The cover art of one of the best Tintin stories is perfectly recreated here in LEGO by Dark Small. If you’ve never read anything from the Tintin series, you should. The adventures of the clever young man, told in a comic book style, are fun and heartwarming. And one of the most heartwarming stories of all is Tintin in Tibet. This installment has the hero and his comrades searching the mountains for a plane crash in hopes to find and rescue his lost friend.
The winged horse of Greek mythology has evolved quite a lot over the eons. Controversial origins and dangerous quests have fluctuated with ideas from fairytales and childrens’ stories. Well, Builder Stijn van der Laan has presented his own version and its certainly not suited for little girls. Unless those little girls have a penchant for war. The RX-12 Pegasus is an unmanned aerial vehicle partly inspired by modern drones with a prop plane twist. Some nice parts usage with newer elements rounds out this build for a smooth design.
The clean, almost studless top portion of this build does well to trick the eye. Stijn made use of the new wedge pieces from the Porsche 911 to achieve the nice slopes on the nose and prop sections. The counter-rotating propellers also use black “flipper” elements to nicely emulate the style of the real thing.
Of course, something like this usually has to land eventually. The builder did a great job with the thin but effective crafting of the landing gear, which I imagine nicely tucks away under some of the exposed panels. This drone has a delightfully sleek profile and a ton of accesories if you feel like checking them out. I love seeing models build to scale with the Technic figures. They may be a bit of a relic but they’re still a delightful piece of LEGO history.
Oh, a little disclaimer from the writer. War is a serious and difficult aspect of the human condition. I will celebrate the design of the builder and even certain capabilities of the real-world inspiration but I do not stand by the warfare supported by such devices. Instead of bombs, I wish we could use these to drop knowledge. For archaeological and ecological surveys, for species and habitat maintenance. Perhaps one day we shall see such an aspirational era.
The LEGO airplane builds from Jack Carleson keep getting bigger and bigger. While his previous Air Force One had a wingspan of five-and-a-half feet, the new Emirates A380 is seven-foot wide and weighs almost 100 pounds with no external supports. It’s massive and has a lot of great details, which we will get to below.
It’s probably safe to say that terms like steampunk and cyberpunk have entered into the common lexicon. Complex worlds, either created around clockwork and steam power or technologically permeated societies, have become pretty popular amongst mainstream society. But what about dieselpunk? Or its partner, skypunk? Thankfully, the nature of the monikers is to get the idea across pretty quickly. Personally, skypunk is one of my favorite concepts. Worlds full of floating fortresses, sky battles in agile, obscure fighter planes, or common people shlepping about on islands in the sky. Today, I want to take a look at the latest skyracer model by builder Sylon-tw.
“Mayday!” – well that’s never good to hear. Douglas Hughes fashions a little red biplane in some big trouble in this LEGO micro-model.
The background featured in this postcard-like photo is brick-built using a number of different elements including various slopes, bricks, and plates in light blue and white for the red plane to crash through. The plane’s body mainly utilizes the plane minifigure costume featured in the series 21 collectible minifigure set, with some added parts to create a second pair of wings and a cockpit. Black 2×2 round tiles serve as a smokey cloud trailing behind the plane – the signifier of disaster. Overall for a minimal build, its concept is surely conveyed.
Today we’re getting our first official, high-quality images of LEGO’s next tribute set, 40450 Amelia Earhart Tribute, by way of the Australian LEGO certified store. According to the Australian LEGO store, the set will be a free Gift with Purchase for customers who spend at least $199.99 AUD starting tomorrow, Feb. 22, until supplies are exhausted. There’s no word yet on the promotion details in other parts of the world. It follows on two previous tribute sets, 40291 Creative Personalities featuring Hans Christian Andersen, and 40410 Charles Dickens Tribute.
Among the most famous aviation pioneers, Amelia Earhart disappeared in 1937 on her trip to circumnavigate the globe flying a Lockheed Model 10-E Electra. However, the red aircraft portrayed in the LEGO set is the Lockheed Vega 5B that she flew solo across the Atlantic in 1932 and is now on display in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
Ninjago Legacy – home of updated and reimagined hits from the 10 year(!) history of the Ninjago theme. We conclude our tour of the January 2021 wave of sets with the Ninjago Legacy 71736 Boulder Blaster. Available now from the LEGO Shop Online for US $39.99 | CAN $49.99 | UK £34.99, this set 449 piece set takes us back Season 4. Will the four minifigures and improved jet end our reviews on a high note? Maybe, maybe not. Read on and see if you agree with our conclusions!
The LEGO Group provided The Brothers Brick with an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.
This just has to be one of the ‘silliest’ scene’s from Indiana Jones and the Lost Crusade and General Tilney managed to capture it quite perfectly in LEGO. The best thing about this photo is that everything is made from LEGO bricks, even the sky! Partway through the film, Indiana Jones and his father Henry are trying to escape from enemy airplanes. There is a lot of bombing involved and at one point, they get cornered on a beach full of birds. Father Henry charges the flock of seagulls while flapping his umbrella. This startles the seagulls and they take off into the airplane which causes it to crash. Henry mumbles a Charlemagne quote, which might actually not be a Charlemagne quote and the scene ends. That is some classic Indiana Jones right there!
When you’re looking at a LEGO creation from someone who’s Flickr handle is “BigPlanes,” you’d expect to see something massive and aeronautical. And, sure enough, this LEGO Northrop XB-35 Flying Wing by Jack Carleson checks those boxes. If you’re looking for information about the technology behind the real XB-35, I’d suggest a trip to Wikipedia. But here at the Brothers Brick, we’re more taken by the excellent building techniques of this model. A masterful combination of SNOT building and Technic wizardry makes this not only a beautiful model but a functional one as well. This huge aircraft has motorized engines, a retractable undercarriage, and even a detailed interior including bomb bays.
As a kid, I built a lot of model airplanes. I loved gluing them together and painting them, but never liked applying the decals. I read books about military airplanes, too, and played with tiny toy planes. I loved airplanes, at least ones that carried missiles and guns. I’m going out on a limb here, but I would hazard a guess that James Cherry loved airplanes, too, and still does. Why would I guess that? Because he has built an amazing Eurofighter Typhoon airplane out of LEGO bricks. Measuring up at over a meter in length and 73cm across at the wingtips (it’s a European plane, so we have to use metric), this is one beast of a creation, too. The whole thing is tiled an oh-so-smooth, with a custom canopy and nose cone, since The LEGO Group does not manufacture anything close to these specs.
Ah, airplanes. What would we do without them? They make travel over long distances easy and affordable to everyone, which is great, and they make spreading contagion across the world lightning fast, too, which is not so great. Gone are the days when we had to wait for the rats in the hold of the ship to spread the pestilence! But military airplanes, deadly in ways non-viral, have a strong nostalgia attached to them for many people, from history buffs to kids who like to zoom things around and make machine gun noises while spitting on everything. Wesley has made a LEGO model of a RAF SE5a, a delightful WWI-era biplane, complete with said machine gun. The shaping is fantastic, especially on the fuselage, and I love the cheese-slope chocks under the wheels. The under-construction aerodrome gives depth to the image, especially when combined with the minifigures and the green “grass”; it’s a simple addition but brings it from a plain ol’ airplane to an immersive scene.
Nearly a year ago, we featured this exceptional kinetic sculpture by Jason Allemann. The “Pursuit of Flight” later went on to become a finalist in the recent LEGO Ideas review round. A week ago, LEGO announced which projects made it into the next production run, and unfortunately, Jason’s “Pursuit of Flight” was not one of those projects. But do not despair! He has made the full instructions available to anyone who is dying to build this wonderful piece of art.
For those big Star Wars fan out there, you can try your hand at a trench run variation of the original model.
As you may know, this is not the first time that Jason (also known as JK Brickworks) has been a LEGO Ideas finalist. He has actually previously won the coveted opportunity to have his build become an official set… twice. He’s responsible for 21305 Maze and 21315 Pop-Up Book (the latter in collaboration with Grant Davis).