I saw an article (hattip to Sullydish) that talks about some study that shows that legoguy facial expressions have been getting angrier over time. This is … interesting, and utterly plausible. I would not place myself in the camp that views this as some kind of reflection of our society’s broad decline or somesuch – at worst, I think it merely reflects Lego Corporation’s growing cynicism vis-a-vis the global toy market and their role in popular culture.
I have always loved Legos. I’m too old to have played directly with Lego minifigures myself as a child. My own legos were simpler than what the toy series later became. But the minifigures came out in time for my younger brother to have had many of them, and later, my stepson had a large collection, too.
At one point, I invented some very elaborate stories about a Lego civilization called Legotopia with my stepson. I even wrote some of them down in the mid 1990’s, but a lot of those things I wrote down during that period were lost because of the disasterous Hard Drive Failure of 1998.
I recall that I had drawn a kind of map of Legotopia, which included a large city called Legoville in the center, and then various surrounding kingdoms and lands, such as a County of Towers (lots of Lego towers and a medieval theme), a Duchy of Roses (lots of pastoral Lego creations on the old Belleville theme), as well as a kind of “wild west” called Castle Pass. It was all more of a universe-creation project than it was a germ of a novel or series of short stories.
I always vividly imagined these lands and places populated by seething masses of undifferentiated “legoguys” with their quotidian struggles and triumphs. I’ve always called them “legoguys” (even the “girls” are called legoguys) – I’m not sure if the original coinage is mine or my brother’s. I made an emperor in Legotopia who went by the moniker of Legoguy XVII – as a proper name, appropriate to the leader of their grand civilization. He was the most generic-looking legoguy I could find in my stepson’s collection.
I still have a (very small) collection of Legos, which I have on occasion shared with some of my students (like the large Lego alligator that lives on my desk at work). Informal survey: I currently own 6 legoguys; two of them are angry. The picture I snapped just now, above right, shows one of them, battling a legogator.
