Kids need bells and whistles these days. Actually, kids would scoff at bells and whistles (and yo-yos and Atari and..) these days. But for those of us born in the 1970s, we didn’t need a hyper-articulated $300 Bertie the Pipebomb to make us happy; we had Legos.
It’s now been 30 years since Lego launched its ubiquitous mini-figures, designed by Jens Nygaard Knudsen. I’m going to quote Beatrice Galilee, a writer for Icon Magazine, from which all these pictures are via:
The familiar little yellow men and women with funny hair and bemused expressions were the culmination of years of work. Knudsen filed and sawed Lego bricks, even experimenting with tin prototypes, to create the stocky flexible design icon we see today – since 1978 the design has only been modified by a matter of millimetres. Each body is three bricks high and comprises eight parts. It’s designed to hold a Lego brick in its hand, and to plug stand or sitting on top of other Lego elements. The figures were totally asexual until the first female figure, a nurse, arrived in 1980. Since then the population has exploded.
Thanks to Beatrice, I’m now reliving a childhood memory. As a kid, I had a bunch of the Spacemen Legos below, and I’d float them around on lids from Tupperware containers (aka DIY UFOs). I wonder if there’s any still somewhere in the backyard where I recall burying a few of the crash victims? Lego, of course, went on to make Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Batman, Spiderman, Harry Potter and Spongebob mini-figures. Would there be Kubrick, Be@rbrick and Qee if not for Lego?
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