotate
– torso and hip-piece fronts and backs can be customized
– legs are connected using Technic rotating / ratcheting click hinges, allowing for some rotation backward and full 90 degree rotation forward (into the seated position)
– head, arms, hands, hips and legs all separate in the same places that a regular-sized minifig’s do
– the rear and bottoms of the legs have “holes” built into them to resemble those on the legs of a regular-sized minifig and are spaced so as to fit onto “studs” built 2×2 and spaced 2 studs apart from one another.
In case you’d like to try your own hand at building a BigFig, Mike even posted a breakdown:
We’re going to hold off posting new LEGO models this weekend as we celebrate the life of Mike Crowley, who passed away on Tuesday in Boston. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy selections from Mike’s prolific and brilliant LEGO output.
Mike’s Sesame Street diorama doesn’t just feature really wonderful, brick-built renditions of the iconic Jim Henson characters. The backdrop is also full of interesting techniques, like the bricks on the green building.
According to my original blog post about this, Mike built this back in February 2006.
Mike Crowley passed away yesterday. He was my friend.
Mike leaves a legacy behind in the LEGO community. So many of us were blessed with his friendship and presence, and his absence due to illness in recent years has been noted. He was such a big personality with such a passionate, caring heart. This world is a little dimmer without him in it.
His activities with NELUG notwithstanding, Mike was a prolific and brilliant builder. His flickr stream is filled with such innovative uses for parts that showed such character for what he was trying achieve with anything he tried.
Beyond his building, beyond his artistic talent, Mike is, was, and always will be a friend first and foremost. In looking back, my memories aren’t always of the incredible things he built. My memories are of laughter until our sides hurt; of feather-boas and tiaras. Of a harrowing van-trip through downtown Portland accompanied by Lonely Island’s “I’m On a Boat.” My memories are of Chinese food, and the EMP. Of “confessions” at T.S. McHughs over nachos. Of late nights at LEGO fan conventions (which many attendees will tell you flat out that the brick is nice, but the friends are better).
My memories are of late night talks, of LEGO and music, movies and TV, of life and relationships. Of finding a way to make everything so bright when it should have been dark.
Mike made such an impact in my life, and the lives of others. All of us here at The Brothers Brick knew and admired him as a person and as a builder. He’ll be sorely missed.
I invite you to share your own stories and memories of Mike in the comments.
You can also read Mike’s obituary, along with details about funeral arrangements and donations, on the funeral home’s website.
The Like a Boss contest sponsored by The Brothers Brick to build a video game boss recently concluded with some spectacular entries. The winners received their share of a $500 prize pool donated by our blog. Check out who won and see all the entries on Flickr.
First place: zane_houston‘s Mecha Bowser
Second place: 2 Much Caffeine‘s Ganondorf
Third place: cmaddison‘s Quick Man
Thanks to everyone who participated and congrats to all the winners!
This miniature Helm’s Deep from Tolkien’s The Two Towers is impressive in its level of detail. George G has captured the towering might of this mountain stronghold, and it looks ready to be defended until dawn. All it needs now is a retinue of Rohirrim to guard its walls, and a few ten-thousands of miniature orcs to assault it. Hmm, now it makes me want to go watch the films again…
Andrew Lee (onosendai2600) took the classic Town racing set 6395 and applied a liberal amount of GARC to it. The result is the most delicious group of space raceships I have ever laid eyes on.
Andrew built 4 very distinctive and unique ships to represent the different cars from the set. Each one is awesome in it’s own right, and I am finding it very hard to pick my favourite. But I am going to have to choose the blue one, if for no other reason than it has an Ice Planet 2002 tile.
You simply have to browse through the full photoset to see all the brilliant details of each ship!
